"The kinds of broad threats now popular in the U.S. -- 'You Iraqis get yourselves in order and negotiate a deal or we leave' -- are way too blunt an instrument," said Stephen Biddle of the Council on Foreign Relations, a former Army War College instructor who has advised commanders. "It has to be much more discriminating."
Although military commanders in Baghdad have not explicitly been giving or withholding assistance to communities based on cooperation, they have been stepping up efforts to forge agreements with local leaders about how best to secure neighborhoods, military officers said.
Those discussions could involve the kind of security to provide to marketplaces, where to place protective walls and where to build new security stations, the senior military officer said.
Kagan said it would be difficult to replicate the Al Anbar-style deals in Baghdad, where tribal ties remain weak and many families have been displaced from their traditional neighborhoods.
But Biddle suggested that the carrots-and-sticks approach could be used in Baghdad.
"If the nature of the problem is to terminate a communal struggle, then the only way to do that is to strong-arm the parties into a cease-fire agreement," Biddle said. "There are all kinds of downsides to using military force as a source of sticks and carrots for this purpose. It could easily fail. But if we don't try it, I am confident we will fail."
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julian.barnes@latimes.com
Times staff writers Paul Richter and Peter Spiegel in Washington contributed to this report.
