It may be time for Scooter Libby to make a splash in the race
for president.
No, not as a candidate, of course. The role of Vice
President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff should be as
sage.
Some context is in order: For understandable reasons, most
of the voter interest in the Republican nomination contest has
focused on domestic issues. Indeed, a semi-isolationist spirit has
taken hold among a large swath of the right-leaning electorate,
expressing the attitude that we have so many problems of our own
that the rest of the world should just take care of itself. This,
however, is as foolish as if the denizens of a single city block
refused to pay attention to deterioration of the neighborhood
surrounding them, and of the city surrounding the neighborhood. A
crime wave encompassing the block to the North and the block to the
South, combined with blight one block westward and more blight one
block eastward, cannot help to make life worse in the original
block in question.
So too with world affairs. And, because a president has
more room to operate freely on matters of defense and foreign
policy than he has on any domestic issues, a presidential election
should (but almost never will) revolve more around those issue
areas than around anything else.
It is in this light that AEI, the Heritage Foundation, and
CNN will host a debate on Nov. 15 devoted solely to defense and
foreign policy. And as candidates prepare for that debate — as
Herman Cain tries to get a clue on those subjects, as Mitt Romney
tries to figure how to be isolationist and interventionist at the
same time depending on where the wind is blowing, as Newt Gingrich
tries to explain having been for intervention in Libya before he
was against it, and as Ron Paul figures out how many ways he can
blame America first — all the candidates would do well to bone up
on the realities in the Middle East as described in a recent series
of essays by Libby and his Hudson Institute colleague Hillel
Fradkin.
On a subject that only Rick Santorum of all the candidates
appears to know well, Libby and Fradkin make a compelling case that
American interests may well be “fading in the new Middle East.”
Their argument comes in an essay titled “Last
Man Standing” in the September/October issue of World
Affairs Journal.
“[T]oday, our adversaries have renewed hopes of expelling
the United States from the Middle East,” they write. “They hope to
show that now it is America that will not support friends, punish
enemies, or achieve our aims. For the first time since World War
II, they have some reason to expect success.” Turkey (about which,
more in a moment) is no longer a firm ally. Egypt (also about
which, more momentarily) is probably going Islamist. President
Obama probably just undermined eight years of solid effort in Iraq.
Iran stands virtually unchallenged as a regional power.
Once-friendly Lebanon is now in the terrorist hands of Hezbollah —
snatched while Lebanon’s Prime Minister Saad Hariri exactly as
Hariri visited a feckless Obama in the Oval Office. They quote Arab
analyst Ghaith al-Omari saying — quite chillingly, for those of us
who fear that American weakness spells massive dangers to American
interests — that “it’s become fashionable to ‘dis’ the Americans.
The prevalent mood now is to say that the United States is no
longer relevant.”
If the United States isn’t relevant, also not relevant
will be our interest in a steady oil supply, our trade routes
through the Persian Gulf and the Suez Canal, and perhaps our
life-and-death interest in keeping terrorists away from our shores.
On that latter, Libby and Fradkin posit that “[n]ear-term
counterterror cooperation will likely diminish in Lebanon, Egypt,
Yemen and Libya, where leaders that had cooperated with the US
against al-Qaeda have been weakened or replaced. While democracy
may one day undermine terrorist in these countries, one or more of
them may also end as repressive regimes that spur terror or leave
new, ungoverned areas in which radicals thrive.”
In that light, the authors
argued in the April issue of Commentary (in “Egypt’s
Islamists: A Cautionary Tale”) that “the structures necessary [in
Egypt] for true democracy are barely in evidence.” And to the
extent that democracy does exist, it seems sure to be dominated by
a group probably determined to use it only as a way-station toward
less salubrious ends: the Muslim Brotherhood. As Libby and Fradkin
note, the Brotherhood’s motto still remains: “Allah is our
objective; the Prophet is our leader; the Koran is our law; Jihad
is our way; dying in the way of Allah is our highest hope.” When
crowds gathered in Cairo’s Tahrir Square in February to celebrate
the ouster of Hosni Mubarak, the Muslim Brotherhood, helping
organize the events, invited as a main speaker Sheikh Yusuf
al-Qaradawi, a star commentator on Al Jazeera. Here’s what the
authors report:
[Qaradawi] offered an impassioned “message to our brothers
in Palestine.” “I have hope,” he declared, “that Almighty Allah, as
I have been pleased with the victory in Egypt, that he will also
please me with the conquest of the Al-Aqsa Mosque [in Jerusalem].”
As the many millions who have heard Qaradawi know all too well, his
words in Tahrir Square reflect his hope to participate in the
extermination of the world’s Jews — Jews, not merely Israelis. He
has applauded Hitler’s work and seen Allah’s hand in it. Indeed, he
has expressed gratitude that the final work has been left to
Muslims, a task, he claims, that goes to the roots of
Islam.
In the same essay, the authors touched on Turkey as well:
“The Turkish model is characterized by growing authoritarianism
through intimidation, questionable detentions of opponents, and
diversion of public assets to friendly hands. That may be more
congenial than the ‘Iranian model,’ but that ought to be cold
comfort, given the speed with which [Prime Minister Recep] Erdogan
is effecting Islamist changes in what was the most secular country
in the Muslim world.”
At least, report Libby and Fradkin, Erdogan himself has
been bumbling somewhat. In a Sept. 30 essay called “Erdogan should
mind his own glass house,” they detail Turkey’s growing opposition
to Israel and how it has backed Syria and Iran in their “quarrels
with the West.” But his attempts to throw his weight around may be
backfiring. Iran and Syria have welcomed Turkey’s support, only to
thumb their noses at Turkey’s own attempts to get them to modify
other abusive behavior — so much so that, the authors report,
“Turkey looked the fool.”
All of which would be condign punishment, and a salve to
American concerns, except that it isn’t clear how Erdogan’s
bumbling will affect the overall state of Middle Eastern affairs.
Will it bring him back in line with the West — or will it lead him
to “double-down” in his Islamist adventurism, to the detriment of
either the United States or to regional stability, or
both?
It is an increasingly dangerous world that Fradkin and
Libby describe — and that’s just the Middle East. As world chess
champion and democracy activist Garry Kasparov
told the Heritage Foundation this week, the situation in Russia
becomes worse by the day. “The systematic destruction of Russia’s
nascent democracy by [Vladimir] Putin,” he said, “has increased its
pace in recent years.”
So the Middle East boils, China grows in power, Russia
flexes anti-Western muscles in what is again a dictatorship, and
Europe’s economies stand on the brink. Such are the concerns that
make it imperative that the Republican nominee be somebody who has
a comprehensive understanding of foreign policy, a commitment to a
strong defense, and the ability to explain to the American public
the great stakes involved in our interaction with the rest of the
world.
If nobody in the race is yet consulting with Libby and
Fradkin on these issues, then wise and bracing insight is being
seriously wasted.
