The success of a free Iraq is critical to the security of the United States. A free Iraq will deny al-Qaida a safe haven. A free Iraq will counter the destructive ambitions of Iran. A free Iraq will marginalize extremists, unleash the talent of its people, and be an anchor of stability in the region. A free Iraq will set an example for people across the Middle East. A free Iraq will be our partner in the fight against terror and that will make us safer here at home. ~George W. Bush 

This Free Iraq sounds pretty impressive.  There is nothing, it seems, that it cannot do, no obstacle it cannot overcome.  Why we didn’t try to establish a Western democracy in this place called Free Iraq, we will never know.  Instead we went to this “Republic of Iraq” place that has none of Free Iraq’s advantages.  There’s no such place as Free Iraq, you say?  That’s crazy–the President has just told us all about it.  He wouldn’t tell us something that wasn’t true, would he?

Yet when the United States bombed European and Christian Serbia to help Balkan Muslims, few critics alleged that American Muslims had unduly swayed President Clinton. ~Victor Davis Hanson

That’s true.  We blamed the Albanian lobby for encouraging intervention in Kosovo, as well we might have done.  The Democrats became very cozy with Albanian lobbyists; the thug and terrorist Hacim Thaci was even a guest at the 2004 Democratic convention.  There’s no sense making sweeping generalisations against all Muslims.

There’s a much easier explanation for the targeting of Serbia during the ’90s: it eased the consciences of those who want to defend non-Christians against a country that was historically Christian, it weakened a Russian satellite, which pleased hegemonists and Russophobes (who are usually the same people), and satisfied all of those in America and western Europe alike who don’t care much for Slavs or Orthodoxy generally.  It also provided a new rationale for NATO in an era when it had none, and briefly fit the bill for those in this country (including neoconservatives) always obsessed with finding a new enemy to fight.

P.S. Note how Hanson can’t even describe the criticisms of neoconservatives or the “Israel Lobby” without distorting the truth.  Why would anyone listen to what he has to say?

Perhaps Thompson’s candidacy will last longer than New Coke did. ~George Will

The left-field substitution of Iraq as the focal point for our post-9/11 rage could never have happened in another region. ~Ezra Klein

This seems very doubtful to me.  Iraq was subjected to frequent bombings and air strikes in the twelve years between the end of Desert Storm and the 2003 invasion.  Iraq was targeted for “regime change” three years before 9/11, and there was a shockingly broad (and wrong) consensus in this country that Hussein’s government represented a serious threat to the region and the world.  It wasn’t at all difficult for those interested in a war with Iraq to refocus the new post-9/11 rage on the old enemy, since Iraq’s government and Hussein personally had filled the “new Hitler” space in hegemonist rhetoric for years by the time of the attack.  The public had been conditioned to fear and hate Iraqis for a full decade, and Hussein was genuinely villainous enough to lend some credibility to the propaganda about the Iraqi “threat.”  In the looney fringes (e.g., The Wall Street Journal) long before 9/11, all evil things allegedly came from or went through Baghdad–the first WTC bombing, the OKC bombing, etc.  Of course, it made the sale slightly easier that Iraqis were also predominantly Muslim, but all that really mattered to persuade a sizeable portion of the public was that Hussein was a dictator and had fought against the U.S. in the past.  If we had randomly invaded Algeria or Oman in response to 9/11, then maybe Kamiya might be onto something. 

The same thing could have easily happened in another region, if the political class were dedicated to projecting power in another region as they are in the Near East.  Just consider the precedent of the Philippine War.  It originated in the initial conflict between the Filipino rebels and U.S. Army forces sent to occupy the archipelago after the victory at Manila Bay and escalated into a major, brutal counterinsurgency campaign.  The expedition to the Philippines itself was a fairly random diversion and only very tangentially related to the immediate goals of defeating Spain and, as the imperialists desired, supporting Cuban nationalists.  The war against the “Dons” ended and still the U.S. kept fighting in the Philippines, presumably to acquire a base for naval and commercial shipping in Asia.  Fighting the Philippine War made absolutely no sense as a follow-up to the Spanish War, unless you consider the strong interest the establishment of the time had in the China trade and the powerful influence of vocal imperialists and naval power advocates.   

Kamiya’s argument relies on a vast majority of Americans having some clear sense of differences between the Islamic and Arab worlds and other regions, which they do not have.  Kamiya says:

No one would dream of suggesting that if Cuba attacked the U.S., we should respond by invading Venezuela. But we play by different rules in the Middle East. 

In fact, there would be a small army of pundits and activists suggesting this very thing.  It doesn’t hurt that Chavez and Castro are politically aligned, but you wouldn’t even need it to be Venezuela for this to work–replace Venezuela with Peru or Paraguay and it would still be only too possible.  Actually, invading Iraq after 9/11 would be a bit like invading Colombia to strike at Latin American communism.  It would be like portraying Bogota as an evil communist-supporting government with close ties to Castro (while the Uribe government, as everyone knows, is actually vehemently anticommunist and anti-FARC).  As it is, right now there are people who might be inclined to call for an attack on Venezuela as a way of getting at Iran (!).  Fostering Veneuzuelophobia has become the latest thing in certain Republican foreign policy circles.  You can already hear them now: “You have to knock out Castro’s economic and political ally to bring his regime down.  On to Caracas!”  

The government and interventionist pundits engage in this kind of vilification of foreign governments and of whole nations in every region of the world.  They are equal-opportunity imperialists.  It just happens that the primary focus has been and will continue to be on the Near East, which means that the irrational fearmongering about Near Eastern governments will be especially intense.  It doesn’t mean that there are not efforts to do the same thing for other regions.  Unfortunately, similarly “random” bait-and-switch deceptions of the American public would not fail.  Who’s going to uncover the deception?  The press?  Ha, that’s a good one!        

Consider: Suppose for a moment that NATO did not intervene in 1999 in Kosovo, and some Albanian Muslim terrorists carried out a major attack on American territory or U.S. bases while Milosevic was still in power in Belgrade.  I can very easily imagine the same kind of unfocused hysteria directed at “those people” in the Balkans.  I could very easily see how the same sorts of people would cook up some roundabout rationale for invading Serbia and overthrowing Milosevic in the name of fighting Albanian terrorism.  “Drain the swamp” probably would have been the slogan then as well.  It would make exactly as much sense as attacking Hussein to strike at Al Qaeda. 

The point of the “left-field substitution” was to pursue a policy that the supporters of the invasion had been wanting to pursue for years.  It was not coming out of left field as far as they were concerned.  Of course, it is an irrational, crazy move judged on the facts in the real world, but since when have those mattered in determining whether or not we invade another country? 

It isn’t so hard to imagine something similar in the Balkans, since this is another region about which Americans know next to nothing and which they perceive as a place of unrelenting, irrational bloodfeud and barbarous peoples.  Our general colossal ignorance of and prejudice against Slavic peoples made it extremely easy to vilify some as the “bad” Slavs and others as the “moderate” and “pro-Western” ones.  We’re still doing it in media coverage of Ukrainian politics.  The Serbophobia of the ’90s was made possible by the steady drumbeat of media coverage casting Serbs as the villains of the conflict in the Balkans, just as Iraqis were made out to be the villains of the Near East throughout the same decade.  Being able to draw on old Western prejudices against communists, Slavs and Orthodox Christians didn’t hurt, either, since all of these things made the Serbs seem alien and Eastern, and thus, following the logic of this sort of prejudice, more likely to be involved in something sinister.  Of course, there was no good reason for the United States to go to war with Yugoslavia in 1999, but our government did so anyway.  Imagine how much easier it would have been to do the same under some general pretext of fighting “tyranny and terrorism.”  

We have played this game before, and many of the same people were involved then as now.  Once again: the point of the “left-field substitution” was to pursue a policy that the supporters of the invasion had been wanting to pursue for years.  The substitution worked because the public had been prepared by years and years of conditioning to accept any attack on Yugoslavia or Iraq as basically a good, defensive or righteous war against the new Hitler.  Who knows?  Perhaps Venezuela will be the next target in another decade.  The groundwork is already being laid today.    

P.S. While there is much else in the article that I would agree with, I have to add that Kamiya’s claim that the “war on terror” is a “crusade, a Holy War” is basically entirely wrong.  Those who prattle on the most about Evil and moral clarity are those who are most likely to deny very strongly any religious or theological significance to the conflict.  They go out of their way to deny that “Islamofascists” are motivated by anything that is actually religious, and insist that they are effectively Muslim versions of the Nazis, as numerous presidential speeches and pundits’ articles have claimed.  This talk of an enemy as the embodiment of evil is the talk of identitarian politics and total war.  It is only all too secular and far removed from any Christian or other religious source.

Obama’s Iraq speech today makes many of the right points, but his current Iraq position remains quite unsatisfactory and his broader foreign policy views border on terrifying.  I think the compromise “residual forces” position that he and the other major Democrats have taken is a mistake, both substantively and politically.  It seems to me to contain the worst of both worlds by eliminating the ability of American forces to do much of anything inside Iraq while also failing to remove the vast majority of our soldiers out of the country.   

Part of the argument of my column in the latest TAC available online is that Obama has been using his long-standing opposition to the war as a kind of screen to block antiwar voters from seeing his hyper-ambitious, unrealistic foreign policy ideas about everything else besides Iraq.  The expansiveness of Obama’s idea of what is in the national security interest of the United States is no less dangerous and no less irresponsible than Mr. Bush’s belief that the freedom of America depends on the freedom of the rest of the world. 

His position on Iran is really no less belligerent and no less misguided than that of Giuliani in its basic assumptions about the Iranian government.  For instance, he said about Iran:

And it’s time to deliver a direct message to Tehran. America is a part of a community of nations. America wants peace in the region. You can give up your nuclear ambitions and support for terror and rejoin the community of nations.  Or you will face further isolation, including much tighter sanctions.

As George has pointed out in connection with Giuliani’s FA essay, Iran already is a member of the “community of nations.”  They never left.  George argued:

But bellicose statements do not alone remove a nation from the “international system;” rather, uncooperative nations must be dealt with through the tools of that system, be they diplomatic, political, economic, or yes, military in cases where America’s sovereignty is directly threatened.

Nearly every other nation, including staunch American allies, retains diplomatic relations with Iran. And America too should consider re-evaluating the diplomatic freeze that has lasted nearly 3 decades. In addition to a mere consular presence that could facilitate people-to-people cultural exchanges, a full-blown embassy would enable espionage and the gathering of more reliable information than we tend to obtain from unsavory exiles, as Ted Galen Carpenter has argued.

(Incidentally, this echoes William Lind‘s calls for rapprochement with Iran.) 

Later in his speech, Obama quotes Brzezinski, who introduced him at the rally and whose role in the campaign has caused the Senator some grief in pro-Israel circles.  As the Politico story relates, Obama’s position on Israel and Iran is solidly pro-Israel/anti-Iran and ever so conventional.  More worrying still, Obama’s vision for American meddling, er, leadership has not been dimmed in the least by the chastening experience of Iraq:

When we end this war in Iraq, we can once again lead the world against the common challenges of the 21st century. Against the spread of nuclear weapons and climate change. Against genocide in Darfur. Against ignorance and intolerance. Corruption and greed. Poverty and despair. When we end this war, we can reclaim the cause of freedom and democracy. We can be that beacon of hope, that light to all the world. 

 Unconventional?  Hardly.

In case you haven’t seen enough refutations of Giuliani’s crazy Foreign Affairs essay, George Ajjan offers his own commentary that eviscerates Giuliani’s claim to be any kind of credible candidate on foreign policy.  Zeroing in on Giuliani’s chatter about globalisation in the Middle East, George writes:

As for the Middle East, Giuliani has it wrong there too. Modernization and globalization do not at all go hand-in-hand with approval of the political/military plans of the United States. I suppose it never occurred to Giuliani that a young Muslim’s ability to enjoy a shake from McDonald’s subtracts nothing from his admiration and hero-worship of an evil man whose claim to infamy is his commitment to the taking of innocent American lives, as my Dubai experience illustrated.

George has shown Giuliani’s invocation of the “international system” to be a lot of hot air, since he consistently misunderstands what “the international system” actually is.  (He seems to use “international system” to mean “policy goals of Washington,” thus emptying it of its real meaning just as others like him have done to the word “democracy,” as George noted.)   While superficially consistent with the preoccupations of his chief foreign policy advisor, Charles Hill, Giuliani’s “international system” talk is mostly window dressing for self-defeating, hyper-aggressive interventionism that seeks to lump non-state actors together with those states Giuliani et al. deem to be worthy targets. 

P.S. There is also more than a little irony in one of the leading backers of the invasion of Iraq talking about the importance of the same system for the survival of civilisation.  The invasion was a fundamental attack on the structures and rules of the actual international system and a violation of international law.  Supporters of the invasion have had great fun speculating about how “international law doesn’t really exist” (except when it can be twisted and manipulated to justify an invasion of a sovereign state), but watch how they wrap themselves in the mantle of preserving international order after they have done so much to undermine that order.  If the great conflict of the moment is between non-state actors and the stability of the international state system, who would be worse to have as a defender of the latter than someone who supports policies of violating other nations’ sovereignty, dismantling existing state apparatuses and turning stable countries into lawless zones where no legitimate authority holds sway?

The resentment of Sunni tribal leaders against al-Qaeda’s highhanded brutality predated the surge — but the surge gave those leaders the confidence and ability to oppose al-Qaeda. ~Michael Gerson

By more or less common agreement, the Awakening began in or around November 2006.  It was spurred on by the smart counterinsurgency work of American soldiers.  It was not a product of the “surge” of brigades that the President announced in January.  Typically, in the study of history we don’t assume that cause comes after effect.  Either our people were already succeeding in Anbar before the “surge,” making the “surge” redundant and potentially unwise, or they were not and the “surge” was vitally necessary.  (Or both efforts are fundamentally unsustainable because they rely on empowering elements who are violently opposed to the new order our government has been trying to establish in Iraq.)   

Some will say that counterinsurgency success is counterinsurgency success, but if we are judging the merits of a particular tactical plan details are of the essence.  If the change of fortune in Anbar was beginning without the “surge,” that suggests that the “surge” was unnecessary in the one area that has seen marked improvement, while “surge” boosters struggle vainly to demonstrate sufficient satisfaction of the administration‘s standards of success.  Ifthe emerging wisdom is that pinning the success of the “surge” on Iraqi political reconciliation was foolish and a misguided waste, then war supporters are finally coming around, eight months too late, to the conclusions that opponents had reached in January.  If political reconciliation at the center is now made out to be so very last winter (the fall fashion is arming sectarian killers for future mayhem), that is not what “surge” supporters have been saying all year long. 

Skeptics may be forgiven for doubting claims of success, since boosters have made every event into some kind of vindication for the “surge.”  When bombings and deaths were on the rise, we were told that this was proof that the “surge” was working; when bombings and deaths were declining, the “surge” was working.  When Sadr disappeared, the “surge” was working, but now that he’s back it is working even better.  When the Iraqi parliament gets bombed, it shows that “we” are getting to “them”; when the Yezidis of Erbil are massacred in multiple bombings, victory is at hand.  And so on ad nauseam.  This week the story is that conditions are improving and that this is proof that the plan is working, but you can bet your last cent that if things begin getting uglier the same people will find an entirely new way to explain why the plan is still really working, but in a new, unexpected way.

Overwhelmingly in Europe, and to a lesser but still large extent in the United States, the vastly unpopular Iraq war has been conflated with the broader war against radical Islam. ~Tony Blankley

This is true about American attitudes, if we’re talking about what supporters of the Iraq war routinely say about it.  As we all know, war opponents have been ridiculed for years for claiming that the two are distinct conflicts that have little or nothing do with one another.  I know that war supporters would also very much like to make opposition to Iraq into opposition to the very different fight against jihadis, but almost the only ones conflating and confusing the two have been defenders of the invasion of Iraq.  Indeed, they have to lean very heavily on this claim, since there is no rationale for remaining in Iraq that really captures the public’s attention quite like the fear of an “Al Qaeda stronghold” being established in Iraq.  Never mind that this has become entirely unlikely–what matters is the constant repetition of it to cow the public into submission and support.  

Meanwhile, the Europeans and others around the world might reasonably be confused by our government’s deliberate conflation of the two conflicts.  If Mr. Bush and so many in the political class insist that Iraq is the “central front in the war on terror,” the argument might go, who are they to say that the two are not one and the same?  For the many opponents of the war around the world, the distinction between Iraq and “the war on terror” does tend to get lost because the administration and its supporters have worked overtime to make sure that the lines are blurred.  As a result, if they oppose Iraq they might find themselves drawn towards opposition to anti-jihadism as such.  Mr.  Blankley has helped demonstrate here how Iraq has undermined and jeopardised the real fight. 

Of course, as a matter of policy, all NATO countries remain officially committed to the mission in Afghanistan, and several of our European allies have been collaborating with us all along in the Horn of Africa and in running interdiction efforts in the Red Sea.  European governments and peoples are not persuaded that jihadism is the “existential threat” alarmists make it out to be because, well, the threat isn’t nearly that grave.  Talk of WWIV is ludicrous on its face, but that doesn’t mean that those who mock the WWIV crowd don’t believe that jihadis are very dangerous.  Having been warned about new totalitarians and new Hitlers ever since the Cold War ended, there really is a strong inclination to disbelieve the alarmists when they begin talking about jihadis as new totalitarians, because they have been wrong so many times before in their dire warnings.  (In fact, jihadis are totalitarian in a sense, but precisely because they are religious fanatics who have a totalising view of the role of religion that subsumes everything to it; they are unlike secular totalitarians in significant ways and our inability to speak about them except in 20th century ideological terms continues to be a great hindrance in understanding and countering them.)  Disbelief turns to bewildered astonishment when they begin speaking of “Islamofascism” and other such absurdities.   

Anti-jihadists have exaggerated and overreached so much in their rhetoric, and they have tended to support questionable or foolish policies to such an extent that they have created a backlash of intense skepticism about the scope and scale of the threat and anti-jihadist proposals for addressing that threat.  One might conclude that if many anti-jihadists were so badly wrong about Iraq, for instance, or if they indulge in fantasies in lieu of analysis that anti-jihadism in its entirety is not credible.  This would be a terrible mistake to make, since there is a serious threat from jihadis, but this mistake is one that many anti-jihadists have encouraged people to make.

TAC‘s 9/10 issue is available online, including my column on Obama and foreign policy.  Also online are Jim Pinkerton’s cover essay on a revived Christendom, Michael’s article on Huckabee, and Fred Reed’s column.  The print issue has some very good pieces as well, such as Clark Stooksbury‘s review of Elites for Peace and Trita Parsi on the causes of U.S.-Iranian rivalry.