Later this week, the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group are going
to deliver a draft of their report to the White House. We can
safely assume that it will be promptly leaked, and the media will
rush to adopt it as if it were the latest delivered on marble
plaques from atop Mount Sinai. The Pentagon is working on its own
recommendations, which may be lost in the coming media feeding
frenzy over the Baker report. And like every such plan, the study
commission recommendations won’t survive the first contact with the
enemy (or, in these times, our “friends”). It is up to the
president to do that which he has not yet done: lead like a war
president and use all the power of the United States — diplomatic,
economic and military — to establish the agenda for Iraq and the
rest of the Middle East. The president shouldn’t rush or allow
himself to be stampeded by a media and the Democrats into taking
anyone’s recommendations at face value.
If the president allows himself to be entrapped by the Baker
commission, as is sadly most likely, the agenda for progress in the
Middle East will be set by Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, Bashar Assad,
Moqtada al-Sadr and Hassan Nasrallah. Ahmadinejad, anticipating the
Baker report, has already put a price on Iran’s “cooperation” on
Iraq. He said last week, “The Iranian nation is ready to help you
to get out of the quagmire — on condition that you resume behaving
in a just manner and avoid bullying and invading….Then, nations
of the region, headed by the Iranian nation, will be ready to show
you the path of salvation….It is the time for the leaders of the
U.S. and U.K to listen. You have reached a dead end in our region
as well as in the world.” The Kissingerian “realists” will label
this bluff and bluster and say, as they said in 1973, that we can
negotiate a deal for “peace with honor.” It would be better for us
to take the enemy at his word, and his deed.
Iran and Syria — believing the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group
will recommend a retreat from Iraq — are pushing violently for
outright control of Lebanon by the Hizballah terrorists. The
assassination of moderate Lebanese Christian leader Pierre Gemayel
occurred within days of Hizballah leader Nasrallah’s demand for a
veto over Lebanese government action. Neither would have occurred
without Syrian and Iranian support. (One Hizballah
“parliamentarian” said on Fox News a few nights ago that his
“party” wouldn’t deny its connections to Syria and Iran.) Again,
take the enemy at his word. Lebanon cannot pretend to democracy
while it is in thrall to the terrorists of Hizballah, and
Hizballah’s service as the proxy for Syria and Iran cannot be
ignored. In Iraq, as in Lebanon, wars cannot be won by fighting
proxies.
In Iraq, Sunni-Shia violence is taking record numbers of lives
while the Maliki government remains unable and unwilling to do
anything to secure its people from it. (The insurgency has become
the only economically viable industry in Iraq, gaining enough from
oil hijacking, kidnapping ransoms and protection money extracted
from Iraqi government officials to sustain itself. What the
insurgents get from Syria and Iran enables them to expand their
control over parts of Iraq.) President Bush’s meeting with Maliki
this week is itself threatened by Moqtada al-Sadr — Iran’s proxy
in Iraq — who said his participation in the Maliki government
would end if Maliki meets with Bush.
If the meeting happens, the president cannot allow Maliki’s need
to mollify Sadr to control the agenda. Maliki needs to receive a
clear, harsh message that America has lost confidence in his
ability to govern. We have respected Iraq’s nascent “democracy” too
much. The truism that only Iraqis can make Iraq function is true,
but only in the sense that we cannot allow them to continue to
decline that responsibility. Maliki and the other members of his
government need to be made to understand that unless they take
immediate action to fight the militias and insurgents America will
cease military action in those areas. The Iraqis can best begin, as
House Armed Services Committee Chairman Duncan Hunter said
yesterday, with moving trained Iraqi forces into the fight around
Baghdad in great numbers. If our insistence on action brings about
the fall of the Maliki government, so be it. This is a key step
toward resetting the agenda in Iraq. The president has to do it, or
Syria and Iran will do it for him. Whatever Baker-Hamilton
recommend, the president has to refuse any negotiations with those
terrorist nations unless our conditions are met. And he has to back
a demand for satisfaction of those conditions with diplomacy and
force.
AS I WROTE LAST
WEEK, the idea that we can get Syria and Iran to negotiate
seriously on peace in Iraq — and nothing else — is laughable
because their goal in Iraq is diametrically opposed to ours. Their
agenda is to protect themselves from further American intervention
in their terrorist operations and hegemonic ambitions. Syria’s
domination of Lebanon is assured as long as it can freely arm, fund
and control Hizballah. Israel’s government, which should be taking
responsibility for ridding Lebanon of Hizballah and Syrian
influence, is incapable of doing so. We have let Israel flail and
falter when we should have been demanding that the Olmert
government act decisively against both halves of its closest enemy.
What was possible for Olmert to do last summer is now beyond him.
It is almost impossible to expect Mr. Bush to do what Olmert
cannot. But he must.
Ahmadinejad is confident that America poses no threat to his
regime in the next six to eight years, in which he can complete
nuclear weapons development. His taunts, eagerly offering to hold
our coat while we clean out our Middle Eastern offices, demonstrate
a confidence that won’t be easy to rattle. But President Bush
must.
Lame-duckism can be both a political reality and a state of
mind. Mr. Bush needs to recognize that if we cut and run from Iraq,
the blame will be his. If the Iranian mullahs remain free to
develop and deploy nuclear weapons while fomenting terrorism around
the world, it will be he that history labels responsible. The
Democrats have to retain the façade of moderation in
order to win the White House in 2008. If the president acts boldly
and decisively to stop Iran and Syria, even at the cost of
“democracy” in Iraq, and especially if he acts contrary to whatever
the Fabulous Baker Boys recommend, he can reset the agenda and
prevent disaster in the Middle East. In so doing he can keep the
White House out of the hands of the cut and run party in 2008.
Mrs. Thatcher isn’t on hand to tell President Bush that this is
no time to go wobbly, but there are other Brits whose words may
prove to be of equal value. Speaking of Iran, British Conservative
Shadow Defence Minister Dr. Liam Fox told me in a London interview
that, “If we give a signal at every single juncture that one by one
we’ll allow states through the difficult stage of getting into the
nuclear club but they all enjoy certain privileges once they’ve got
there, we might as well have an open-door policy. At some point,
you have to make a stand to give credibility to the arguments that
you make. If we lose in any of the areas in which we’re now
deployed or in any of the cases we’re now making, we will only give
greater credence to those of our enemies who portray us as being
morally weak and lacking the fiber to defend our own values and
interests.”
Fox said, “It is not in Britain’s national interest to see Iran
brought into the negotiation on the basis of any softening over
Iran’s nuclear program. We have already seen what a failure of
diplomacy can do in relation to North Korea and suggest that we
don’t go down the same route again. Therefore I think it’s
nonsensical to rule out any measures that would be necessary to
stop Iran from developing nuclear weapons. I would say that it
would not be sensible for any poker player to in any way reveal
their hand, and the Iranians have, over time, shown that they are
extremely good poker players.” Ahmadinejad has called and raised.
Your bet, Mr. President.
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, 2006).
