April 28, 2006

Our Orphaned Middle East Policy
Things are looking up as everyone starts jumping ship.

It is common now to hear of an American Middle East policy in shambles. And why not, given the daily mayhem that is televised from the West Bank, Afghanistan, and Iraq, and the overt threats of Iranian President Ahmadinej(ih)ad?

  

Somewhere in the Sunni Triangle, with costs mounting in our blood and treasure, the United States lost the last vestiges of that wonderful sense of national unity that had swept the country following September 11. About every week now some administration official seems under pressure to resign or in fact does.

Tell-all books by disgruntled former CIA agents and ex-diplomats lament how the supposedly clueless people in power did not listen to their own Protean expertise. Those who leak from the CIA, an agency with analysts seemingly at war with their own government at a time of war, are hardly considered culpable — so long as their tips were to the "right" newspaper and for the "right" cause.

Former proponents of Saddam's removal and democratization are now unabashedly triangulating — scrambling to be recast as "I warned them" foreign-policy consultants, as they showcase their intellectual wares for the next generation of politicians in 2008. Their support comes and goes, as they wonder whether the good news from Iraq should rekindle guarded approval, or the bad news should reaffirm their belated opposition. Not since the up-and-down summer of 1864 has this country at war seen such equivocating and self-serving editorialists and politicians.

No one pauses to suggest what the region would now look like with Saddam reaping windfall oil profits, 15 years of no-fly zones, ongoing corruption in Oil-for-Food, the bad effects of the U.N. embargo, Libya's weapons program, and an unfettered Dr. Khan. If a newly provocative Russia is willing to sell missiles to Iran's crazy Ahmadinej(ih)ad, imagine what its current attitude would be to its old client Saddam.

Or perhaps, as in the 1980s when over a million perished, our realists, who seem fond of such good old days of order and stability, could once again encourage an unleashed Saddam, with Uday and Qusay at his side, to be played against Iran for a (nuclear) round two. How sad that those who once fallaciously argued that the fascist Saddam was the proper counterweight to the fascist Iran now ignore that the genuine corrective is a democratic and humane Iraq.

A few retired generals smell blood, want to even old scores, and have demanded Secretary Rumsfeld's resignation. They earn not the usual condemnation from liberals for intruding into the gray area around our hallowed civilian control of the military, but praise for their insight and courage — as if speaking out on in retirement is especially brave or calling for radical change at a time of war is always wise. That they are usually Army officers long furious over military transformation is left unsaid — as is the irony that Iraq will largely be saved by the skill of their brethren U.S. ground officers currently deployed.

Scholars under the rubric of Harvard's Kennedy School of Government, not the American Conservative magazine, publish a pseudo-scholarly treatise about undue Jewish influence that resulted inexplicably in a disastrous tilt in American policy toward the only liberal society in the Middle East.

Meanwhile, we are faulted for "outsourcing" the problem of Iranian nuclear ambitions when we let the multilateral Europeans take the lead in talks with Tehran. And we are then condemned as itching for more "preemption" and "unilateralism" when we sigh that at some point someone may have to act to prevent Mr. Ahmadinej(ih)ad from arming his missiles. This is a psychopath, after all, who assures those on the West Bank of his love and support by promising to send a nuke soon in their general direction. I suppose Hamas thinks that 50 kilotons can distinguish east from west Jerusalem.

But if we look beneath all these self-serving contradictions, real progress amid the carnage since September 11 is undeniable. It is not just that the United States has not been attacked again. Al Qaeda's leadership has been insidiously dismantled. Even bin Laden's communiqués are increasingly pathetic, whining about lost truce opportunities for the Crusaders while warning of more welcomed genocide in Darfur. We can be sure of his war-induced attenuated stature when some on the Left are already suggesting that the 9/11 attacks were mostly the operations of just a few criminals rather than precursors to international jihad.