Wasting Time With Alex

Wisdom from Michael Ledeen

Micheal Le has a great article dealing with what needs to be done to win this conflict we are stuck in. Our problem is that the people making the decisions have failed to identify that the instability in Iraq is a direct result of the fact that the conflict stretches far outside the borders of Iraq into Iran, Syria, and the Palestinian enclaves - or they know this and do nothing, or close to nothing about it, which is worse - and that unless we tackle all the culprits, we can not move to a victory. The issue is that we are all asking the wrong questions and hence not seeing the real solution.

The Baker/Hamilton Commission has a chance to dramatically reshape our thinking about American foreign policy, if only it will ask the right question. They should follow the guidance of one of the last century’s most brilliant thinkers, Ludwig Wittgenstein. In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein asks an apparently straightforward question: what do all games have in common? He ties himself in mental knots trying to get the answer, but nothing works. Finally he realizes that the question was posed wrongly. It should have been: Is there anything all games have in common? That’s the real question (and the real answer is “not much"), but the language of the first question tricked him into searching for an answer that does not exist.

Our strategists are constantly asked, how can we win the war in Iraq? But it is the wrong question, and therefore has no correct answer. Read Reuel Gerecht in Friday’s Wall Street Journal: “(The Baker/Hamilton Commission) cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn’t exist.”

EXACTLY! I have been pointing out that we can never define a winning strategy in Iraq as long as we allow Iran, their proxy Syria, Saudi Arabia, or al Qaeda to meddle and disrupt indefinitely while only having to put up cash, supplies, and the occasional training camp for radicals.

Instead of trapping themselves in an imaginary quagmire, the commissioners can help us face the real war. What’s going on in Iraq is not “the war,” which is raging over the entire world. The real question — the life and death question — is: How can we win the war in the Middle East, which now extends from Afghanistan to Lebanon, Iraq, Israel, and Somalia?

That question forces us to devise a strategy to deal with multiple enemies instead of limiting our strategic thinking to the Iraqi insurgency alone. It forces us to confront the terror masters in Tehran and Syria as well as the killers in Iraq. If we ask how to win in Iraq alone, we are led into a fool’s errand of trying to convince our sworn enemies-Iran has been at war with us for twenty-seven years —to act like friends. But if we ask how to win the war, we can see that we have many good cards to play, and many real allies, from the Iranian and Syrian people to the millions of Kurds in Iran, Iraq and Syria, to several other oppressed groups throughout the region, and even to leaders who today denounce us.

And there you have it. The sad part is that while this reality and the right course of action escapes us, it has not escaped the Iraqis, and especially, the Iraqi leadership. Many people have been angry or disappointed by Maliki, but if you were in his shoes would you do any different than he is?

Take Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki, for example. Several commentators flew into a rage when Maliki went to Tehran to kiss the turban of Supreme Leader Khamenei, as if this were an expression of Maliki’s deep affection for his neighbors. It isn’t, but Maliki knows they can blow him up, kidnap his relatives, and blackmail his friends. He has no reason to believe that we are going to save him from the Iranians, nor indeed that we are going to win this thing at all. From his point of view, we’re bugging out of the real war, and all the talk about negotiating with Damascus and Tehran can only reinforce this belief. He undoubtedly believes — don’t you? — that we are just marking time until we can dump it all in his lap. Very few Iraqi Shiites dream of living in an Iranian-style Islamic Republic, but they all know that if we lose, they will have to come to terms with Tehran. Maliki is trying to save his neck. Who wouldn’t?

The same applies to the fighting on the ground. Just as Iraqi leaders must come to terms with the Iranians and the Syrians if they believe we will lose, so individual Iraqis, Sunni, or Shiite, urban or tribal, have to stay away from American soldiers. Above all, they must not be seen to be helping us. If we are going to lose and leave, anyone who helps us will lose and die.

Of course those that have forever wanted to limit the WoT to killing bin Laden and firing a few cruise missiles at Afghanistan and not this current protracted but absolutely necessary conflict will not like these facts and are part of the reason why we remain focused on the wrong question and hence the wrong solution. What we asy or do is heard. I have had repeated arguments with people that have gotten furious that I point out to them that when they “dissent” and demand we “cut & run” this message is taken seriously by both the bad guys and the Iraqis with devastating consequences. Of course these moonbat never see the damage they do, and if they do, they do not care.

In like manner, some Middle Eastern anti-Americanism has less to do with religious or cultural convictions — even when it is expressed in religious language — than with the brutal calculus of winning and losing. Thousands of Syrian Sunnis are now converting to Shiism, and I don’t think they have had an epiphany. They see Hezbollah winning, which means Iran is expanding its domain. Some of the rage against the United States stems from a mixture of anger and fear at a country that often seems ready to pack up and go home. They must surely see the American election results as confirmation of this trend, and no amount of sweet talk from the diplomats or Karen Hughes can undo those harsh facts. The antiwar Leftists at home are not the only ones looking at Iraq as an Arabic-speaking version of Vietnam.

There is another aspect of this that Ledeen doesn’t address, likely because it bears very little impact on what he is trying to communicate to us, but it is just as devastating. Just as detremental to our cause as the American losses like Vietnam shape the Arab psyche and lead them to conclude America can not win, is the desire for us to lose that dominates so many on the radical left and leads them to actively take actions to help us lose. We have an active element that really believes America needs to lose this conflict so it follows the European’s lead and gives up war. The consequences of this ridiculous belief, never sinking in with these moonbat, pot smoking, free-sex radicals. Anyway back to the issue at hand.

None of the various schemes put forward in our public debate to “solve” Iraq can work — although much can be done to improve conditions — because they all inevitably assume that Iraq can be “solved” by itself. That includes the call for more troops on the ground. Even if you believe that those troops will dramatically improve security, it still doesn’t address the central question: can the people of the region believe we are going to win? They won’t believe it until they see us waging war effectively, which means we have to be able to threaten Iran and Syria with defeat.

It requires an Iran/Syria policy. Iran declared war against us 27 years ago and has waged it relentlessly, but we have yet to respond. It is astonishing how many diplomats and spooks actually believe Syria is a friend, when Assad drinks our blood from the same glass as Khamenei. Serious policies must aim at regime change in Tehran and Damascus. This does not require a military invasion of either country, but it does require active support for anti-regime political groups, combined with an explicit declaration that we want an end to the tyrannies. As a starter, it would be nice to have the Justice Department indict the Iranian leaders, following the example of Argentina, which just issued arrest warrants for former president Rafsanjani and his henchmen, who presided over the Hezbollah bombing of the Jewish Community Center in Buenos Aires in 1996.

We do not have great intelligence on Iran, but we do know a lot about the sentiments of the overwhelming majority of Iranians, thanks to public-opinion polls conducted by the mullahs themselves. Those polls show upwards of seventy percent of Iranians — that would be 50 million people, mostly younger than 30 — who do not like the regime and want it changed. Those are terrific numbers for us and terrifying numbers for the mullahs, which is why they frantically arrest, torture and kill anyone who openly criticizes them, and why they have destroyed all remnants of free press, and why they are censoring Internet use, satellite-TV access, and cell phones. They, and their Syrian allies, know where their doom lies.

I agree with Michael Ledeen that unless we ask the right questions and formulate the right policies we are not going to win in Iraq. But unlike the moonbat I mention above that that would see this loss as a win for their idiotic ideology, I am not that crazy. If we lose this conflict it will not only follow us home, but it will blanket the world. Freedom as we know it is at stake. If people thought the Dark Ages were bad, what will come if we fail now is going to make that look like a picnic. And again for the retards that claim it has been 3 years and it should have been over by now: get real.