I. An Alternative to the Current War
1) The Architecture of Failure
The debate over the war in Iraq has become a little like the story of the two building contractors who are given a job to refurbish and add onto a fine, elegant old building. Because the contract is very large neither contractor is big enough to handle it by themselves. But the other contractor is the primary and you the secondary, meaning you are only in position to advise the chief contractor. This, of course, you do. You present a whole list of things which must be done, should be done, along with a corresponding list of things which absolutely shouldn’t be done and must at all costs be avoided.
Then you watch in horror as your rash partner proceeds to do exactly everything you specifically counseled against. After a long time then, with the building in nearly complete disrepair, the good parts destroyed and the bad parts unimproved and growing worse, when the whole project is hopelessly ridden with cost overruns and mismanagement and riddled with a scandalous list of shoddy materials, weak oversight and bad decision making, the project is well beyond all point of feasible repair.
Then and only then, after having belligerently resisted taking any of your or anyone else’s good counsel up to that time, the principal contractor turns to you with an angry scowl, as if all that has come to pass was unavoidable and somehow more your fault than his and demands of you, “Well, genius, what do you suggest we do now?”
To which, of course, you would be perfectly justified in responding, “We?”
But since we are one nation and all must bear the price for the mistakes the few in charge have made we bite our tongues and try to civil. This is more than can be said for them, for though they jealously try to hoard exclusive credit for their few successes they are more than generous making sure everyone else shares disproportionately in the massive cost of their losses.
Still it’s nothing but charming for those who were smart enough to have been against this deplorable war from the beginning to hear its authors and proponents now claim it is up to someone else to come up with a solution to the problems they have created or else stand aside and watch as they continue to make them worse.
To return to the story of the contractor, the problem with the war in Iraq, like any poorly laid plan, is the foundation of the whole thing. If the foundation is poorly laid everything which is built atop it is flawed beyond hope of corrective repair and each addition will only destabilize it more. The war in Iraq was counterfeit policy from the outset. It was based on a tissue of lies and misconception, irreparably compounded with incompetence and self delusion. It is the shoddiest piece of work in American history, a perjury on the American people and the world, compounding exponentially and daily growing farther afield from a redeemable policy and any discernible national interest for the United States.
The flawed world view underlying the failed policies of this administration might be thought of as the weak and uneven foundation built of cheap materials on which all their counterproductive foreign policy has been based. Clearly the immediate problem, the Iraq war, must be discontinued as rapidly and efficaciously as possible. Only then can the broader fundamental, foundational approach to the entire war on terror be overhauled and reformed from the ground up and a new, more effective diplomatic and military policy be instituted in its place.
For now Iraq harms us triply. First, it is an egregiously dishonest and counterproductive policy in its own right. Second, since only one policy road may be traveled at once, it crowds out by default any and all more effective policies which might have been and still today could be instituted in its place. Third, an entire range of remedial, corrective, expensive and time consuming policies will have to be applied later to repair all the harm of omission and commission by the first two points, before any effective alternative policy can start to bear fruit.
Yet now the President, our own incompetent contractor, proposes to tie us further to his disastrous policy trifecta and add yet another story with all its massively attendant costs atop the precariously unsteady structure of the Iraq policy already constructed. He selfishly proposes to hold the nation hostage to his own failed notions in Iraq and bizarrely claims we have no other choice but to do this. Recommitting further resources to a disaster is a self-evident error and throwing good troops after bad policy is a profound disgrace. Yet he and his supporters pretend not to be able to see any alternative but to continue to progress for several years more down the same wrong road toward additional costs and inevitable defeat.
First things first, however. Since the Commander in Chief has become the dissembler in chief, and pretends not to remember all the flawed decisions he, the decider in chief, has made, all against good advice, to get us to this unforgiving position, we might digress a few moments to revisit a few of the most obvious mistakes he has made. They have been made in layers, one atop the other. As it would be presumptuous to write in first person plural, though many others have thought and have expressed themselves similarly and more persistently and better than I, I’ll try to refresh the President’s blithe, Alzheimer-like memory with a brief outline in first person singular.
2) The Discreet Charms of the Neo-Cons
I once saw a Spanish film called the “the Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie” which had a scene eerily reflective of the genesis of our Iraq policy. It showed eight or ten prosperous and satisfied looking people sitting down to a nice meal. In the middle of it, terrorist anarchists burst through the door, masked and wielding Uzis. They force the dinner guests to line up against a wall, apparently to rob or murder them.
One man, however, managed to slip from his chair and under the table unnoticed. Hidden by the long table cloth which draped over the sides of the table he seems to have successfully escaped the anarchists’ notice. Yet, even as the fate of the hostages is still unknown, the purpose of the terrorists still unclear, this man’s hand can be seen slowly creeping out from under the tablecloth and along the top of the table, feeling around for something. Perhaps a knife or sharp object to use as a weapon? No, the hand finally stops its fumbling when it reaches the chicken platter. It had merely been another cold drumstick it was searching for.
After 9/11, even while George Bush and his advisors were talking of how desperate and long the struggle ahead against al Qaeda was certain to be, like children with attention deficit disorder, they still couldn’t resist reaching into the past for one old last dried policy drumstick. They say that military strategists are always busy preparing to fight the last war. It’s the same with these small minded and irresponsible politicians who were apparently itching to refight the Gulf War with Iraq.
Unlike the current war, the Gulf War of 1991 was actually very successfully done and might stand as a paradigm of how all such wars should be fought. It achieved all its policy aims, extracted our troops in good order and enhanced US prestige and leadership in the world. As a nation we enriched ourselves diplomatically, militarily and even financially. By knowing where to stop (which is the essence of the acquisition and maintenance of power) the first Bush administration achieved a full 90% of everything we could have ever wanted in Iraq, achieving maximum benefit for the US with minimum possible costs.
This Bush administration, through its peculiar combination of greed, lack of capability, self control and grasp, in what they thought would be an easy political win, decided it wanted to pick up the final ten percent left on the table from the Gulf War for no other reason than for their own ego gratification. Apparently no one told them (though of course many, many people did) that the last ten percent was the most difficult part of the whole operation and would never be worth the cost of the enterprise. In fact, if entered too far into, as is the case with the invasion of any nation, it might prove a bottomless black hole for the invader. So it has proved to be.
3) Bush and Cheney or Thelma and Louise
The idea to provoke this unnecessary war was George Bush’s first mistake.
His mistake in the second place was that no honest and competent administration would have lied, cheated, fear mongered and hastened its own people into this war in the first place. It should have been adequately and democratically debated and discussed, properly planned and prepared for according to a timetable most suitable to our interests; not exaggerated, politicized and steamrolled into being. The weapons inspectors on the ground in Iraq should have been allowed to finish the work they’d started which would have obviated the necessity of rushing to war at all.
Personally, I would have completed the war in Afghanistan and captured and brought to justice the ones (remember them) who actually attacked us on 9/11. Noticing that the war in Afghanistan remained undone surely we should have honored Lincoln’s simple maxim of, “one war at a time.” And we should have actually adhered to the President’s own disingenuously put forward precept of this as a “war only as a last (rather than first and only) resort.”
Third, if I would have gone to war I would have employed the Powell doctrine, remember him, your own Secretary of State, and at the fall of Saddam I would have had 400,000 troops in Iraq to ensure that the country did not descend into irretrievable chaos which our sparse, unmilitary troop levels all but made inevitable.
Fourth, I would have engaged in intelligent rather than pointlessly bellicose, saber rattling diplomacy, prior to, during and after the war. Simple prudence would dictate that, to insulate us from any unforeseen reversal we should have, like the first (successfully waged) Gulf War, involved the entire international community and enlisted the United Nations and NATO behind our efforts before proceeding. This would have given us a real share the burden coalition, not just the British and a few others for show. This would not have left the American taxpayer and American soldier to bear the war’s entire cost and burden and would not have left us today virtually alone in this misbegotten war.
Fifth, I would have had a realistically achievable plan in place for success in Iraq and stuck to it. I wouldn’t have turned this into a free for all for specially favored American corporations and private contractors and would have had an exit strategy in place prior to the war ever beginning. This war was started with a bogus, nebulous, misrepresented purpose in mind which then has morphed into an entire series of unattainable goals (like a strong river which breaks into a thousand tributaries as it nears the sea) primarily to preserve the illusions of the political class that there was a national interest in our attacking Iraq in the first place.
Finally, if he had really been serious about “winning” in Iraq, the speech the President finally gave recently weakly admitting to a few minor mistakes and calling for a few more troops and a few better thought out tactics should have been given three and a half years ago. Instead, for patent political expediency, he has steadfastly denied for years that any shift in strategy need be considered, that more troops were not necessary, and that we were, absolutely, winning the war in Iraq, even reiterating these statements just weeks prior to his admitting the opposite was true.
Instead, by refusing for all these years to admit his mistakes, he has ensured their continuance. By willfully deciding to disguise his failures he has ensured they would only grow more costly and irreversible for the nation. And still his administration dares insists on continuing to take us farther down the one way road the wrong way away from any successful policy which could actually hold out any hope of success against the type of enemy with which we are engaged.
And this is just the sordid start. One could fill books (and many already have) with all the other tactical errors and misjudgments, dishonest projections and disreputable political maneuvering that have caused all these original problems to be allowed to grow so much worse over time. Even though the whole idea behind the war was disproved within weeks of its outset by the finding that Iraq had no weapons of mass destruction, even then, with a modicum of brains and commitment by an intelligent leadership there’s no way the situation should have deteriorated to the levels this president has taken us to.
Therefore, when George Bush claims that there is no clear alternative to a policy of escalation in Iraq that is not defeatist he is, as usual, completely wrong. Nearly everyone has a better alternative plan than his and none of them would lead to a defeat as comprehensive as the one he’s leading us into. Unfortunately, since he and his cabinet still persist in their delusions, they are the ultimate impediments to our success against terrorism. Not a minute passes in a discussion with either George Bush or Dick Cheney before the old untruths about the premise of their policy begin to surface again in their explanations. Bush and Cheney are less Washington and Lincoln than Thelma and Louise in their determination to drive the car of their foreign policy over edge of possibility or return.
4) The Way Forward Requires a First Step Back
Fine. But the President is still the president for two years more. What must he do now?
First it must be acknowledged by the President and his followers once and for all that there’s no military solution in Iraq. Furthermore he must understand and admit that our occupation is one of the prime continuing destabilizing forces in Iraq not a proof against its continuing deterioration. I would have him acknowledge that the future of Iraq will be determined for better or worse, good or ill, by the Iraqis themselves. I would suggest he admit that our forces are but a sideline to effectively control the forces of dissolution which already have Iraq in their deadly grip and really control the country.
I would have the President quit trying to invent a benefit for the United States that wasn’t present in Iraq from the outset and understand that it is a structural implausibility to derive a benefit in a lost cause merely by continuing to try to build on a vast and exponentially increasing accumulation of losses. I would have him quit purposely confusing the terrorists of al Qaeda with Iraqis fighting for the future of their own country as if these two groups were interchangeable. Finally, any policy which doesn’t include a clear path to get our troops home is wrongly conceived. A plan without an exit strategy offers no benefit whatsoever to the United States.
At last, I would like to see him admit that he is chasing an illusion in Iraq. Wars and policies based on illusions can never succeed. It is high time to begin to prepare for our withdrawal from Iraq, not by childishly pretending it will never happen (even our enemies know it will), but by making the diplomatic overtures and arrangements to keep the turmoil that our presence in the Middle East has caused from continuing to spread.
The nonsensical statement that we “must succeed” or “cannot afford to lose” in Iraq must be disavowed as the false and empty slogan it is. It is absolutely irresponsible and truly traitorous to the democratic spirit of this country to keep hiding behind the troops while pretending that anyone who hasn’t and doesn’t still support all the failed policies of this administration is less patriotic than they are. Clearly the opposite is much closer to the truth.
Of course we can lose in Iraq. The President’s own dereliction has made it all but inevitable. No new “way forward” in the form of renewed commitment to a failed cause in the past can possibly result in a future “win” which might in any way outweigh the massive accumulated loss of men, money and time this debacle has already cost us. The President must admit that his entire plan for continuing in Iraq is a poor and despicable attempt for a failed administration to save face for waging and losing an unprincipled war against an unarmed state before the last vestige of American pride and possible hope of victory has fled once and for all aboard the last plane home.
Short of these obvious admissions and acknowledgments, clearly the President
and his administration have not begun to accept a realistic and workable approach either to the war in Iraq or the fight against terrorists. Quite frankly, when you listen to them, the evidence is that they are still deluding themselves and still willing to deceive us. Given these consistent failures of leadership it is not at all clear that this administration the character, skill and personal moral and intellectual qualities necessary to the task at hand. In this case, regardless of how bravely and effectively our troops in the field perform, their efforts will continue to be wasted and betrayed by the political class.
We must ask ourselves after all, what is the likelihood that the very people who, through all their fear, ignorance, dishonesty and incompetence have authored this mess, will suddenly turn wise, honest, industrious and ingenious to get us out of it? Nil. On the contrary, armed with the wrong mental maps and erroneous theories and poor basic information, they seem determined to take all the wrong turns and make the same mistakes over and over. There is still no one in this entire administration who has a strategic grasp of the world, only a propensity to careless disregard for the truth and an insane unwillingness to engage in self analysis or to listen to reasonable arguments that differ from their own.
They still refuse to recuse themselves from a persistent allegiance to their own mistakes and accept the better counsel of those who have been correct from the start about the needs of necessities and pitfalls of this war. They not only continue to ignore the good advice of patriots with careers of public service and other successes in their past far more distinguished than their own, but ignore the clearly stated electoral will of the vast majority of the very people whose interests they are allegedly in office to serve. Surely this is the greatest arrogance and anti-democratic hubris in the nation’s history.
Having said all that, the alternative to George Bush’s way forward is perfectly apparent, it is indistinguishable from the way out. The alternative to George Bush’s policy of escalation in Iraq is to do the opposite of what he suggests. There is no other creditable course.
The President must engage in diplomacy with all the regional powers of the area today. If his Secretary of State can’t do it he should appoint a special, distinguished ambassador of proven ability and stature in the region to bring the disparate strands of our foreign policy in the region into coherence. He should trust in the genius of our democracy which finds its best policy in consensus and consult with members of both parties. Four years into a failed war is not too soon nor too heavy a demand for the government of Iraq to immediately make tough decisions about their own future. This is not a decision which should be left open or to chance somewhere down the road but must be spelled out in benchmarks to be put forward immediately. It is high time to establish a definitive American policy in Iraq not entirely contingent and dependent on others (who do not necessarily wish us the best) to carry out. The United States of American should be dependent on no other nation for the soul and determination and implementation of its own policy.
What arrogance of men explains people so willing to let others die for their mistakes? For the authors of this war to pretend that this, the most avoidable of all wars, was somehow unavoidable, maintaining that they have not sold out their country by sinking us into this miserable morass of their own incompetence, fearful and corrupt behavior, and then pretend that the only solution is to escalate, is disingenuous beyond what is acceptable in our public servants.
II Toward an alternative policy
1) Who the Real Enemy Is
We won the Cold War through patience, diligence and by possessing a superior system of economics, government and ethics. There is no reason to believe that the same tried and true policy will not be just as efficacious against terrorism today. George Kennan, the one credited with the most influential policy document of the Cold War wrote in the Long Telegram:
“…(communism) involves questions so intricate, so delicate, so strange to our form of thought, and so important to analysis of our international environment that I cannot compress answers into a single brief message without yielding to what I feel would be dangerous degree of oversimplification.”
He continued, “Our first step must be to apprehend and recognize for what it is the nature of the movement with which we are dealing. We must study it with the same courage, detachment, objectivity and same determination not to be emotionally provoked or unseated by it, with which doctor studies unruly and unreasonable individual.”
This is a perfect representation of our situation today and yet this administration, either because they are truly gutless or for cynical political purposes, insists that the United States has never faced a threat so overwhelmingly challenging before. They are wrong, we have faced many crises in our history far more challenging than this, we have just never had in place people less fit to deal with them. The Cold War itself was a much graver and more comprehensive world threat to our nation’s future and survival than international terrorists represent today. Yet we behaved with much greater national dignity, subtlety, care and wisdom in dealing with it than our leadership shows today.
The “war on terror” or on Islamic fundamentalism or global war on nearly everybody we don’t like or whatever else they are calling it today, is a terrible misnomer. You can’t fight a war against an abstraction. Terror itself is not an enemy you can effectively operate against any more than is pure fear. The very vagueness of its terminology unfocuses our strategy and undercuts our tactical successes. You may choose to chase rats in your house with a tank but you will only destroy your house and leave the vermin free to breed in the rubble. We may as well send an army out to fight darkness.
But then the entire theory of the war has been created backwardly. The terminology used has been more noteworthy as a function of its efficacy as p.r. rather than the effectiveness of the policy itself. Then the policy fits itself to the rhetoric rather than the other way around. Dick Cheney has even taken to referring to the threat against us as “existential”, which further reduces all serious debate to an even higher level of absurdity. To put troops in harm’s way to assuage the irrational fears our own neurotic leadership has engendered for its own narrow political purposes is self-defeating.
The root of their failure then lies in their inability to have adequately even begun to understand and define who our enemy is. We are not in a war against half of Islam. It does not follow that anyone who engages in suicide bombings, however deplorable, is anti-American or in sympathy with al Qaeda’s doomed jihad against the United States. Just because our government cannot help but confusedly conflate all these various issues before us into one big basket and pretend that they have some common ancestry does not mean it’s true and it certainly doesn’t follow that they have a common solution. This is precisely the “oversimplification” that Kennan warned of.
The real “war on terror” is actually less complex. It is even only a “war” in the vaguest metaphorical sense and is better thought of as merely a fight against a few specific terrorist organizations rather than a “war” against the concept of “terror” itself. In fact, the task before us, is painfully, achingly simple. It is a policy action against a certain nihilistic spin off group of Islamic fundamentalists. Though they employ particularly gruesome and irrational tactics and spout a vocal anti-Anti-American agenda its hard core membership is very few in number and though they represent a terrible deadly threat in isolation, in no way do they represent an assault either convincingly real or abstract on our very way of life. Despite their bombast, they simply do not have the power or numbers to do this.
In Iraq we are fighting Sunni and Shiite militias jockeying for control of their own country. This has nothing to do with 9/11 and never has had anything to do with us, it is just a lie our leaders told us. There is no national interest in trying to establish democracy in a land where it cannot possibly take hold, at the point of a gun, at the cost of countless American lives and dollars in the failure. Whatever Iraq will become in five years it will not be a democracy in our sense of the word. In twenty years perhaps, but as to whether our occupation is a help or hindrance in their fitful progress to this eventuality, is too much of an open debate to be worth the concrete costs.
Meanwhile, the war is a negative enabler to al Qaeda. In Iraq we have created a power vacuum in a foreign country over which we have little effective control, with porous borders in an area where it is impossible to tell al Qaeda from locals. Through the blizzard of competing forces vying for control of Iraq, both religious and secular, we don’t even know from one day to another who or where al Qaeda is in Iraq. Conversely they know exactly who and where we are. To suggest that this is an efficient way or place in which to fight al Qaeda when we can’t even separate al Qaeda from the warring Iraqis we are there to liberate is an absurdity. Such a confusion or asymmetricallity is not a promising basis on which to fight a war.
With the possible exception of Iran, no one is happier than al Qaeda that we are stuck in Iraq and they will do anything to keep us there even if that involves blowing up Muslim innocents. Unfortunately for us this means the aims of our enemies nicely comport with the aims of our own administration. The elemental Bush administration claim that fighting them there will keep them from here, is clearly absurdist and an insult to the nation’s intelligence. All our entire effort in Iraq has done to al Qaeda is to temporarily save them air fare.
On the contrary, as long as we are there they have a ready recruitment plan in place, a perfect training ground for operational terrorism and a steady supply of American targets at the ready. Meanwhile their leadership is left free to regroup, reorganize, recruit and plot for more attacks against us in our own country at their leisure.
2) The Islamic Reformation’s Reaction to Modernity
The next layer of confusion our hapless leadership has inadvertently stumbled us into the middle of is the religious-political reformation currently underway across the Islamic world. It is against this backdrop of turmoil, supplying an undercurrent of instability, irrationality and distrust across the Islam world today, that is yet another reason Iraq has become such a whirling dervish of backlash and unpredictability. The Bush administration has basically stuck a stick into a hornet’s nest and now it seeks to pick and choose among the wasps and bees and reorganize them to unity, democracy and stability. It is hard to imagine an effort bound to be more fruitless or grounds less conducive for United States interests to flourish.
As we all know, the Protestant Reformation in the sixteenth century in Europe was a reaction to the worldliness and corruption of the Catholic Church and all the excesses, some quite beautifully inspired, others quite decadent, of the Renaissance. It was a retrenchment to the old perceived verities and it sometimes grew violent as it spread erratically across European Christendom. “Heretics” on both sides were condemned to the stake for nuances of theology that would have baffled an outsider.
A Reformation is a political and social fight complicated by religious passions. As religious leaders are often the most conservative members of society, they hate change which will threaten the static observances of long standing rules of order. Once technological or economic or social change occurs anywhere, religions generally fight them and orthodox practitioners of the old religion, confused with how the old faith will fit in the new society emerging, often find themselves aligning themselves with anti-progressive Luddites and even latent revolutionaries of their society. They try to return to the roots of their faith, when possible to the words of their religion’s founder, and hold to them like a rudder to see them through the inscrutably shifting demands of the world around them.
As hard as change has sometime come about in the West, which is far better conditioned to adapt to it, imagine how far more primitive, parochial and patriarchal nations react to wholesale social changes when they think these are being thrust upon them by outsiders and infidels to profit at their expense. This reactionary movement, in its broad sweep, is what seems to be going on in the Muslim world today.
Interesting too, as an historical comparison, is the fact that as the Protestant Reformation played out in Europe it was the Muslim world that played the role the West is playing today in this Islamic Reformation. In the sixteenth century it was the Muslims pressing in from Eastern Europe and plying piracy in the Mediterranean that kept good Christians up worrying at night. That Christian Europe must put aside its differences to unite in common cause against infidel Muslims was a constant refrain of the times.
But it was almost never acted upon and over time many Christian states, including France and eventually even the Papal States themselves, to increase their political leverage in Europe, put aside their abhorrence for Islam and made treaties of convenience with them. There will be many opportunities for the west to exert influence over events in the Middle East short of committing troops to the conflict.
In the broader sense, such tumultuous activity accompanying far reaching changes are perfectly normal. And generally speaking this Islamic fundamentalism in its generic sense is no fundamental threat to the West. Obnoxious as is the rhetoric and as hyper sensitive as Muslims are to the slightest perceived insult, generally this will be an internal battle which they must thrash out on their own. Ordinarily it will be internecine, complicated by an existing historical split (which did not exist in the monolithic Christianity of the Reformation) of Sunni and Shiite. And most of its violence will be confined to political, religious and nationalistic disputes of Muslim against Muslim. The progress of this movement will not be uniform, and will create tensions and backlashes to its own excesses across Islam. Like Europe it will play out differently in every nation, every region and sometimes from town to town, playing out in each and every country it passes through like a wave in different ways.
In general too, if this plays out like Europe did in the Reformation, national priorities will always trump some pan Islamic dream of a new Muslim caliphate. These nations will subdivide against themselves and against each other along clearly visible fissures and fault lines according to preexisting and long standing internal ethnic and religious tensions. Because of these internal divisions and fractures the Islamic world despite its threats, will not be able ultimately to unite in common cause against outsiders for the foreseeable future. Its inbred, backward looking, self-destructive radicalism will be an impediment to the movement’s own cohesion, prosperity and success.
And it must be remembered that when a power vacuum does develop, as has been artificially created in Iraq by our blundering into the middle of this melee, the axis of possibility will more likely spin a nation back in time toward a more conservative retrenchment (anti-women and theocratic) rather than ahead toward a more open, pluralist, tolerant and liberal democracy. Therefore, the conservative reaction underway will cause inefficient societies to stay as politically and religiously regressive as they already are and for emerging democratic societies to tend to become even less democratic and less economically effective. This will render the Islamic world (though terrorism itself will persist as a threat for the foreseeable future and must be dealt with accordingly) less of an actual threat to world domination than it poses now.
Finally, the idea of the United States being able to impose a western style democracy in Iraq has always been nothing more than a pipe dream.
It will continue to be futile, as we have seen in Iraq, to enter too deeply into these factional and doctrinal fights. We will find, as we have also discovered in Iraq, that ultimately the only thing that can unite these forces in common cause, deflecting their attention from their differences with each other, is opposition to a meddling outsider.
Instead we must engage in more precisely tailored responses to our true enemies (it’s not like they don’t go out of their way to tell us precisely who they are) while protecting ourselves and providing support to our allies. Meanwhile we must await the historical reasonableness which has always marked Islam to slowly reassert itself over the more extreme of these radicals. This will occur once the ancient and pragmatic nations in the region see how counterproductive these murderous groups are to their own futures. This will happen sooner once we remove ourselves as much as possible from the midst of these controversies and contentions and adopt a role of honest broker more suitable to the world’s only superpower.
3) A New Containment Policy
To quote Kennan again: “Finally we must have courage and self-confidence to cling to our own methods and conceptions of human society. After all, the greatest danger than can befall us in coping with this problem of (Islamic fundamentalist terrorism) is that we shall allow ourselves to become like those with whom we are coping.”
The greatest single failure of this administration has been its chicken little approach to the world after 9/11. In their desperate attempts to fuse 9/11 and Saddam Hussein together, their catch-as-catch-can policies have alienated all our friends and further emboldened our enemies. They have turned half the world against us and engendered distrust and opposition in the rest, even in our allies. All this has been completely unnecessary, the crises we have created for ourselves have largely been self-induced.
This then is the outline of the problem. Here is the solution as an alternative to the currently failing policy.
1) Stop doing things which don’t work. A measured withdrawal from Iraq should be begun as soon as possible. Leave Iraq to the Iraqis.
2) Identify our real enemy as al Qaeda and al Qaeda clones. Recommit troops to the forgotten war in Afghanistan, where al Qaeda and its sympathizers actually exist in significant numbers.
3) Play to our strengths rather than our weaknesses. Ninety percent of the war on terror may be won with sound policy true to our ethics and in cooperation with international organizations and NATO. We must make book with those who despise terrorists and the unrest in which they thrive as much as we do, which constitutes the vast majority of the world. We must recognize that stability and law and order are our friends and the mortal enemy of terrorists. Yet our current irrationally contentious policy undercuts international law and order and seems perfectly designed to prosper instability and create war torn power vacuums, precisely the environment where al Qaeda and those like them may best flourish.
4) Persistent containment of the worst of the contagion is the policy that won the Cold War. Open warfare, then as now, should be avoided as it will generally be completely counterproductive to our purposes. Law enforcement and robust diplomacy will be even more successful and easier to apply here. The Islamic world is more geographically contiguous. Its worst radicalism ultimately has little universal appeal to countries outside its predominance.
5) We must wage this battle with far more dignity, class, compassion, and finesse and understanding, strictly in compliance with our finest religious and political principles, than we have up to now displayed. These principles are what have made us and kept us great. If cohered to they will overcome this new crisis facing with ease. On the other hand, continuing to try to fight against the grain of history as we have done up till now since 9/11 with means and methods contrary to our own finest traditions, can only bring continuous failure, irresolution, confusion and defeat.
