March-April 2008 | By Stephen Biddle

IRAQ'S PROGNOSIS is better today than it has been for a long time. An end to major violence, and with it a major reduction in the risk of a wider war and the human cost of further bloodshed, is now a real possibility. But to realize this potential won't be cheap or easy. And it won't produce Eden on the Euphrates. A stable Iraq would probably look more like Bosnia or Kosovo than Japan or Germany.

This is because the likeliest route to stability in Iraq is not by winning hearts and minds or reaching a grand political bargain in Baghdad. It is by building on a rapidly expanding system of "bottom up" local cease-fires, in which individual combatant factions who retain their arms nevertheless agree to stop using them and stand down. Of course, fighters who voluntarily stop shooting can voluntarily start again; such deals are not inherently stable or self-policing. But neither are these merely accidents or brief tactical breathing spells. Cease-fires in Iraq have spread so rapidly because they reflect an underlying, systematic shift in the war's strategic calculus since early 2006 that has now made peace look better than war for the major combatants. This same strategic reality gives most of the remaining holdouts a similar incentive to stand down, which could bring an uneasy stability to Iraq.

If so, the challenge for the United States would not end. The mission would shift from war fighting to peacekeeping, and U.S. casualties would fall accordingly. But a continued presence by a substantial outside force would be essential for many years to keep a patchwork quilt of wary former enemies from turning on one another.

This was not what the administration had in mind when it designed the surge or invaded Iraq. And it will not produce a strong, internally unified, Jeffersonian democracy that spreads liberty through the Middle East while standing in alliance with America against extremist and hegemonic threats in the region. But it can stop the fighting, save the lives of untold thousands of innocent Iraqis who would otherwise die brutal, violent deaths, and secure America's remaining vital strategic interest in this conflict: that it not spread to engulf the entire Middle East in a regionwide war. Eden this is not. Reasonable people could judge it too costly or too risky. But there is now a greater chance of stability in exchange for this cost and risk than there has been since this war's early months--and given the stakes, the case for staying and doing what is needed is stronger now than it has been for years.

THE ORIGINAL idea behind the surge was to reduce the violence in Baghdad, enabling the Iraqis to negotiate the kind of national power-sharing deal we thought would be necessary to stabilize the country. The violence came down, but the compromise did not follow. Instead, a completely different possibility arose--a "bottom up" approach beginning with a group of Sunni tribal sheikhs in Anbar Province.

In a span of just a few months, this "bottom-up" approach has yielded more than one hundred local cease-fires across much of western and central Iraq. The participants agree not to fight U.S. or Iraqi government forces, to turn their arms instead on common enemies, to wear distinguishing uniforms, to patrol their home districts, to limit their activities to those home districts and to provide coalition forces with biometric data (e.g., fingerprints and retinal scans) for all members. In exchange they receive recognition as legitimate security providers in their districts, a pledge that they will not be fired upon by U.S. or Iraqi government forces as long as they observe their end of the agreement and a U.S.-provided salary of $300 per member per month. More than eighty thousand Iraqis have now joined the "Awakening Councils" or "Concerned Local Citizen" (CLC) groups that implement these deals.

This was very bad news for al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI). The CLC members had once been their allies, providing the safe houses, financial support, intelligence and concealment that had been essential to AQI. Without this, al-Qaeda was left exposed to U.S. firepower in ways it had never been before. Their ensuing heavy losses in Anbar and Baghdad drove AQI's remnants into the limited areas of Diyala, Salah ad Din and Ninawa Provinces where CLC deals had not yet been reached.

The CLCs are mostly Sunni. But many of the principal Shia combatants are now observing their own cease-fires. In particular, in August 2007 Moktada al-Sadr, the principal Shia militia warlord in central Iraq, directed his Jaish al-Mahdi (JAM) or "Mahdi Army" militia to stand down, too.

Holdouts remain, especially in the northern provinces between Baghdad and Kurdistan. But by January 2008, most of the major combatants on both the Sunni and Shia sides were all observing voluntary cease-fires. This produced a dramatic reduction in opposition, a dramatic reduction in the number of enemy-initiated attacks, and a corresponding reduction in U.S. casualties, Iraqi civilian deaths and Iraqi government military losses. There are no guarantees, but it is now increasingly plausible that enough of today's holdouts can be brought around to bring something resembling a nationwide cease-fire to Iraq.

IF THIS happens, will the cease-fires hold? After all, voluntary decisions to stop fighting can be reversed. CLC members and JAM militiamen retain their weapons. Many are essentially the same units, under the same leaders, that fought coalition forces until agreeing to stop in 2007. Many retain fond hopes to realize their former ambitions and seize control of the country eventually. Many observers have thus argued that these cease-fire deals could easily collapse. And indeed they could.

But this is not unusual for cease-fires meant to end communal civil wars such as Iraq's. These typically involve very distrustful parties; they often begin with former combatants agreeing to cease-fires but retaining their arms; and they are always at risk of renewed violence. Many fail under these pressures. But some succeed: in Bosnia, Kosovo, Liberia, Sierra Leone, Mozambique and Zimbabwe, for example, cease-fires of this kind have held.

Translating fragile deals into persistent stability requires at least two key conditions: peace has to be in the perceived strategic self-interest of both parties, and outside peacekeepers have to be present to keep it that way.

UNTIL RECENTLY, Iraq failed to meet the first condition. But two major errors by AQI changed the strategic landscape dramatically by mid-2007.

Their first big mistake was to bomb the Shia Askariya Mosque in Samarra in February 2006. Before this, Sunnis believed they were the militarily stronger side; if only they could drive the United States out, they thought they could defeat a weak Shia regime and rule Iraq again. The Shia had largely allowed the U.S. and Iraqi governments to wage war against the Sunnis for them; Shia militias had fought mostly defensively and often stood on the sidelines in Sunni-U.S. combat. But when AQI destroyed the shrine, the Shia militias entered the war in force and on the offensive. The result was the Battle of Baghdad: a yearlong wave of sectarian violence in the capital pitting Sunni insurgent factions and their AQI allies against, especially, the Jaish al-Mahdi. At the time, Americans saw this wave of bloodshed as a disaster--and in humanitarian terms it was. But in retrospect, it may prove to have been the critical enabler of a later wave of cease-fires by changing fundamentally the Sunni strategic calculus in Iraq.

The Battle of Baghdad gave the Sunnis a Technicolor view of what an all-out war would really mean, and they did not like what they saw. With the Americans playing no decisive role, the JAM overwhelmed Sunni combatants in neighborhood after neighborhood, turning what had been a mixed-sect city into a predominantly Shia one. Districts that had been Sunni homeland for generations were now off-limits, populated with and defended by their rivals. By goading the JAM into open battle, AQI had triggered a head-to-head fight in which Sunnis were clearly and decisively beaten by Shia they had assumed they could dominate.

AQI's second mistake was a systematic alienation of its Sunni allies. Fellow Sunnis whom AQI's leadership judged insufficiently devout or committed were treated with extraordinary brutality--including delivery of children's severed heads to the doorsteps of wayward sheikhs. The smuggling networks that Sunnis in Anbar Province relied upon to fund tribal patronage networks were appropriated by AQI for its own use, leaving sheikhs impoverished and disempowered. Before the Battle of Baghdad, most Sunnis tolerated these costs on the assumption that AQI's combat value against Shia and Americans outweighed their disadvantages. Defeat in Baghdad, however, showed that AQI could not deliver real protection, making AQI all cost and no benefit for its coreligionists.

By late 2006, Sunnis who once thought they were on the road to victory thus realized they faced defeat unless they found new allies. This forced them to abandon AQI and turn to the United States while they still could. After initial wariness, U.S. forces took the plunge and aligned with the tribes against AQI. With American firepower connected to Sunni tribal knowledge of whom and where to strike, the ensuing campaign decimated AQI and led to their virtual eviction from Anbar Province. U.S. protection in turn enabled the tribes to survive the inevitable, brutal AQI counterattacks. The result was a provincewide cease-fire under the auspices of the Anbar Awakening Council and the U.S. military.

News of the Anbar model spread rapidly among disaffected Sunnis elsewhere. And as word spread, U.S. surge brigades began arriving. The combination of Sunni realignment, increased U.S. troop strength and a new U.S. mission of direct population security created a powerful synergy. The prospect of U.S. security emboldened Sunnis outside Anbar to realign?with the United States; Sunni realignment?enhanced U.S. lethality against AQI; U.S. defeat of local AQI cells protected realigned Sunnis; local cease-fires with the Sunnis reduced U.S. casualties and freed U.S. forces to venture outward from Baghdad into the surrounding areas to keep AQI off balance and on the run.

Cease-fires with Sunnis in turn facilitated cease-fires with key Shia militias. For Moktada al-Sadr, leader of the JAM, the Sunni stand-down and the U.S. surge transformed the strategic landscape. The JAM arose to defend Shia civilians from Sunni violence. But that violence was now on the wane as Sunnis brokered cease-fires. In the interim, JAM thugs had increasingly exploited the population's dependency on the militia to extort personal profit through gangland control of key commodities such as cooking oil and gasoline, inspiring growing resentment among Shia civilians. This was tolerated when the JAM was all that stood between Shia and mass murder by Sunnis. But as the Sunni threat receded, the continuing exploitation turned the JAM into a parasite rather than a protector, and its Shia public support waned.

Meanwhile, the U.S. military buildup in Baghdad posed an increasing threat to JAM control over its base. The Americans offered Shia security without gangsterism, and the Sunni cease-fires meant not just diminished public tolerance for the gangsters, but greater U.S. freedom to swing troops into a battle with the JAM for control over Shia population centers. Al-Sadr could have fought this, staking his reputation and his militia on a gamble that he could defeat the Americans. But al-Sadr had tried this twice before and been decimated by U.S. firepower each time. In the past, he had nevertheless emerged from these defeats stronger than ever, as his popularity among Shia brought fresh recruits in droves to replace his losses. Now, by contrast, his popularity was declining. And his control over his own militia was splintering as rogue lieutenants with their own income took an increasingly independent path. With a weaker army and a declining ability to replace its losses, al-Sadr thus had no assurance that he could survive another hammering from the U.S. Army. He chose instead to stand down.

YET, THE local reductions in violence have not produced national reconciliation among Iraq's elected representatives in the capital. Why not?

In time they may. For now, though, the Shia-dominated al-Maliki government's incentives differ from those of its coreligionist Moktada al-Sadr. Al-Sadr needs peace to avoid further deterioration in his internal position and to avert casualties he cannot replace in a costly battle with the Americans. Al-Maliki, by contrast, is not fighting the Americans--the surge is no threat to him. On the contrary, U.S. reinforcements and weaker Sunni opposition reduce the cost of continued warfare for the al-Maliki government's army. For al-Maliki, moreover, peace is politically and militarily riskier than war. Reconciliation along American lines requires dangerous and politically painful compromises with rival Sunnis: oil-revenue sharing with Sunni provinces, hiring of former Baathists, Anbari political empowerment and other initiatives that al-Maliki's Shia allies dislike, and which al-Maliki fears will merely strengthen his sectarian enemies militarily. A predominantly Sunni CLC movement adds to these fears. Al-Sadr needs peace because war now risks his political status; al-Maliki, conversely, runs greater risks by compromising for peace than by standing fast and allowing the war to continue. Thus, the Shia-dominated government makes little progress toward peace even as Shia militias stand down in cease-fires.

This is not to deny any progress by the government. It has been distributing revenue to Sunni provinces even without a hydrocarbon law to require this. It recently passed a new de-Baathification law making it easier to hire Sunnis into some government jobs and had been doing such hiring even without a legal mandate. To date this has resembled a form of toe dipping: the al-Maliki government has been willing to experiment tentatively with compromise as long as it retained the ability to back off again later if the results were unfavorable. These moves could lay the basis for eventual compromise. But for the near- to mid-term future we are likelier to see a weak and sclerotic central government unable to do more than distribute oil revenue, while the real dynamic of Iraqi security devolves to localities.

THUS, FOR now, local cease-fires look more likely to end the fighting than national grand bargains. But for these cease-fires to hold, an outside party will be needed to serve as a peacekeeper.

This is because such deals are neither self-enforcing nor inherently stable. Even where peace is in the mutual self-interest of the majority on both sides, there will still be spoilers who seek to overturn the cease-fire and renew the war. Rogue elements of Shia militias profit from the fighting and will seek to restore the instability within which they flourish. And AQI has no interest whatsoever in stability. Though on the ropes, even small numbers of committed AQI terrorists can bomb selected marketplaces and public gatherings. In an environment of wary, tentative, edgy peace between well-armed and distrustful former combatants, even a few such attacks can lead to an escalatory spiral that quickly returns the country to mass violence.

In another bad-case-but-likely scenario, the central parties to the cease-fire may try to expand their area of control at the expense of neighboring CLCs or militia districts. Ambitious Sunnis with dreams of Baathist restoration may use the lull to build strength, probe their rivals for weaknesses, then launch a new offensive if they discover a vulnerability. Shia militia leaders unsatisfied with a limited role in a weak government could push the limits of their accepted status at the expense of Sunnis or rival Shia warlords. The military balance limits what Sunnis, especially, can actually accomplish via renewed violence, but some will surely test the waters anyway or simply miscalculate; either way, it is easy to imagine the cease-fire parties cheating on the terms.

Outside peacekeepers play a crucial role in damping such escalatory spirals and enforcing cease-fire terms. As long as the underlying strategic calculus favors peace, then an outside military presence allows victims of spoiler attacks to wait rather than retaliate--they an afford to delay and see whether the Americans will avenge them. Similarly, if CLC leaders and militia commanders know that a U.S. combat brigade is going to enter their district and arrest any leader whose followers violate the terms of the agreed cease-fire--and if the provision of biometric data and locating information for all CLC members means that the Americans know who the violators are and where to find them--then the underlying mutual interest in cease-fire is less likely to be tested.

This is not war fighting. But it does require troops who can fight if they have to. And some fighting would be needed, especially early on, to punish spoilers and cease-fire violators, thereby discouraging further violence. Peacekeepers must thus be combat capable, but peacekeeping should not require the casualty toll of sustained warfare.

Peacekeeping of this kind is labor intensive, long term and would almost certainly have to be a U.S. undertaking, especially in the early years. We are the only plausible candidate for this role for now--no one else is lining up to don a blue helmet in Iraq. We are not widely loved by Iraqis; among the few things all Iraqi subcommunities now share is a dislike for the American occupation. Yet we are the only party to today's conflict that no other party sees as a threat of genocide. We may not be loved, but we are tolerated. And Iraqi attitudes toward Americans are not fixed: Sunni views of the U.S. role, for example, have changed dramatically in less than a year. Marine patrols in Falluja that would have been ambushed are now met with kids mugging for photos from marines carrying lollipops along with their rifles.

This mission will be long--perhaps twenty years long--until a new generation, which has not been scarred by the experience of sectarian bloodletting, rises to leadership age in Iraq. A U.S. role will clearly be important for at least part of this time, but it may not be necessary for the United States to do this alone the entire time. If two to three years of apparent stability make it clear that the Iraq mission really has become peacekeeping rather than war fighting, then it is entirely plausible that others might be willing to step in and lighten the American load, especially if they can do so under a UN banner rather than a bilateral agreement with the United States or the government of Iraq. So we need not assume a twenty-year U.S. responsibility alone. But a long-term presence by outsiders will be needed. And it would be imprudent to assume that we can turn this over to others immediately.

The number of troops required could also be large. The social science of peacekeeping-troop requirements is underdeveloped, but the rule of thumb for troop adequacy in this role is similar to that used for counterinsurgency: around one capable combatant per fifty civilians. For a country the size of Iraq, that would mean an ideal force of around five hundred thousand peacekeepers--which is obviously impossible. But some such missions have been accomplished with much smaller forces. In Liberia, for example, fifteen thousand UN troops stabilized a cease-fire in a country of four million; in Sierra Leone, twenty thousand UN troops sufficed in a country of six million. It would be a mistake to assume that such small forces can always succeed in a potentially very demanding mission--but it would be just as bad to assume that because the United States cannot meet the rule-of-thumb troop count, the mission is hopeless. The best assumption is that more is better when it comes to peacekeeping: the larger the force, the better the odds, hence the right troop count is the largest one we can sustain for a potentially extended stay.

Some now hope that lesser measures will suffice to stabilize Iraq's cease-fires. The U.S. leadership in Baghdad, for example, hopes that it can create a financial incentive for CLCs to behave by making them Iraqi government employees. But the al-Maliki regime is resisting this, and it is far from clear that Sunni CLC leaders would trust al-Maliki to pay them if the United States withdrew most of its troops. Nor would government paychecks for CLCs do much for the JAM, which is an equally grave threat to stability.

Financial incentives alone won't prevent spoiling, but they would help. They are just another useful tool for effective peacekeeping. The chance of maintaining a stable Iraq is highest with the largest number of peacekeepers we can sustain; other measures help, but they are not substitutes.

IRAQ IS thus not hopeless--there is a real chance for stability. But this is no time for a victory parade. Stability's requirements are hard, and its payoff is likely to be imperfect.

Nor is it guaranteed. Peacekeeping sometimes succeeds, but peacekeepers can also wear out their welcome. If the U.S. presence is not replaced in time by tolerable alternatives, nationalist resistance could beget a new insurgency and a war of a different kind. If spoiler violence or probes for weakness are not met forcefully enough, then challenges could overwhelm the peacekeepers and Iraq could collapse into renewed warfare. If ongoing operations do not spread today's cease-fires through the rest of Iraq, then the U.S. mission could remain that of war fighting without any peace to keep.

Given these costs and risks, a case can still be made for cutting our losses now and withdrawing all U.S. forces as soon as logistically practical. But withdrawal has costs and dangers of its own: U.S. departure from an unstable Iraq risks regional intervention and a much wider war engulfing the heart of the Middle East's oil production, plus the human consequences of spiraling sectarian bloodshed if the war escalates in our wake, even without foreign intervention.

Any policy for Iraq is thus a gamble. Stability cannot be guaranteed by staying; disaster cannot be excluded if we leave; exact odds cannot be known for either in advance. The scale of cost and uncertainty here makes all options for Iraq unattractive and risky.

But we have to choose one. And the strategic landscape of 2008 shifts the odds and the risks in ways that make the case for staying less unattractive than it has been for a long time.

Stephen Biddle is a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.