The great debates about Iraq policy which consumed much of the past decade have largely faded from the public arena. The Obama administration has withdrawn more than 100,000 troops from Iraq, while the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in 2008 commits the U.S. to withdrawing the balance of its troops by the end of next year. Iraqi politics muddle along, while the security situation remains roughly stable with periodic spikes of spectacular violence but no signs of a resurgent civil war. But while the U.S. political debate about Iraq has faded, the importance of Iraq to American interests has not. It's therefore rather extraordinary that Congress has moved to cut $500 million from funding for the U.S. civilian mission in Iraq, leaving a shortfall of more than $1 billion.

Yesterday a wide array of Iraq policy analysts of wildly different perspectives converged on an appeal for the United States to remain committed to Iraq politically in order to deliver on a long-term strategic relationship beyond the military mission. I authored an op-ed with John Nagl, my colleague at the Center for a New American Security, arguing for a continued political engagement. Meanwhile, Brookings released a report entitled Unfinished Business, co-authored by Ken Pollack, Raad AlKadiri, Scott Carpenter, Fred Kagan and Sean Kane. There's a striking degree of analytical and policy convergence among people who used to be at sharp odds over Iraq. Nagl and I are colleagues at the Center for a New American Security but we sharply disagreed back in 2007-08 about the appropriate strategy for Iraq, as did many of the people involved in yesterday's Brookings Report. Nagl and I had not read the Brookings report at the time when we wrote the Christian Science Monitor op-ed. That we all converge on a roughly similar position today is significant - a "harmonic convergence" which the authors of the Brookings report nicely recount: "members of our group who had once been ready to do great violence to one another over their differences found themselves in violent agreement over what needed to be done." The conclusion of my piece with Nagl nicely captures this, I hope:

Today, those who backed the 2007 "surge" should be keen to see its gains consolidated, while those who called for withdrawal should be keen to make sure that as it happens, disaster does not follow. And while Iraq certainly needs to step up its political game, the United States must also muster the bipartisan political strength and will to help build a stable Iraq that can be a partner to the United States in a vital -- and deeply troubled -- part of the world. Those who gave their lives for this fight deserve nothing less.

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This afternoon at the Elliott School of International Affairs I moderated a really interesting panel on war reporting, co-sponsored by my Institute for Middle East Studies, Sean Aday's Institute for Public Diplomacy and Global Communications, and Jim Lebovic's Security Policy Forum. The panel featured three major American print war journalists: Michael Gordon (of the New York Times) and Ann Scott Tyson and Rajiv Chandrasekaran (of the Washington Post). What emerged was a fascinating picture of strengths and weaknesses, of what war reporters could and could not accomplish --- especially the difficult of getting unfiltered access to local Afghan or Iraqi voices. And the panel brought out some thought-provoking points about how significantly Afghanistan differs from Iraq for the press corps... and not for the better.

There was a fairly sharp, and productive, divergence in the presentations of Gordon, on the one hand, and Tyson and Chandrasekaran on the other, about the ability of the media to cover Iraq, Afghanistan, and other such war zones. Gordon mounted a strong defense of the performance of the media in Iraq, arguing that it was the press which first noticed and drew attention to the chaos following the fall of Saddam and to the improvements following the "surge." He showed a striking slideshow of images from combat, and talked of his many embeds across Iraq as offering direct and systematic access to both the American and Iraqi sides of the conflict. All three journalists pointed to how much could be learned through embeds, from the body language and frank evaluations of the junior officers and soldiers and from the moods on the streets and bases -- and all had poignant vignettes demonstrating what a sensitive and determined journalist could do with such access.

At the same time, the Washington Post reporters both offered more guarded evaluations of what the press had been able to do in Iraq and Afghanistan. Chandrasekaran described a brief "golden age" after the fall of Saddam when journalists could get out into all parts of Iraq fairly freely, but as the violence mounted and journalists were targeted in the struggle access to many parts of Iraq or to many Iraqis became much more difficult. For years, journalists (even those not living in the Green Zone) were forced either to huddle down in offices and rely on stringers, or else go out into the field with the military as embeds. Both routes offered useful perspectives, but neither is perfect.

Tyson and Chandrasekaran were both frank about the limitations of trying to speak to Iraqis or Afghans from within a military embed (hopping out of a military vehicle and surrounded by large men with guns is not always the best way to strike up a conversation -- through a translator -- with locals). The U.S. military's decision to shift to a population-centric COIN strategy created more and better opportunities for such contacts, intriguingly. Both mentioned the great value of stringers, Iraqis who could get out into their communities, and who help constitute an effective overall team. Such use of stringers is essential but raises its own problems, of course - including, not least, their own safety. I pointed out my dismay at the number of books about Iraq written by even very good journalists which fail to quote or take heed of Iraqis themselves. Anthony Shadid was brought up several times as an exception, but what makes Shadid exceptional is that he is, in fact, exceptional in this regard both in terms of his Arabic language and his access (ditto Nir Rosen and a few others).

Both also acknowledged the reality of the Defense Department's control of access to embeds and of crucial information (a point Gordon disputed). Tyson mentioned at least one instance where she was not allowed to travel to a location in Iraq because it would have been a "bad news story", and the frustration of trying to get accurate and useful data from the military. Meanwhile, as I pointed out, the Pentagon's own media strategy must be taken into account -- the marketing of "good news" stories, the selection of embeds, the provision of the "right" shaykhs or former insurgents with a message to send, and so on.

Chandrasekaran -- just back from covering the Marja campaign -- noted some significant differences between Iraq and Afghanistan for war reporters. In Iraq, he argued, Baghdad was a central hub where a lot of the meaningful politics happened, while in Afghanistan Kabul is just a bubble and tells you virtually nothing about what's going on elsewhere. The infrastructure of stringers is far less developed in Afghanistan, curtailing that stream of vital information for reporters trying to make sense of the full range of voices and viewpoints. Tyson also pointed out differences in treatment of reporters by the British and other commands compared to the U.S. command. Both expressed concerns about journalists bringing their Iraq experiences and lessons learned to an Afghan context where they may not apply.

As usually happens when journalists come together, talk turned to the financial crisis of the press today and the resource constraints which this imposes. Both the Times and the Post have continued to devote significant resources to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, even increasing the latter. But there's a lot fewer other papers able to do so, and to this point no clearly viable new media business model to fill the gap. Tyson pointed out how the Iraq focus had sucked attention away from Afghanistan for the crucial years of 2005-2008, a gap which the media was only now beginning to fill -- tellingly, following rather than leading the White House's decision about where to focus.

Finally, Gordon complained of the "lag time" between Washington-based analysts and reporters on the ground, and hit out against bloggers, pundits, politicians, and other analysts who weren't there on the ground. This struck me as something of a red herring -- war reporters and policy analysts do different things, have access to different streams of information, have different needs and make different contributions. Embedding with the military offers an unparalleled worms eye view, but it's only one part of a complex picture, and such experiences are only one of the multiple streams of information and context needed by serious analysis. One point which didn't come up in the discussion but perhaps should have is the significant difference in what can be learned between long-term war correspondents, present in the field for months and months and able to get out into the field and really learn their turf, and the "war tourists" coming in for a week's embed or a CODEL-style set of briefings and trip through a marketplace tour to be able to say they've "been in Iraq/Afghanistan." Those differences would make for a fascinating follow-on panel discussion -- which someone else should organize!

By Marc Lynch

This week's virtual book club about Tom Ricks's The Gamble and Obama's Iraq speech have brought out some really good points and arguments here on Foreign Policy.com. I wanted to quickly respond to some of them here as the week wraps up. 

First, my esteemed co-blogger Christian Brose objects to my description of the Obama plan (offered in my response to Dan Drezner) as essentially the same one offered by Obama throughout the campaign except for two extra months. The plan is the same, he concedes, but reality has changed.  That's fair, as far as it goes. Iraq in February 2009 is not the Iraq of spring 2007. But it's still the case that the plan which Obama presented on Friday is in most particulars the same as the one presented throughout 2008, save for those two fateful months added to the timeline for withdrawal of combat brigades.

The most interesting part of the story has to be how the U.S. policy debate evolved over 2007-2008 to make this consensus possible. The rough contours of Obama's plan evolved amidst a healthy, constructive debate over the course of 2007-08 between center-left and center-right pragmatists. Obama's commitment to withdrawal along a fixed timeline moved the debate in both the U.S. and Iraq -- just compare the early Bush positions in the SOFA negotiations in favor of an open-ended, long-term U.S. military presence with the final document's fixed deadline of December 31, 2011 for the departure of U.S. troops. The SOFA (which I have praised Bush for signing) cemented the strategic convergence around a time-line for withdrawal. That, along with his careful consultations with the military at all levels on how to safely implement his commitments, helped ensure the rough consensus we so amazingly saw last week.

But all of that just makes it even more amazing to look back to the presidential election campaign, where the intense political rhetoric tended to obscure the emerging policy convergence on Iraq policy. Obama's plan is, as Brose acknowledges, substantially the same as the plan he advocated in the campaign. During the campaign, McCain's people savaged the plan. Now the same people praise it as "an Iraq policy John McCain might have formulated." As a great man once said, you can tell the people you roll with whatever you want, but you and I know what's going on. (That's not aimed at Chris, just to be clear).

Second, Tom Ricks.

Much of what Ricks has said in response to his critics makes sense. I fully agree with his concerns about the long-term success of the surge, the continuing and deep political fragility of Iraq, and the impressiveness of the men who changed U.S. strategy in Iraq. Can things go wrong? Are conditions still fragile? Lord, yes. Will some U.S. commanders on the ground continue to worry that it isn't a good time to remove forces? Probably. But I disagree with his repeated claim that Obama is repeating Bush's mistake of over-optimism, and I think that his cavalier dismissal of the SOFA is dangerously wrong.

Obama's withdrawal plan was never based on unrealistic optimism, but rather on a healthy skepticism about what the U.S. could hope to accomplish, which should be music to the ears of the Tom Ricks who wrote The Gamble. Back during the election season, it was the ones who backed what I take to be Ricks's preferred strategy who tended to offer wildly over-optimistic views of progress in Iraq, the better to vindicate the surge. The people around Obama were far more skeptical and (in my opinion) prudent -- we were far more often criticized as "doom and gloomers" than as wild-eyed optimists. I've seen no evidence that anything has changed with the team now in place. These are tactically conservative, careful people -- if anything, too cautious for my taste.

As for the SOFA, though, we do really disagree. I think Ricks is just wrong, and dangerously so, to dismiss it as not mattering. It matters a lot to Iraqis, it is legally binding on the United States, and the new campaign plan is built around it. If the referendum fails in July -- a real possibility -- all the other plans are off and the U.S. will have to withdraw within a year. Ricks has the right to his perspective on this, and it may reflect what he has heard from many of his military sources, but I think this is a major flaw in his analysis. We shall see.

By the way, let's hear it for all the contributors to FP.com's Iraq week! These are good debates to be having and it's a delight to be part of it. I hope that the seeming bipartisan accord on the withdrawal plan can open the space for constructive policy debates about what is almost certainly going to be a tricky and difficult path out of Iraq.

UPDATE:  Since Peter Feaver has now weighed in, let me add on a quick response to his thoughtful remarks as well.  

First, Feaver argues that "with only minor modifications, his "new strategy" simply codifies the Bush plan and embraces the Status of Forces Agreement negotiated by Bush."  This is true only to the extent that Bush moved a long, long way before agreeing to the Status of Forces Agreement in its final format. The final SOFA, with its fixed December 2011 deadline, just looks nothing like the original conception of the long-term U.S. presence in Iraq originally envisioned when the negotiations began.  Bush and his team deserve -- and received, from me at least -- great praise for accepting the new Iraqi and American realities, and signing on to a SOFA which lined up with Obama's stated intentions.  

Second, Feaver worries about the inflexibility of the deadline and worries that it will tie Obama's hands in the event of future problems.  But this isn't a bug, it's a feature. Part of the problem here is that Feaver sees this as primarily directed towards the domestic audience.  But it's also, and I would argue more significantly, directed towards the Iraqis.  Most Iraqis find it very hard to believe that the U.S. will really leave, and need clear, sharp signals to establish that this is in fact the policy. And then down the road there will be all kinds of vested interests in keeping the U.S. in Iraq which will look for ways to force that to happen. Obama's speech (after the long campaign) will now pay very high "audience costs" (to use the IR theory lingo) for revising the policy, which will help to raise the bar for changing the stance quite high and will establish the credibility of the commitment.