Walking with the devil: the commitment trap in U.S. foreign policy.

• Author: Root, Hilton L.

BY THE George W. Bush Administration's self-imposed standards, a successful conclusion to the Iraq War was well within reach. The president declared victory on May 1, 2003, a constitution was ratified on October 15, 2005, and a general election took place on December 15 to elect a permanent 275-member Iraqi council. The current government, headed by Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki, took office on May 20, 2006. Yet this government--as of early 2007--had not met one of Washington's benchmarks regarding national reconciliation, security or governance. Maliki's government refused to distance itself from radical clerics or curb their private militias. Non-sectarian technocrats were not invited to join the cabinet. Police units that practiced sectarian partisanship were not suspended. Government ministries stacked with loyalists bred corruption.

How could a government so utterly dependent on American collaboration defy U.S. wishes, yet hope for U.S. forces to remain in Baghdad? With ample evidence of Iraq's failure to meet the public security and civil service criteria of a secular state, why has the Bush Administration not tied aid to policy performance? Why has it not made continued support contingent on achieving explicit milestones?

THE TRAP the United States faces in Iraq exemplifies a recurring dilemma in U.S. foreign policy: Presidents have continuously coddled client regimes unwilling to make the political trade-offs necessary for national legitimacy. Similarly, throughout the Cold War, despite American rhetoric about overseas reform and rejuvenation and ambivalence about backing dictators, many American political leaders relied on one authoritarian regime to help defeat another, more odious authoritarian regime. And there were the proxy wars, too: arming Iraq against Iran and the mujaheddin against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. Such myopic policies consequently impaired America's ability to forcefully advocate domestic reforms in those regimes. Once engaged, U.S. support and subsidies typically preclude a withdrawal option, weakening American demands for pro-reform quid pro quo terms.

Such is the U.S. commitment trap: Committed to the survival of allies, yet lacking the leverage to discipline recalcitrant regime leaders, America creates a strategic vulnerability that even weak client states can exploit. The commitment trap acts as a repressive force that reduces America's credibility as a reform advocate.

It binds the United States so that it cannot walk away from allies without its credibility suffering. Curiously, this trap isn't sealed abroad, but at home in the fears that have driven the U.S. electorate since the Cold War began.

Client regime reform is certainly within the American ideological tradition, and attempts at such efforts have been an important component of U.S. security policy since the Cold War. For example, meeting with the Shah of Iran in 1949, Secretary...