The Iraq solution that is staring us in the face, we just can’t see it

In Iraq, writes Diana West, our forces cannot fire at the enemy unless the enemy is engaged in hostile acts, or shows “clear intent.” Subjecting our fighting men to such police-like rules, it is obvious we have no real notion of victory—“unless anyone seriously believes victory looks like just another basic death-to-America-and-Israel Shariah state dominated by Shi’ites with ties to jihadist Iran.” Next to such a prospect, the “chaotic limbo” created by our left-liberal rules of engagement “doesn’t look good, but it does postpone that sure-to-be-nasty shock of recognition.”

All along, West continues, we’ve posed a false dilemma to ourselves, that our options are either “victory” (which in practice means the endless prolongation of chaotic limbo), “or else.” The “or else” is the abyss, the end, the ultimate disaster. But is it really?

Here’s an “or else” scenario from Nawaf Obaid, an adviser to the Saudi government, that actually sounds promising…. Contemplating what he would call an unwelcome American withdrawal from Iraq, Mr. Obaid writes that the Saudi government just might fill the breach out of “religious responsibility” to Iraq’s Sunni minority. Saudi Arabia, “the de facto leader of the world’s Sunni community,” Mr. Obaid writes, just might decide to support Iraq’s Sunni fighters, just as Iran has been supporting Iraq’s Shi’ite fighters, to avert a possible “full-blown ethnic cleansing.”

Imagine: Sunni Saudi Arabia vs. Shi’ite Iran—and nary an American soldier ordered to pull his PC punches in the crossfire.

What West is really saying is, the Muslim world has or would have its own means of bringing about relative order in Iraq, but our military involvement there with our neocon/liberal approach to war (analyzed by me in the previous blog entry) fosters maximum disorder. In the real world, order can only be brought about by superior use of force, aimed at establishing a monopoly on the use of force. But, being neocons and liberals, we refuse as a matter of principle to employ such force. Therefore our very presence in Iraq assures endless chaos.

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Meanwhile, “Victory” Hanson, having learned nothing, keeps promoting the very contradiction—wage war while simultaneously promoting democracy—that has created the chaos. He writes today at NRO:

The remedy, then, is to respond forcefully to terrorists and their sponsors, while simultaneously appealing to the people of the Islamic world that the United States is no longer cynically realist—but is actively working to promote consensual government throughout the region to address their lack of representation in their own affairs. That is not naiveté, but rather both the right and smart thing to do. Unlike the majority opinion that offers the chimera of stability through short-term expediency, the more costly, difficult, and ambitious minority view addresses conditions that more likely will lead to a lasting peace.

Howard Sutherland writes:

And would it not be good for the Christian West for the Moslems to be fighting each other? Especially if Moslem young bucks in the West felt obliged to go to the dar al-islam to fight on one side or the other! Maybe a silver lining, after all.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at December 01, 2006 09:30 AM | Send