Hard bargaining

May was a hard month for US policy in Iraq, with the highest American casualties since 2004, a near-stalemate in Congress over funding for the war, and little progress toward sectarian reconciliation in Baghdad.

If there is any way out of all this, it will only be through a negotiated political solution to Iraq's civil war, rather than a US military victory on the battlefield. On this much all parties agree. Notwithstanding frequent charges that the Bush Administration sees only military solutions, it has in fact been trying to negotiate a settlement among Iraq's warring factions since at least 2005.

The problem is not a fixation on warfare, it is a lack of the leverage needed to make negotiations work and broker a deal: Iraq's factions reject reconciliation, and will continue to reject it until outside pressure forces them to compromise. Real progress, therefore, requires some new and more powerful lever.

Many critics of the war now hope that a threat of US withdrawal will provide this lever. Senator Carl Levin, for example, has long argued that the US military presence serves as a crutch that enables Iraqis to avoid painful compromise and hard bargaining, and that only a timetable for removing this crutch can compel them to face facts and swallow a settlement.

The administration, by contrast, sees its troop surge as the means to reconciliation. In its view, chaos in Baghdad has pushed politics aside in favor of sectarian self-defense and the vengeance of militias. By deploying enough troops to bring security to the capital, the administration hopes to create breathing room and a political space within which a deal can be struck.

Neither view is sound. Instead, if there is any hope of a peaceful solution to Iraq's civil war, it will require a new strategy in which military force is tied much more actively to ongoing political negotiations. Rather than merely creating space for diplomats to talk, our military must provide the leverage needed to drive unwilling factions toward compromise.

The surge will give us 160,000 heavily armed troops in Iraq. This is not enough to secure the whole country, but it is enough to provide some powerful sticks and carrots. Used selectively to threaten factions that do not compromise and assist those that do, American military power can be an important tool for negotiators.

Such a strategy may require militarily protecting or assisting factions that have fought the Iraqi government and killed Americans if these factions agree to change sides or observe a ceasefire. It may require us to withhold military assistance or defense for communities whose leaders fail to bargain in good faith, and to use force to disarm the militias of factions that refuse to negotiate, while tolerating or even assisting others that do cooperate politically.