by mike Evans
Why should we assume such a plan would work now? After all, it didn’t work in Madrid after the first Iraq war, when Mr. Baker was secretary of state. Is it time to dust off the “Road Map” again?
As the Study Group itself said, there was really nothing new in their report. Instead, they collected what they felt were the best recommendations available and reported them to the president. The president was free to do as he wished with the results. Reading the report, one gets the feeling that it is a shotgun approach rather than a sharpshooter’s. However, the mood of it is somber and has little good to say about how the war has been handled to date. It was as if they had written to fit the mood in the wake of the bloody outcome of the 2006 elections: Iraq is a mess. Things are going from bad to worse there. We need to get our troops out. It is the Iraqis’ problem to clean up their internal security issues, not ours. We have tried military action to make things better, but it hasn’t worked; now it is time to turn it over to the diplomats—even if it means meeting with enemies who have shown a serious lack of good faith in the negotiations of the past. We’ve had too much war; now it’s time to try some appeasement.
As National Security Advisor Stephen Hadley responded:
Here is Syria, which is clearly putting pressure on the Lebanese democracy, is a supporter of terror, is both provisioning and supporting Hezbollah and facilitating Iran in its efforts to support Hezbollah, [and] is supporting the activities of Hamas…. This is not a Syria that is on an agenda to bring peace and stability to the region.8
Regardless, the Baker-Hamilton committee seems to believe Syria is exactly the type of country we should try to woo to a regional security conference—and that we would be able to rely on them to work for peace, even though it has been the farthest thing from their agenda in over four decades.
In contrast, Defense Department officials are very uncomfortable with the idea of granting a role to Iran and Syria at the expense of Israel. In their view, such a strategy could well undermine Arab allies of the United States such as Egypt, Jordan, and Morocco:
The regional strategy is a euphemism for throwing Free Iraq to the wolves in its neighborhood: Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia…. If the Baker regional strategy is adopted, we will prove to all the world that it is better to be America’s enemy than its friend. Jim Baker’s hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record and has endeared him to Israel’s foes in the region.9
You would think there is a group of politicians in Washington that is more interested in its own political agenda than in finding a way for America to win.
A PETITION FOR THE PRESIDENT
In response to the Iraq Study Group Report, I drafted the following petition for President Bush:
Dear President Bush:
The crisis in Iraq is serious; however, I do not believe that the solution is to appease terrorist states, as proposed by James Baker and the Iraq Study Group (recommendation 55). The enemy has made Iraq the central front on the road to terror.
Mr. President, I fully support your 9/11 doctrine on terror: “If you harbor terrorists, you are a terrorist. If you train terrorists, you are a terrorist. If you feed a terrorist or fund a terrorist, you’re a terrorist; and you will be held accountable by the United States and our friends.”
The Baker-Hamilton report proposes that you reach out diplomatically to the terrorist state Iran as a support group member, while assessing no preconditions (recommendation 5). Mr. President, I do not support a terrorist regime becoming a support group member, especially one that is responsible for the murders of the majority of American troops in Iraq through improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and proxies, one that continues to enrich uranium, one that continues to proclaim that millions of Jews should be wiped off the map, and one that envisions a world without America. I do not believe that the UN Security Council—with France, Germany, Russia, China, and the United States as permanent members—should be the moral conscience to determine the future of Iran’s nuclear program (recommendation 10).
The Baker-Hamilton Report also proposes that all militants and insurgents in Iraq (terrorists) that have killed Americans be granted amnesty (recommendations 31, 35). Mr. President, almost 3,000 Americans have been killed by terrorists. That is comparable to the number killed on 9/11. Another 21,000 have been seriously wounded. I do not support appeasing terrorists, nor do I believe that terrorists will stop killing Americans if we offer appeasement.
James Baker proposes that the entire crisis in Iraq is inextricably linked to the Arab-Israel conflict and that Israel must accept a terrorist regime as a partner in peace (recommendations 13, 14, 17). The report also states that land-for-peace is the only basis for achieving peace.
Israel is being asked, once again, to pay the appeasement price by allowing terrorists in Lebanon to return to Palestine; by giving a terrorist regime—the Palestinian Authority—land-for-peace, i.e., Judea, Samaria, and East Jerusalem; and by returning the Golan Heights with no preconditions (recommendation 16) to Syria, another terrorist state. The report also asks that Israel be excluded from a regional Middle East conference, while both Syria and Iran would be included (recommendation 3). I do not believe that appeasing racist regimes that refuse to recognize Israel’s right to exist, that reject the Holocaust and want Jews wiped off the map, is the answer to our problems in Iraq.
I do not believe that terrorist states responsible for having murdered Americans and Israelis should be offered incentives (recommendation 51) or offered access to international bodies, including the World Trade Organization.
Neville Chamberlain proposed a similar appeasement plan to the Fascists; it cost the world 61 million deaths, including 6 million Jews. Winston Churchill said in 1931 that the world lacked the “democratic courage, intellectual honesty, and willingness to act.”
We must not fail this test; if we do, the jihadists will head our way. The root of the rage is racial bigotry against Christians and Jews (Crusaders and Zionists).
Mr. President, I am praying for you. America and Israel are in harm’s way. I humbly believe moral clarity and faith in God according to 2 Chronicles 7:14 will be the key in winning the war against Islamofascism, not appeasement.
IS IRAQ ANOTHER VIETNAM?
Though previously stated, it is worth repeating here: winning the war on terrorism means defeating the ideology of Islamofascism—it is not only about Iraq, but Iraq must be a first victory along the way. That victory has two centers of gravity: 1) maintaining Western civilization’s political will to win this war; and 2) in the short term, stopping the flow of Iranian financial and arms support for terrorist groups in Iraq, while in the long term halting Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
Just as Nazi Fascism rose in the 1930s from the ashes of a powerless, defeated nation in northern Europe to the point of threatening the world, a new totalitarianism in Islamofascism has arisen that promises an even greater challenge. This fanaticism is the central uniting principle of a world of disgruntled, underprivileged people who desire to bring down the nations who have, according to their distorted doctrines, exploited them for centuries. It is not a war to take what the West has, but to bring the West down to the level of the conquerors. It is more than Communism ever was, because it has added the zeal only possible in religious fervor; therefore, it is a greater threat to the world than anything we ever fought in the Cold War.
Liberals scoff at the idea that such military wimps as Iran could ever be a threat to our borders or existence as a nation. They seem to forget that if Islamofascists get the bomb, conventional military power will mean little. If the objective is simply to attack and disable the West with little fear of reprisals, there is nothing like having an entire regime with the mentality of a suicide bomber willing to hit the United States with a few carefully synchronized nuclear attacks. That would be better than an invasion. And just as I wrote in the prologue to my book Showdown With Nuclear Iran, Ahmadinejad’s dream of wiping Israel off the map could be done with one nuclear strike centered on
Tel Aviv.
Many liken the battle in Iraq to the war we fought in Vietnam but miss some key points of comparison. First of all, the Communists we fought in Vietnam were nowhere near being able to strike us with nuclear weapons. Some say the cost of Iraq is too high and point to Vietnam again in comparison. While I don’t support the idea of one needless death among the sons and daughters who fight in the U.S. military, we need to realize that we have lost approximately three thousand soldiers in Iraq as compared with the roughly fifty-eight thousand who were lost in Vietnam. While the cost of the war in Iraq is escalating, has anyone really stopped to consider the cost of retreat? If we don’t win the war in Iraq and end the terrorist threat there, we will certainly have the chance to do it again when it “comes to a theater near you.”
Have we been so quick to forget the lesson of The Ugly American? Perhaps we have, because today the term no longer refers to the hero of that book—a physically ugly but innovative man who went to Southeast Asia to use his inventiveness to raise the standard of living. Instead we use the phrase to refer to a bombastic, egomaniacal consumer of other cultures’ resources so many in the world have come to see as the worst of American culture. Despite this, the main lesson of The Ugly American was that we lost the war in Vietnam not because of insurmountable odds but because Washington refused to let the military on the ground fight the war without being micromanaged by congressional committees and commissions. Those who called the shots refused to study the Viet Cong and Communists and counteract to their tactics. Traditional rules of firepower and the use of military strength to capture territory did little good in the jungle where lines meant nothing and guerrilla ambushes were easier than head-to-head clashes. The use of standard infantry techniques from World War I and II were constantly defeated in this chaos, and it is proving to mean even less in the streets of Baghdad. Do politicians again think they know better than military experts about how to win a war?
Isn’t it interesting that there was not one active U.S. or Israeli general or even a specialist in Middle Eastern history and politics among the Iraq Study Group members? There was no one but politicians, lawyers, and diplomats. Oddly enough, the members decided the answers in Iraq were political and diplomatic, not military. What they provided was a way out, not a way to victory and to protect our troops. They suggested that untrustworthy regimes should be brought to the negotiating table with Israeli land offered to appease them.
Following the release of the Iraq Study Group’s report, I debated the Iraq war with Al Sharpton on Hardball With Chris Matthews. The concensus of opinion from both Mr. Sharpton and Mr. Matthews was that Israel, not Iran, was the core of the problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I would love to bring our troops home, but if we don’t bring them home in victory, we would only be bringing home a fight to our own doorstep.
If we are fighting a war against covert, guerrilla forces, then we need to let our military experts in covert, guerrilla warfare direct the course to victory. We need to disarm militant groups such as al-Sadr’s now possibly 60,000-strong Mahdi army; train the Iraqi forces to fight terrorism in their streets like the Israelis; let our special ops groups do what only they know how to do; and cut off the flow of weapons, finances, and soldiers from Iran and Syria to terrorists fighting in Iraq. We need to use our know-how and technology—things such as the Global Hawk, a long-endurance, high-flying, unmanned aerial vehicle—to watch the borders of Iraq and to close them to keep more terrorists and munitions from infiltrating the country.
At the same time, we need to continue to rebuild the infrastructure of Iraq’s public services that our troops found barely functional when they entered the country. The tenets of life in a free society, such as schooling, medical treatment, transportation, freedom of religion, protection of the rights of minorities and women, and so on, must become “business as usual” in Iraq. This can only happen if the Iraqis find a new path to unity among the different ethnoreligious groups that were driven further apart by the Baath regime’s oppression. Iraq must find a way to emerge from this conflict whole, or else it will only be fodder for its neighbors to pick apart later.
SANCTIFYING CIVIL WAR: THE PROPOSAL TO PARTITION IRAQ
While the Iraq Study Group argued against dividing Iraq into autonomous regions, many in the United States still believe it is the best path to getting our troops home sooner. In May of 2006, in response to the continued sectarian death squads and civil violence between Shiites and Sunnis, Democratic senator Joseph Biden Jr. and the president emeritus of the Council on Foreign Relations, Les Gelb, were the first to introduce the idea of dividing up Iraq as had been done in the Balkans. In a nutshell, they suggested partitioning Iraq into three regions along ethnic and religious lines, having each sovereignty police itself, dividing Iraqi oil revenues between the areas proportionate to the populations of each, and withdrawing the bulk of our troops by the end of 2008.
The argument behind much of this? Provisions were already made in the Iraqi Constitution for this kind of extreme federalist separation of power. The thought is that it would end ethnic fighting and reduce the need for U.S. troops in Iraq almost as soon as the borders between these regions could be set.
According to Peter Galbraith, a former State Department official and proponent of partitioning Iraq:
Iraq’s three-state solution could lead to the country’s dissolution. There will be no reason to mourn Iraq’s passing. Iraq has brought virtually nonstop misery to the eighty percent of its people who are not Sunni Arabs and could be held together only by force. Almost certainly, Kurdistan’s full independence is just a matter of time. As a moral matter, Iraq’s Kurds are no less entitled to independence than are the Lithuanians…. And if Iraq’s Shiites want to run their own affairs, or even have their own state, on what democratic principal should they be denied? If the price of a unified Iraq is another dictatorship, it is too high a price to pay.
American policy makers are reflexively committed to the unity of Iraq, as they were to the unity of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. The conventional response to discussions of Iraq’s breakup is to say it would be destabilizing. This is a misreading of Iraq’s modern history. It is the holding of Iraq together by force that has been destabilizing. This has led to big armies, repressive governments, squandered oil revenues, genocide at home, and aggression abroad. Today, America’s failed effort to build a unified and democratic Iraq has spawned a ferocious insurgency and a Shiite theocracy.10
Apparently, the majority of the American people view the war as a tragic mistake, and President Bush’s approval ratings and the 2006 elections reflect the growing discontent. It seems more and more that a partitioned Iraq would permit the development of an exit strategy for the United States that an ongoing war cannot—but is that what we should do?
LOOKING CLOSER AT A PARTITION PLAN
While on the surface the idea of a partition plan looks reasonable, we don’t have to scratch too deeply before we see the flaws and the reasons why the Bush administration is refusing the proposal. In essence, those that support this idea are admitting that the sectarian violence is more than we can handle and that Iraq is already in the middle of a civil war. If this is true, why leave our troops in the crossfire?
This proposal ignores the fact that the violence is being motivated by Tehran, not Iraqi citizens. Iran’s goal is an Iraqi civil war between the Sunnis and the Shiites. If we are to keep Ahmadinejad from doing what he wants in Iraq, stabilizing Iraq becomes all that much more important.
While dividing the nation into regions according to ethnicity and religion looks easy on a map, Iraq’s people do not just belong to three distinct groups. While the major groups are Shiite Arabs (55 to 60 percent), Kurds (17 to 21 percent), and Sunni Arabs (18.5 to 20 percent), the country has minorities of Assyrian, Chaldean, and Armenian Christians (roughly 3.5 percent), Turkomans (roughly 2 percent), and Mandians (roughly 0.5 percent).11 As would be expected, there is a good deal of overlap between the areas wh
ere these ethnoreligious groups live, especially around Baghdad, where much of the trouble has occurred. Drawing lines between them would force migration or cause greater distress for minorities. Baghdad would have to become a shared region similar to Berlin at the end of World War II and before the fall of the Berlin wall.
At this moment, despite what is covered—or not covered—on the nightly news, the Kurdish north and Shiite south of Iraq are relatively peaceful and prospering. The Kurds insist on the constitutional right to run their own region, and Baghdad ministries are not permitted the right to open offices in the area. The area is so buzzing with new building by investors that a perpetual dust cloud of prosperous activity hangs over all the major cities.
The Shiite south is run by clerics, militias, and religious parties under the guise of municipal and government offices. For all practical purposes, it has become an Islamic state similar to Iran. An ongoing American presence in the Shiite southern regions would only serve to further aggravate relations with that sector. The coalition troops are a catalyst for ongoing attacks. With the exit of all coalition troops, there would be less likelihood of friendly-fire incidents.
