By Jed Babbin on 5.23.05 @ 12:07AM
Iraq is not an island. It's just one country in a lousy neighborhood.
It is the gravest of mistakes to think of Iraq -- or any other
nation -- in isolation. And it is willfully ignorant to ask when
Iraqis will be able to defeat the insurgency, when Americans will
withdraw, or when the violence in Iraq will abate. Would you
measure the safety of one family's home without examining the
neighborhood it's in? The security of every nation depends on the
actions of its neighbors, and Iraq sits in one of the world's worst
neighborhoods. It can't be stable and democratic unless and until
its neighbors -- Syria, Saudi Arabia and Iran -- end their
interference. Unless we abandon Iraq, Americans will continue to
die as a direct result of these nations' actions until they are
compelled to behave.
On that terrible morning of September 11, 2001, there was no way
to get out of Washington. Sitting in my office about two blocks
from the White House and seeing nothing more constructive to do
such as run through a subway tunnel, I sat down at my computer and
wrote about how we should respond to the most deadly attack on our
soil since Pearl Harbor. The article was published in the
Washington Times the following day.
The article made two points. First, that we couldn't allow
ourselves to be weakened by empty rhetoric urging a "proportional
response." Our response to the 9-11 attacks had to be decisive, and
to be so our counterattack had to be in proportion to our strength
and not the enemy's relative size or weakness. Second, that no
matter who the enemy was, and no matter where he chose to seek
refuge, we could allow him no sanctuary. We would have had to
attack the al Qaeda stronghold wherever it was. Had it not been
Kabul but Damascus, Tehran, Beijing, Pyongyang or Moscow our action
would have had to be the same. If we had learned anything from
Vietnam it was that to allow sanctuary is to hand the means of
victory to the enemy.
President Bush took much this same position in his tough speech
to Congress a week later. Nations had to choose, he said then, to
be with us or with the terrorists. Since then something has been
lost. Syria has chosen to be with the terrorists, and we have done
nothing decisive about the regime of Bashar Assad. We are paying
too high a price -- in the lives of our soldiers -- for this to
continue one moment longer.
Commencing weeks before American forces slashed into Iraq in
March 2003, our reconnaissance forces saw a steady flow of cars and
trucks going into Syria along the Baghdad-Damascus highway. About
ten days into the fighting, there was an intense fight near the
border city of al-Qaim where our special forces took on a sizeable
Iraqi force moving through al-Qaim into Syria. The fierceness of
the fight there -- as intense as any other before Baghdad fell --
told us that the Iraqis were moving something they thought was of
tremendous value. Was it money, weapons or people the Iraqis moved
then? It matters not. What matters is that Syria chose to provide
first a sanctuary for members of Saddam's regime and its assets and
then comprehensive support for the Sunni insurgents who fight only
to prevent Iraq from becoming stable and free, and kill as many
Americans as they can in the process.
We know that the majority of the suicide bombers killing people
in Iraq come from Saudi Arabia to Syria where they are helped to
cross into Iraq. We know that money and weapons flow from Syria to
the insurgents in Iraq. We know sufficient details about where the
insurgents meet and train in Syria to target those places for
attack. "Operation Matador," the week-long fight along the Syrian
border that ended on May 14, disrupted the insurgents' ability to
cross into Iraq. At the cost of at least nine Marine lives, we
stopped them but only for a while.
The President has too much on his mind, and his advisers are
divided. The CIA and the State Department point to the small amount
of cooperation we have been getting from Syria, and insist that we
can compel them to do more without taking firm action. The Defense
Department is less tolerant. It wants to act, but apparently hasn't
even been allowed to ask the Iraqis for permission to mount an
attack into Syria. Our failure to take decisive action costs too
much. The time has come to act.
First, either Vice President Cheney or the President himself
needs to knock heads together, because no one else can. CIA, State,
and Defense have to be brought into line and resolved to action.
Then State should deliver a final ultimatum to Assad. If he fails
to end his regime's support for terrorism forthwith -- and that
means not only the Iraqi insurgents, but Hezbollah and all the
others that have operated from Damascus for decades -- he must be
told we will end it for him. The Iraqi government should be
consulted, but its reluctance -- if it has any -- to a cross-border
attack must be dispelled or politely ignored. As soon as it is,
special operations forces should cross into Syria covertly, to lead
a combined air and ground attack against the terrorists and
whatever Syrian assets are supporting them, from Qaim to Damascus.
Whatever it takes, that is what we must do.
Syria is the immediate problem regarding Iraq. (Iran is no less
immediate; but because of its nuclear program, not its present
involvement in Iraq.) Saudi Arabia is a different kind of
problem.
The Saudis have, perhaps too late to save themselves, come to
realize the dangers of terrorism. But because the Saudis are
Wahabis, and because the Wahabi version of Islam is insecure,
violent, and hostile, they still don't take sufficient steps to
stop the export of terrorists and terrorism. We can't disregard the
power Saudi oil gives them over our economy. But we can't be afraid
of it either. Their insecurity is our handiest weapon.
Our cadre of evil geniuses can think of many ways to motivate
Saudi behavior, and we should be using them all. For example,
cautious people that we are, the Pentagon should commission a
secret study of how we might intervene to restore order in the
former Saudi Arabia after some massive terrorist attack annihilates
the Saudi royals, taking some of the oil infrastructure up with
them. When that study is leaked (to Bob Novak, of course, not the
New York Times) how much more uneasy will rest the heads
on which the Saudi crowns lie? Enough, perhaps, to make some
greater effort against those Saudis whose business it is to exhort
and export terrorism?
The Saudis are crude in their manipulation of us. We should
compel them to conclude that Machiavelli was a wimp.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004).
topics:
Business, Islam, Books, Iraq, Iran, Oil
