The Time to Negotiate Is Now

If it needs political cover to engage in regional negotiations, the Bush team could simply refer to the Iraq Study Group report. Many old-fashioned realists were pleased to see that the group seemed intent on finding the right balance between U.S. ideals, interests and power in Iraq. The report includes strong recommendations for a balance-of-power approach to ending the war -- an approach reminiscent of the Vietnam conflict.

The study group urged Bush to reach out to Iraq's neighbors and to look at the war regionally and concluded that a broad-based political settlement held the best hope for sustained peace in the region. Bush has so far rejected the group's recommendations in favor of the troop surge. But if events continue to unfold along their current trajectory, the White House will eventually be forced to deal with the report's suggestions.

The study group report, in fact, reminds me of a secret CIA study conducted during the Vietnam War. Like the three administrations before it, the Johnson administration had long feared the consequences of withdrawing from Vietnam, including a South Vietnamese blood bath and falling dominoes in the rest of Southeast Asia. But Johnson officials also insisted that the United States had to remain in Vietnam to live up to its obligations under existing treaties, and Secretary of State Dean Rusk believed that Washington would lose international credibility if it pulled out. There was also a strong conviction that our Cold War enemies would smell weakness in the capitalist camp if the United States were to cut and run.

But in 1967, CIA Director Richard Helms put his best people to work studying the potential impact of a U.S. withdrawal from Vietnam on unfavorable terms. The resulting secret report concluded that the United States could leave without suffering a significant loss in security, global prestige or power. And yet it was six more years before Washington acted on the Helms report.

Let's hope it doesn't take that long this time.

robrigham@vassar.edu

Robert K. Brigham, a historian at Vassar College, is the author of "Is Iraq Another Vietnam?" (PublicAffairs).