|
Rice approves Iraqi communiqué that legitimized attacks on our troops
So far this week I’ve mentioned several responses by the media to the Iraqi leaders’ deal-killer of a communiqué saying that armed resistance against U.S. forces in Iraq is legitimate. The New York Times, the leading liberal organ in America, gave a misleading paraphrase of the communiqué that failed to indicate that the Iraqi leaders had ok’d armed resistance against U.S. troops. Richard Lowry, editor of America’s flagship conservative magazine, said that the “resistance is legitimate” statement was just “symbolism” aimed at winning Sunni approval. I’ve also mentioned blogger Dan Darling, who argued lamely that the communiqué did not mean what it plainly meant. Well, those were not serious treatments of the issue, and could be dismissed. Unfortunately we now have a statement by the U.S. Secretary of State herself, in which, instead of condemning the Iraqi communiqué, she treats it just as the Times and Lowry and Darling did, denying its real import and justifying it as an effort to win Sunni support. Asked by CNN for her reaction to the Iraqi statement, Secretary Rice replied: “I think what they were trying to do was to get a sense of political inclusion while recognizing that violence and terrorism should not be a part of resistance.” But of course the communiqué did not merely say that violence and terrorism should not be a part of the resistance. It said that terrorism is wrong, but it defined terrorism as attacks on civilians and civilian institutions, pointedly omitting attacks on U.S. and even Iraqi troops from its definition of terrorism. Thus attacks on U.S. and Iraqi troops come under the rubric of legitimate resistance. What’s going on here? According to a must-read piece by Eli Lake in the New York Sun, what the administration is up to may even be worse than initially appears. It seems that the U.S. pushed Iraqi leaders including the president and prime minister to attend the Arab League-sponsored conference in Cairo, and, further, that the U.S. encouraged the Iraqi leaders to demand a U.S. exit strategy. Thus the administration, says Lake, is seeking a solution very similar to what John Kerry and other Democrats were demanding last year: that the Arab League create a force to police Iraq, enabling the U.S. to pull out. Lake concludes that to legitimize “attacks on the army fighting for successive elections, a constitution and a future free of tyranny … is not so much an exit strategy as it is a surrender.”
Which raises an interesting point. I have advocated that the U.S. withdraw its forces from central Iraq to a secure base in Kurdistan, from which they could remove any dangerous regime that happened to get into power in Iraq, while otherwise having nothing to do with internal Iraqi affairs. Pro-Bush conservatives consider such a proposal pure surrender, not even worth debating. But if Lake’s analysis is correct, the Bush administration is involved in a greater surrender than anything I’ve contemplated. I want us to keep our forces in the region to destroy any pro-terrorist regimes that may come to power. The administration is making moves toward handing Iraqi security over to the Arab League (the Arab League!). I want us to have nothing to do with Muslims except to isolate and contain them, because any arrangements with Muslims only suck us into the sickness and evil of their world. The administration, if Lake is correct, wants us to get even more deeply involved in arrangements with Muslims, even to the insane point of making the Arab League our ally and surrogate. Email entry |