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Sol Sanders Archive
Friday, June 29, 2007

Shame on the Potomac: Spurning the Iraqis and U.S. interests as the world watches

The catastrophe brought on by the present Democratic Party leadership campaign against the Bush Administration on its Iraq policies and strategies is not defined by the fact that they are playing petty politics with national security – which they are doing, of course.

Those of us who lived through the interventionist-isolationist debate of the late 30s and early 40s know that, unfortunately, politics have never stopped “at the water’s edge”. Reformed isolationist Sen. Arthur Vandenberg [R., MI] did plead for just that in 1952 when he endorsed the controversial Truman Doctrine of aid to Greece and Turkey to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. That was a strategy that would later turn into the North Atlantic Treaty Organization, perhaps the most successful alliance in history.

But from its earliest origins, even when the Atlantic and Pacific were days journeys from Europe and Asia and not a few minutes ICBM missile flight from Iran or North Korea, the Republic found its leadership at odds over foreign policy. Founding Fathers Thomas Jefferson and Alexander Hamilton were at each other’s throats in President George Washington’s cabinet over what position the U.S. should take toward the French Revolution.

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And, indeed, that is probably as it should be. For even more today – in a world of instant communications and shortening lines of transportation – foreign policy is a critical part of national governance. And that is what we have political parties and national debate for, to find the best ways to move ahead.

So with a more than a usually chaotic presidential contest just ahead and each party fielding many candidates in one of the longest campaigns in American history, it is little wonder that the party of the outs should ring the noisemakers over a long and seemingly stalemated war directed by the ins.

However, much of the time Democratic Party spokesmen speak as though they are totally unaware of the digital revolution, that they do not know that every word uttered in the U.S. by people in authority and by the media is carefully scrutinized not only by the Islamofascists around the world and its allies among the enemy in Iraq, but also by members of the Iraqi regime. [One does not need to talk about what it is doing to young men and women who every day risk their lives in Iraq.]

The bizarrely amateurish and counterproductive propaganda warfare of Karen Hughes in the State Department is now reinforced by what one can only call enemy incentive guarantee rhetoric voiced by Senator after Senator. The foot-in-mouth disease leads to such outrageous statements as the majority leader stuttering through a statement including a phrase about the Iraqis not wanting us there.

Politicians are no different there than here: if even some Republicans are scurrying for camouflage before the 2008 elections on the Iraq issue, what is one to expect of Baghdadi politicians trying to choose up sides for a series of proposed excruciatingly difficult reforms while their very lives are daily threatened by terrorists? And in a strange circular reasoning, enactment of those reforms which are demanded in Washington are jeopardized by the Democrats’ blather.

The series of proposals on how to run the war by the Democratic leadership is equally destructive of any outcome beneficial to U.S. national interests:

Not only is setting a deadline for withdrawal inviting a continued maximum effort and handing a timeline for the insurgents’ leadership to mobilize their own highly challenged following, but it ignores even the necessity for time for the physical capacity of pulling out American troops and equipment while minimizing losses. It would take months under the best conditions to admit defeat and withdraw American troops.

Proposals for deployment to other Persian Gulf states – neighboring Kuwait, for example – ignores the impact an American withdrawal [simulataneously admitting to all and sundry a U.S. defeat] will have on these states. [John Murtha, another great strategist in the Congress has suggested pulling such a fire brigade force back to Okinawa!] Bahrain, for example, the home of the U.S. Fifth Fleet in the Persian Gulf, already beset with a Shia majority infiltrated heavily by the Iranians, would immediately be at risk. Nor is it clear for what purpose this would be done: to race back into Iraq if the situation becomes even more threatening?

Proposals for reducing American troops to a minimal number which would protect only certain key areas ignores the probability that insurgent forces would be on the offensive against those very reduced U.S. enclaves. Furthermore, what would be those priority areas – if not Baghdad where Gen. David Petraeus’ surge is now concentrated, where?

The inchoate claim that President Bush and The Pentagon’s current strategy has failed and another approach must be taken to the problems leaves open the question of with what would it be replaced. There are no real answers from the Democrats. Sen. Joseph Biden’s proposal for partition into Sunni, Shia and Kurdish states would bring on a holocaust. [Has everyone forgotten The Partition of British India?] Furthermore, it would only “institutionalize” and reinforce sectarian warfare between the ethnic, religious and racial groups with three or four ministates constantly at war with one another.

Whatever one argues about the origins of the war – that is, for example, even maintaining it was a war we should not have fought – the fact remains that an American withdrawal now will not solve the problem of U.S. national interest Washington now has. Unless one can foresee an Iraq which would turn into a permanent “Somalia”, a regime – probably inimical able to the U.S. – would finally be established in the wake of an American withdrawal. That regime would with all probability turn its back not only on the U.S. but on any kind of representative government – as Iraq and most Middle East regimes have in the past – and opt for dictatorship.

But unlike Afghanistan where Osama Bin Laden was able set up shop despite a war ravaged, isolated and backward polity, the new regime would be sitting in Baghdad, historically one of the most important cities in the Islamic world, and on the world’s second largest oil reserves.

Just as Sadam Hussein’s aim was the control the vast oil resources of his Persian Gulf neighbors with his 1991 invasion of Kuwait, any such Iraqi regime would be tempted again to do the same. Nor does it seem likely the U.S. could again play the game it did during the almost 20 years of the Iraq-Iran War of using the two major powers in the Gulf to neutralize one another. At a minimum, Europe and Asia’s oil supply would be at risk.

Demagogery at its worst? Yes, of course.

But I accuse the Democratic Party leadership of something much worse: unforgiveable and inexcusable abandonment of common sense in their pursuit of attempting to milk in 2008 the voters’ disapproval of a cruel and difficult war in which, as always, huge mistakes have been made but one for which Washington must find a successful termination.


Sol W. Sanders, (solsanders@cox.net), is an Asian specialist with more than 25 years in the region, and a former correspondent for Business Week, U.S. News & World Report and United Press International. He writes weekly for World Tribune.com and East-Asia-Intel.com.


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