Guest Commentary : If you can’t win, get out
Posted on Sunday, January 28, 2007
At the risk of being thought a bigot,
I must confess I’m beginning to
suspect that deep within the dark recesses of the collective Arab / Muslim mind, there is a loose wire. My first intimation came when I noticed that people in an Arab country often express extreme happiness by running into the street and firing guns in the air. They also do this when they are angry, making it very difficult at any given moment to judge their mood. Then there is the civil war gene. They have one. Take Palestine for example: Palestinians pretty much agree that they have a common enemy — Israel. They believe Israel the devil incarnate, the source of all their problems. You would think they could put aside individual differences long enough to form a common front against this enemy. Wrong. The two dominant political parties have decided instead to wage a modest civil war against each other. Fighting Israel can wait. (Isn’t it amazing how often life imitates “ West Side Story” ?) Finally, there’s Iraq. At considerable cost in blood and treasure, we have liberated Iraq from the iron rule of its cruel dictator, Saddam Hussein. You would think that grateful Iraqis would take the opportunity to embrace freedom, rebuild their nation and make it the democratic beacon of the Middle East so we could all live happily ever after. Wrong. The various religious sects, tribes, political parties and gangs of Iraq have instead decided to duke it out for control of the country. This is why President George W. Bush’s plan for Iraq (which he’s been hawking everywhere this side of Sesame Street ) is almost certain to fail. There is no Iraq, there are only warring groups, each of whom wants justice, a word they use interchangeably with revenge. Thus, expecting that a Shiite Prime Minister like Nuri Kamal al-Maliki will go after Shiite insurgents, like Moktada al-Sadr and his Madhi army, is futile. You might as well expect George W. Bush to get rid of Dick Cheney. The Madhi are Maliki’s shock troops. He can’t get along without them. What Maliki would really like, what he’s proposed, as a matter of fact, is for us to stay out of the way so that he and his friends can cleanse Baghdad of its unhealthy Sunni influence. We might be able to jam a contrary policy down the prime minister’s throat for a time, but its chances of working in the long run are virtually nil.
In the face of this ongoing foreign policy train wreck, the Democrats are milling around, getting their act together. Some, like John Edwards, are for abandoning the Bush plan and beginning an immediate pullout. He’d be for withholding funds for Bush’s escalation.
Barack Obama, who has been against the war from the beginning, isn’t quite so bold. He wants a pullout, but he’s not willing to cut off funds and face charges of failing to support the troops. Hillary Clinton, meanwhile, is at the brink of opposing the war, inching towards courage. She’s not nearly as good at being on both sides of an issue as her husband was, but she’s trying.
The fact is the Democrats have no place to go other than being the anti-war party in the next election. The Republicans have the war-mongering vote sewed up. If the Bush plan, against all odds, works, the Democrats aren’t going to cash any chips anyway. They might as well unite against the war. The wild card in this game is Iran. Each day Bush officials bring new expressions of alarm at Iran’s intentions. The suggestion is that it’s trying to develop a — gulp — Weapon of Mass Destruction.
Preemptive war, anyone ? This is getting scary. Republicans are fond of saying that the Democrats don’t have an alternate plan that will yield victory and they’re right. There is no easy way out of this mess and precious few hard ones. This much seems clear, however:
Taking on a third war won’t make things better.
Donald Kaul is a two-time Pulitzer Prize-losing Washington correspondent who, by his own account, is right more than he’s wrong.
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