|
The Iraq dilemma, again
I haven’t said anything about the ongoing daily mass murders of Iraqi civilians these last few weeks because I think I’ve said everything that can be said about it—and said it, and said it, and said it. I’ve said 100 times that there is no victory in Iraq unless we defeat the insurgency, and that as far as I have been able to tell from U.S. statements and actions, we have no strategy to defeat it. But that leaves unstated the key question: what if we have no strategy to defeat it because no such strategy is possible? The suicide attacks in Iraq are the work of foreign jihadis, young men from Saudi Arabia and elsewhere who volunteer to come to Iraq for the express purpose of wiping out innocent Iraqis 20 or 50 at a time, in order to create such chaos and misery that the new government will fall and an Islamist regime will take its place. If the problem comes from foreign suicide bombers, the supply of them is essentially infinite, limited only by the ability of the U.S. and Iraq to seal Iraq’s borders. Evidently the borders cannot be closed. Therefore the terror campaign cannot be stopped. If this is true, what do we do?
The first thing we do is speak the truth about the situation, instead of going on crowing about the marvelous, ecstatic victory of “democracy.” Then, perhaps, we might think of other approaches that we have refused to consider so far. The toppling of jihad supporting regimes, such as recommended by Angelo Codevilla, might be considered. Or we may decide to withdraw from Iraq. Or we may decide that we have no choice but to soldier on there, despite the continuing carnage. In any case, we’d be looking at the reality and speaking the truth about it, instead of living in unbearable hype and lies as we have been doing for the last two years. Email entry |