Iraq's Complex Reality: The Interwoven Challenges of State Failure and External Influences : หน้า 11/52

albeit it is still inappropriate to talk about an axis. Iraq's problems, and possible solutions, are so closely intertwined with Iran that it is no longer possible to discuss solutions for Iraq without taking into consideration what Iran will do. Politically, Iran and Iraq now constitute a cluster, and there is no possible solution for Iraq that does not involve Iran as well. In both Iraq and Iran, the United States is confronted with several difficult-to-change realities. Some of them are the direct result of U.S. policies, or more precisely of the unforeseen and unwanted consequences of those policies; others are not. Seeking to establish what is the result of U.S. policy and what is not would be a futile exercise. Whatever their causes, these are the realities U.S. policy must address in the future. IRAQ. The first reality of Iraq is that it is currently a failed state. The U.S. invasion unleashed a power struggle that will take years to play out and that effectively prevents the state from functioning. The signs of state failure are obvious: Iraq is unable to contain violence on its own. It was unable to do so until mid-2007, despite the presence of 140,000 U.S. troops. The surge that increased the number of U.S. troops by 30,000 has succeeded in reducing violence, although levels are still extremely high. But Iraq is still unable to discharge the administrative functions of the state. Budgets remain largely unspent, reconstruction is lagging, and services are not being delivered. Different towns and cities are controlled by different groups with little if any allegiance to the central government—competing Shi’i militias, Sunni tribal militias, Sunni-based “concerned citizens” organizations,” and Sunni Awakening militias control towns, villages, and neighborhoods, sometimes in cooperation with U.S. and Iraqi security forces, sometimes in opposition to them, or simply on their own. The official governmental institutions compete with unofficial structures that have developed in the vacuum of authority. These are all typical symptoms of state collapse. The second reality is that state collapse is always extremely difficult to reverse. Despite the growing body of prescriptions on post-conflict reconstruction and the numerous international attempts to put collapsed states back together, the record is not encouraging. Outside intervention can sometimes bring violence under control. It has done so successfully in small countries recently—Bosnia, Kosovo, East Timor, and Sierra Leone. So far, outside intervention has not brought an end to violence in large countries—Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and, of course, Iraq itself. Largely this is because the size of the intervention force needed to impose order in such countries is daunting and out of proportion to the size of modern military forces that rely on technology rather than manpower. Finding a political situation that will make the state viable without outside intervention has proved exceedingly difficult, even in small countries. The reason is that political solutions cannot be imposed but depend on domestic agreements among competing groups or the outright victory of one of the struggling factions. The successful transformation of a failed state into one capable of functioning on its own is an undertaking that outside intervention has not accomplished in any country so far. The third reality is that neither Iraqis themselves nor the United States at this point has a plan on how to bring the country back from collapse. While the troop surge implemented by