October 26, 2005
Two Thousand Dead - and for What?
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=7764
by Patrick J. Buchanan
These are not the halcyon days of George W. Bush.
With his approval rating below 40 percent, his reputation as a
decisive leader ravaged by Katrina, his conservative base shattered by
Harriet, and his closest aide facing indictment, the president is said
to be shouting at and blaming subordinates for the lost opportunities
of his second term.
None of the above problems is insoluble. For if or when the Miers
nomination dies, and Bush sends up a Michael Luttig or Edith Jones,
his base would rally and he could lead his coalition in a decisive
battle over whose judicial philosophy should guide the Supreme Court.
The real crisis the president faces, and we all face, is Iraq. If the
war ends in failure, no success will redeem the Bush presidency.
By the time this column appears, the remains of the 2,000th U.S.
soldier to die in a war that has lasted longer than World War I for
the United States will be on the way home. And it is difficult to
visualize the end of this war or the victory so often predicted and
promised.
Even critics now praise the successes of Bush's father: the liberation
of Kuwait, unification of Germany, the deft handling of the collapse
of the Soviet Empire and breakup of the Soviet Union. But the son's
foreign policy is on the precipice of failure. Only a third of the
nation still supports him as a war leader, while more than half
believe Iraq was a mistake and we should begin to bring the troops
home now.
A preliminary list of winners and losers from our invasion seems to
show that it is our enemies who have prospered and our friends who
have suffered. As of today, the principal winner of the Iraq war is
Iran.
While our invasion of Afghanistan smashed a Taliban regime hostile to
Iran, our invasion of Iraq was even more beneficial. It brought down a
Ba'athist regime that had inflicted hundreds of thousands of
casualties on Iran in their eight-year war in the 1980s. In power in
Baghdad today, in place of Saddam, is a Shia regime that looks to Iran
as patron and ally.
In 2001, Iranians had demonstrated in support of the United States
after 9/11, and in successive elections, a moderate presidential
candidate had carried 70 percent of the vote. The Tehran mullahs were
on the ropes.
But with Bush declaring Iran an "axis-of-evil" nation, which was to be
denied, even if it meant preventive war, any nuclear program or weapon
of mass destruction, Iranians responded as nationalists. A hardliner
won the presidency, and Tehran's defiance is now a popular policy.
Meanwhile, the U.S. threat of military strikes to effect the nuclear
castration of Iran becomes less and less credible the longer the war
next door goes on.
With Iraq smashed and perhaps splintering after we depart, Tehran is
set to fill the power vacuum. History may yet record that the U.S.
Army did all the heavy lifting in the Persian Gulf to make Iran its
preeminent power.
A second winner of the Iraq war is al-Qaeda. While the U.S. invasion
of Afghanistan dethroned the Taliban enablers of bin Laden, killed
countless followers, and destroyed his base camp, our invasion of Iraq
compensated him for his losses. The Iraq war radicalized the Islamic
world, recruited thousands of jihadists, and converted Saddam's
country - inhospitable terrain for Islamists - into the world's
training ground for Islamic terrorists.
Among the other beneficiaries of America's Iraq war are the Shia
fundamentalists who stand to inherit their first Arab country. Among
the losers are the Turks, who must contend with Kurdish nationalism
inflamed by Kurdish successes next door, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and
Kuwait.
If the Iraqi insurgency evolves, as it appears to be doing, into a
civil-religious war, the Sunni and Shia populations of those three
autocracies cannot but be affected and those nations perhaps drawn in.
And peoples' wars have almost always proven unfortunate for kings and
emirs.
How does the balance sheet look for the United States?
Saddam and his neo-Stalinist regime are history, the Iraqi people,
especially the Shia and Kurds, are free, a threat to U.S. interests
and the region is removed forever.
On the liability side, there is the high cost in dead and wounded, in
alienated allies, in a radicalized Middle East, and in the creation in
the Sunni Triangle of a base camp and training ground for jihadists
that did not exist before the U.S. Army crossed the Kuwait border, 30
months ago.
As George Bush's place in history is riding on the outcome of this
war, he is right to be angry and alarmed. But this war is not the
doing of any subordinate.
http://www.antiwar.com/pat/?articleid=7764
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