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| Home Front: Politix |
| Three Mistakes and a Danger |
| 2006-05-11 |
| Excellent opinion piece on NRO that expresses pretty much the same ideas I've had about the war in Iraq for some time. The one thing we cannot allow is any further involvement by the State Department in trying to create an Iraqi government - even a State Department under Condoleeze Rice. They just screw things up! Like many conservatives, I think President Bush's decision to invade Iraq and dethrone Saddam Hussein was a brave, right, and necessary decision, and an essential part of a much larger war we have no choice but to fight and win—the global, 21st-century war against Islamofascist supremacy and terror. And like many conservatives, I think the Bush administration handled the invasion of Iraq brilliantly, but made an awful mess of the post-invasion period. In 2003, 2004, and 2005 (three times—here, here, and here), I argued with increasing urgency that to win the post-invasion battle, we needed to take three big, bold steps. In 2006, as the bloodshed in Iraq persisted and the regional situation deteriorated, I stopped criticizing our policies in Iraq for the same reason many other conservatives have lately been reluctant to do so: for fear of adding weight to a Leftist alternative that is even worse. Of course we can't just cut and run in Iraq. We must make a serious effort to salvage what we can. But whatever the outcome there, we confront a greater danger in Iran now, and we must do all we can to make sure Americans don't draw the wrong conclusions about what our mistakes in Iraq were and who made them—conclusions that will make us too timid to save ourselves from the Iranian menace that looms before us today. The surest way to draw those wrong conclusions would be to accept the analysis of the rebel generals currently baying for our Defense secretary's head, because the three mistakes they harp on aren't mistakes at all, and the three big mistakes we really did make weren't made by Donald Rumsfeld. They are the mistakes of the State Department, the CIA, and the rebel generals themselves, along with two other mistake-prone groups David Frum rightly added to my April 30 list in May 2004: "the British Foreign Office," and "most of the better-known foreign policy pundits." But it was John O'Sullivan in a National Review piece later that same May who put the responsibility for all our major decisions in Iraq—the winning ones and the losing ones—squarely where it belongs: on the shoulders of the man in charge, the man who tried to have it both ways, our president. RUMSFELD’S PLAN WAS RIGHT The rebel generals and their think-alikes claim mistake number one was inadequate planning for the post-invasion period. Rumsfeld and his allies in Vice President Cheney's office didn't think we needed elaborate, bureaucratic American plans; they thought we needed to empower strong Iraqi leaders right away, and they were right. Our first big mistake was to bypass Rumsfeld and our Iraqi National Congress allies, and turn the occupation over to Paul Bremer, an arrogant, appeasement-minded State-CIA type who treated our INC allies with contempt, and courted divisive, greedy, and openly hostile Iraqi elements with a condescending and ineffectual mix of small carrots and smaller sticks. Rumsfeld and his supporters wanted to put the leaders of the INC in full charge of a forceful Iraqi transition government with all the powers necessary to create the pre-conditions for democracy: order and hope. To that end, they needed to de-Baathify the country aggressively, tame or eliminate violent Shiite militias, repair critical infrastructure, get oil revenue flowing again, and see to it that every peaceful Iraqi citizen got a check for his share of it. That's what secular Shiites like Ahmed Chalabi, secular Sunnis like Mithal al-Alusi, and their Kurdish INC partners wanted to do, and we should have backed them, without ambivalence or apology, with our full military might. Afterwards, we should have given them whatever additional time they needed to gradually work out and apply a new set of rules for their own Iraqi brand of democracy. Instead, we put a camera-hogging American civilian in charge and let him waste a critical year in a vain attempt to placate foreign Sunni despots as well as hostile Iraqi Sunni and Shiite groups by micromanaging a long drawn-out "process" that was supposed to lead to an all-inclusive Iraqi democracy but in fact led only to disorder, distrust, and growing sectarian violence. STRENGTH, NOT SENSITIVITY Our second big mistake was not, as the rebel generals insist, a lack of "sensitivity"—either to their demands for a vast increase in the number of American troops deployed, or to the finer nuances of Iraqi culture. It was our failure to recognize irredeemable Iraqi enemies as such, and to take bold, decisive military action against them, and especially, against their leaders. It was a mistake to negotiate with the brutal Baathist generals behind the Sunni mob that lynched American civilians in Fallujah; we should have wiped them out. It was a mistake to let the vicious, Iranian-backed Shiite mob leader, Moqtada al Sadr, live, after he sent his thugs out to maim and kill our troops. Quick, crushing military action against men like these would have sent the right message to all our Iraqi enemies, Sunni and Shiite alike: Violent resistance is immediately fatal and ultimately futile. A clear, consistent message like that could have saved many American, Iraqi, and Coalition lives down the road, and won us what we needed most: the respect of ordinary Iraqis, reassured to see clear limits emerge in their new and uncertain world. Hearts and minds would have followed. Instead, Bremer and his civilians—joined by a group of military officers who embraced the fashionably debilitating cliché that "there is no military solution"—repeatedly reined in our frustrated fighting men. Time and again, these walking Rumsfeld antitheses snatched defeat from the jaws of victories our soldiers and marines were poised to win. Time and again, they forced our men to pause or retreat while they made vain, on-again, off-again attempts to win the hearts and minds of committed enemies. What they won was contempt, and a growing conviction that the price of resistance was cheap; the prospects for eventual success good. DON’T IGNORE THE NEIGHBORS Our third big mistake was to fail to recognize and act boldly on the fact that, like it or not, we were in a regional war, because from the start, we weren't just fighting Iraqis. We were fighting Iran and its main proxies, Syria and Hezbollah, too. These external enemies didn't just provide money, training, and increasingly sophisticated weapons like shaped charges to Iraqis in both Sunni and Shiite terrorist groups. They openly recruited and trained foreign jihadis too, then smuggled them across the border into Iraq to do what few Iraqis are willing to do: turn themselves into human bombs to kill and maim large numbers of Americans and Iraqis. The rebel generals argue that we needed many more troops to seal Iraq's borders, but even if we had been profligate enough to add the hundreds of thousands of additional men they wanted, it would still have been a Sisyphean task. There was an obvious alternative with much greater promise of success at much less cost: forcing Iran and its proxies to stop breaching Iraq's borders by striking back hard at terrorist rat-lines and training camps on their soil. Secretary Rumsfeld asked, repeatedly, for permission to do that in Syria, and we could have done it from the air, without need of any U.S. ground forces, but George W. Bush said no. His motives were good—he wanted to save us from having to fight a wider war—but his stubbornness in refusing to recognize the fact that this was a vain hope greatly weakened us in Iraq. EMBOLDENED MADMEN Worse, it greatly strengthened the conviction of Iran's fanatic mullahs that despite our military might, Americans are a weak, decadent people who can be attacked with impunity. That false belief got its first big test in 1979, when the mullahs and their men overthrew the Shah and took our embassy people hostage. Jimmy Carter's impotent, bungled responses confirmed the mullahs contempt for us, but we responded by electing Ronald Reagan, and at first, he frightened the Iranians—our hostages were released the day he took office. Reagan was a strong president —he saw the evil Soviet empire clearly and worked to defeat it with great courage and skill— but he did not understand the Middle East. He thought we could be neutral peacekeepers in the Islamist war against Lebanon's Christian-dominated democracy, and when Iran's mullahs used their main terrorist proxy, Hezbollah, to attack our embassy there, too, he failed to alter his view or strike back effectively. Those mistakes emboldened the mullahs to blow up 241 of our sleeping marines in their barracks on October 23, 1983, and we simply loaded up our dead and came home, leaving Lebanon to the non-existent mercies of Iran, Hezbollah, and their partners in crime, Syria and the Palestinians. Unchecked, Iran's Shiite mullahs grew bolder and more grandiose in their ambitions. Despite the double handicap of being a non-Arab people who espouse a minority version of Islam that Sunni Arab despots despise, Iran's mullahs aspired to the leadership of the whole Islamofascist world—Sunni as well as Shiite—and they have been stunningly successful. In the last two decades, they have succeeded in replacing the Soviets as Syria's main patron, and in implanting a network of Hezbollah cells throughout Europe, Africa, Asia, and Latin America, as well as the Middle East. Defying our "experts," Iran's Shiite fanatics forged close ties to leading Sunni terrorist groups: to al Qaeda cells in many countries, and to the increasingly popular and powerful Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan. On the West Bank and in Gaza, the Iranians have done even better, gaining virtual control over the Palestinian branch of the Brotherhood, Hamas. Today, Iran's still-growing influence and prestige is not limited to active members of terrorist organizations. When Ahmadinejad trumpeted Iran's success in enriching uranium on April 12, Sunni despots responded with anxiety, but their bitter subjects—ordinary Arabs, Sunni as well as Shiite—celebrated wildly. Confident, now, that tomorrow Iran will make America's nuclear superiority a relic of the past, they believe it will elevate them, too, in the only way most of them can readily imagine: by reducing us to the status of dhimmis. These are not just the fevered dreams of impotent third-world losers. A nuclear-armed Iran would change the balance of power in the world against us, and we cannot allow it to happen. It's time to stop pretending that a corrupt U.N. or an already half-dhimmified EU will prevent it. Neither can we afford to wait in hope that the millions of ordinary Iranians who despise the mullahs will overthrow them before they have nuclear weapons in quantity, and make good on their threat to spread them throughout the Islamofascist world. Millions of Iraqis despised Saddam Hussein, too, but they lacked the power to prevail against a ruthless police state without outside military help, and brave protests notwithstanding, decent Iranians are in the same unfortunate position. A TIME TO ACT Only America has both the courage and the military might to save these Iranians, along with ourselves and decent people of all religions everywhere, from the new age of barbarism that threatens us all. To do that, we must ignore the Chamberlains among us and rally behind our Churchills, and we must act. In 2003, 2004, and even 2005, I thought we could rein in the mullahs without needing to attack Iran itself. I thought we could send them a sufficiently chilling message by striking the terrorist strongholds of their smaller, weaker surrogates in Syria and Hezbollahland. Now, it is too late for that. We need to get ready as quickly as possible to mount a major air assault, not just to take out as many of Iran's nuclear sites as we can find, but to defeat the rising evil behind them by aiming our bombs and missiles at Iran's leaders, its Revolutionary Guards, and the bully boys of the Basij too. But we cannot stop there; we also need to bomb Hezbollahland in Lebanon, and to close our own borders immediately in order to lessen the odds that Iranian proxies will succeed in carrying out the attacks on our soil that they are already planning. And of course, our Navy must be fully prepared to do what it takes to keep the Straits of Hormuz open, and to protect vital shipping lanes in the Gulf. The longer we wait, the costlier all of this will be to accomplish. Even now, Putin’s Russia is busily upgrading Iran's air defenses. A coalition of the willing can help a bit, but striking suddenly, before our enemies expect it and are fully prepared, will help more. Conventional wisdom tells us that history will judge George W. Bush by what happens in Iraq. It's not true. He will be judged by what he does about Iran, and so will we, for centuries to come. It is past time for him to focus the nation on the severity of the Iranian threat, and to mobilize and unify us to confront and defeat it |
| Posted by:Old Patriot |