What’s going wrong in Iraq, and how do we fix it? Polls say that
almost three quarters of Americans think Iraq is headed the wrong
way and are growing impatient at the apparent lack of progress
toward the establishment of a functioning democracy. The president
has asked former Secretary of State James Baker and former 9-11
Commission co-chairman Lee Hamilton to review the Iraq situation
and report — after November 7th — ways to change course. The
question is not what the Baker Boys will recommend. The question
is, are we even asking the right question. The answer to that, as
I’ve written
before, is that we’re turning ourselves inside out — and possibly
turning Congress over to the Dems — trying to answer the wrong
question.
The choice, as the Media/Democrat Complex states it, is between
a Bush policy of “stay the course” and the Democrats’ alternative.
There is no Democrat alternative, of course, other than what Sens.
Carl Levin and Barack Obama said yesterday. Levin — who will chair
the Senate Armed Services Committee if the Dems seize the Senate —
insisted on Fox News Sunday that the Dems don’t want to “cut and
run” but want to begin a phased withdrawal immediately. (For “cut
and run” read “trim and trot.”) Rising Dem star Sen. Barack Obama,
beginning his presidential audition on Meet the Press,
insisted that the withdrawal begin before year’s end. (Obama, who
the BBC’s Katty Kay said was, “ridiculously good looking”, got the
Russert red carpet treatment, backing off his pledge to serve his
entire Senate term and saying he’ll revisit that issue after
November 7th. We may be looking at a Clinton/Obama ticket.)
What’s going on in Iraq isn’t what we planned or wanted. The
militias of various religious groups are achieving anti-democratic
armed power. The Maliki government isn’t either powerful enough or
committed enough to disarm the militias because some of their
leaders, such as Iranian-funded and directed Moqtada al-Sadr, are
key Maliki supporters. Rethinking Iraq, within the boundaries of
current wisdom, poses bad choices aimed to solve an
almost-irrelevant question.
The choices we’re offered are all based on what we need to do
within Iraq to win the war there. But the war in Iraq has always
been only a part of the global war terrorist nations are waging
against us, and that war cannot be won in Iraq, but it can be lost.
We’ve been enthralled by the illusion that Iraq is only about Iraq.
As I’ve noted before and will again and again, the war for
democracy in Iraq is mis-aimed. It matters little to us who governs
Iraq as long as they are no threat to America. And to win the war
against Islamic fascism requires the defeat and removal of the
national regimes that sponsor it. Without national sponsorship,
Islamic fascism and the terrorism it uses against us would not be
the existential threat it is. Unless and until we win the war
against those nations — Iran and Syria chief among them — that
threat will continue to grow. Because none of the choices our
leaders offer are aimed to defeat the terrorist nations, every one
of the alternatives they pose can lead only to defeat.
The choices, the 527 Media tell us, boil down to four
alternatives. First: stay the course, whatever that means. Second,
partition Iraq. Third, mount a coup to replace Maliki with a
“strongman” who can impose order in Iraq. Fourth, withdraw —
immediately or within a year — and let the Iraqis fight it out
among themselves and their neighbors.
No one from the president on down says we should stay on the
current course without changing tactics. But what changes are going
to be made? It’s entirely possible that Baker’s report will
recommend a phased withdrawal, with the engagement of Iraq’s
neighbors Syria and Iran. In effect, that would paper over a
strategic defeat for America. We would be withdrawing from Iraq
under the cover of whatever temporary peace Syria and Iran might
allow us.
Partitioning Iraq is an approach that could earn an A+ in a
graduate course at the Kennedy School of Government, but will get
an immediate F in the real world. An independent Kurdistan — the
presumed northern section — would violate the agreement President
Bush made with Turkey before the invasion. The Turks would invade
because they believe (with much justification) that an independent
Kurdistan would seek to expand into northeastern Turkey. Shia
southern Iraq would be swallowed by Iran, and the middle — Sunni
Iraq — would become part of Syria or a Syrian satellite terrorist
state like Lebanon. Even if Iraq’s neighbors wouldn’t invade or
interfere (an assumption that would be hilarious if it weren’t so
dangerous), only Kurdistan could possibly survive as an independent
state. The other two would lack either the economic resources
necessary to survive or the political unity to function, or
both.
It’s fascinating to hear media liberals speak somberly about
fomenting a coup to install an Iraqi strongman. If they had any
knowledge of the region (or of history) they would know that an
American-run coup to overthrow Maliki would succeed as well as the
coup as the November 1, 1963 coup against Ngo Dinh Diem engineered
by John Kennedy. (According to the George Washington University
archives, a White House tape captured an October
1963 meeting in which Bobby Kennedy said, “I mean, it’s different
from a coup in the Iraq or South American country; we are so
intimately involved in this….”). Like partitioning Iraq, a coup
would backfire, probably putting someone like Moqtada al-Sadr in
charge and certainly ending any effort to establish democracy
there.
What’s left? Only, as we’re led to believe, is what Bob Hope was
first to say we should do in Vietnam: declare victory and come
home. That recipe for defeat will be dressed up in sufficiently
elegant diplo-speak, but that’s what we’ll likely get from the
Baker Boys. And it will, in all likelihood, be made the media
gospel just as the 9-11 Commission’s recommendations were before
it. There’s only one problem with it. It’s a concession of
defeat.
The president was wrong to declare that our purpose in Iraq was
to establish democracy as a force to overcome Islamic fascism. And
it’s wrong to say that if we gradually withdraw from Iraq, even if
Iraq fails, that the war against Islamic fascism will have been
won.
Conservatives, according to Bill Kristol, are saying more and
more, “win or come home.” That’s only half right. Conservatives,
and every other American who wants to see an end to this war, know
that the fate of Iraq isn’t very important. To win this war means
removing the regimes in Iran and Syria and telling the rest of the
world that they will be next if they sponsor Islamic fascist
terrorism. Prosecute the war in a manner designed to win it
decisively, or lose it inevitably. Right now we’re doing the
latter, and talking about how to do it quicker and at less
cost.
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) and, with Edward
Timperlake, Showdown: Why China Wants War With the United
States (Regnery, May 2006 — click here).
