November 25, 2011, 10:20 AM
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Next month, America's long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the departure of the last US forces from the country.
Amazingly, the approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama's decision to withdraw on the US's hard won gains in that country.
After some six thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.
The general stupor was broken last week with The Weekly Standard's publication of an article titled, "Defeat in Iraq: President Obama's decision to withdraw US troops is the mother of all disasters."
The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan. The Kagans contributed to conceptualizing the US's successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq, popularly known as "the surge," that president George W. Bush implemented in 2007.
In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic implications of next month's withdrawal. First they note that with the US withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all likelihood return in force.
Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of pro-Western, anti- Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American acquiescence, Maliki and his Shi'ite allies already managed to effectively overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right to form the next government.
Due to Maliki's actions, Iraq's Sunnis are becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the government.
The strategic implications of Maliki's purges are clear. As the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard-won victory in Iraq to its greatest regional foe - Iran.
Repeating their behavior in the aftermath of Israel's precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000, the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from Iraq as a massive strategic victory.
They are also inventing the rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran's Hezbollah-trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr, has declared that US Embassy personnel are an "occupation force" that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of defeating.
The US public's ignorance of the implications of a post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the administration's lead in underplaying them.
For its part, the Bush administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.
US military officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded by Iran and Syria. But policy-makers never took any action against either country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime's support for the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki's pro-Iranian purge of the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama administration has effectively sided with America's foes, enabling Iranian-allied forces to take over the US-built, trained and armed security apparatuses in Iraq.
ALL OF these actions are in line with the US's current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in ousting the US's most dependable ally in the Arab world, president Hosni Mubarak.
Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Because SCAF is comprised of the men who served as Mubarak's underlings throughout his 30-year rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed toward chaos and Islamic radicalism.
However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the military junta is much less able to keep Egypt's populist forces at bay.
Throughout Mubarak's long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak's ouster necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt. If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on Mubarak.
Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to the army's institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone presidential elections.
Their moves provoked massive opposition from Egypt's now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they launched what they are dubbing "the second Egyptian revolution."
And the US doesn't know what to do.
In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign Relations, and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, chose to completely ignore the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak's overthrow in the name of "democracy" in January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February, Obama is likely to follow their "bipartisan" advice.
FROM IRAQ to Egypt to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi's overthrow, the US is faced with the prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it, they will be forced to admit they sided with America's enemies in taking down Gaddafi.
While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an impotent adversary.
In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present day. And now, with Assad's fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.
And in Egypt, after embracing "democracy" over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the support of the Egyptian people.
HOW HAS this situation arisen? How is it possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in the current issue of the Claremont Review of Books titled "The Lost Decade."
Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after September 11, 2001, to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those interests.
The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn't want the US to fight. Moreover, because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world's hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US appeasement of its enemies.
For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left.
And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat a tactic because a tactic isn't an enemy. It's just a tactic.
And as its war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became spectacular. Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious extremism.
The lion's share of responsibility for this dismal state of affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left didn't want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11, the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and appeasement.
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left's ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease America's worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is why he supports Turkey's Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to Israel.
And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap the whirlwind of Washington's irresponsibility.
There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so.
Originally published in The Jerusalem Post.
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Islam cannot develop stable, reasonably humane societies because Islam consists of crushing everything but itself. From the beginning, the victory of Islam has meant the suppression of the culture, ethnicity, religion, and all other traditions of the Islamized country. The whole Islamic world thus consists of suppressed cultures/peoples/groups struggling to live within the stranglehold of Islam. The only way this will-to-life can express itself is through eternal civil war against other cultures/peoples/groups. Whichever group emerges victorious becomes the oppressor, using the fist of Islam to keep down all other groups.
We are currently in another wave of this eternal Muslim civil war, going on in several countries simultaneously. The West mistakes this Muslim civil war for a struggle for freedom. In reality it’s only a struggle for freedom by some Muslim groups against other Muslim groups that are currently dominating them, a struggle that can only end with a new oppression, until it is overthrown in its turn. That is the only “politics” that exists in the Muslim world. That is the only “politics” that will ever exist in the Muslim world.
Caroline, I have come to rely on your columns as accurate assessments of world affairs today and I thank you. Unfortunately the Bush administration set off a chain of disastrous events that our current Occupier of the White House only intensified with his evasion and non support of the true state of affairs in the Middle East today. We can only expect this condition to deteriorate even further if Obama secures a second term. Shabbat shalom
'In his 11 September 1990 Toward a New World Order speech to a joint session of the U.S. Congress, President George H. W. Bush described his objectives for post-Cold-War global governance in cooperation with post-Soviet states.'
There is rhyme and reason to what the utterly perverse and corrupt US oligarchy have been doing since 1990.
Welcome to America's New World Dis-Order where CFR Globalists of both political parties,academia and media control the sinister,Satanic agenda.
And still the idiots of Israel look to the US for security and peace even after all of these continuous gross failures.
All the toil,blood Israel has invested in the US peace scam has led the nation to the abyss
Jeremiah 18:15
Because My people have forgotten Me, They have burned incense to worthless idols.
And they have caused themselves to stumble in their ways,
From the ancient paths, To walk in pathways and not on a highway,
To make their land desolate and a perpetual hissing;
That's all well and good, except you continue to prop up the misconception that there was some kind of future for the Mubarak regime. You have admitted elsewhere that Mubarak offered to retire in a year and help to create some kind of stabile transition. True, Obama rejected this as did the religious parties. But the point is that Mubarak had no future and any stance on the part of the US in promoting its interests in Egypt that did not confront this was totally worthless. And now you pose the withdrawal of the US from Iraq as another failure in US foreign policy, one that leaves Iraq in the hands of Iran. But this was decided the split second we decided to invade Iraq and remove Saddam Hussein. No other outcome was possible. Saddam Hussein was the only thing standing between Iran and Iraq. There was war between Iraq and Iran remember, over borders. The war between Iraq and Kuwait where HW Bush sent in the US to push Iraq back was also over borders. Many said that we should never have stopped with Kuwait and should have gone all the way to Baghdad then.
Remember also that one of the reasons for confronting Saddam Hussein was his confrontation with Shi'i Muslims in the south, the "marsh arabs". These were Iraqis friendly to Iran, and maybe even Iranians themselves spilling over the border from population dense Iran.
But the deed was done and we cannot stay forever in Iraq. Blaming Obama is too easy to be credible. It is not hard to see that part of why we have Obama at all is to be a straw dog to excite the US public and generate enthusiasm for some other straw dog that promises to be an alternative, when in fact they are nothing of the kind.
A very good article. When you mention that America was unable to properly name its enemy, you get to the very heart of the problem.
We went to war against a tactic, but a tactic is just a tactic, and not an enemy.
Britain paid dearly for her ostrich-like policies in the 1930s: today it's a second-rate power, with its former pride, the Navy, run jointly with France (remember the role French Navy played in World War Two?) America's willingness to shed the blood of its young so that Iran could grab Iraq, its appeasement of its numerous other antagonists (Russia is just one recent example) will lead it down the same path. The shifting of gigantic tectonic plates through whose cracks countries fall, then or now, obviates sentimentality: people deserve the government and the media they get. The Israelis are no exception.
The ultimate purpose of invading Iraq and destroying that regime was forward operating bases. You will please notice that Iran is right next door. At one point we decided to deal with them in a final manner.
Alas, the left knew what we were about to do and succeeded in stopping it from happening. The left has continually intervened on behalf of our enemies, in all things because it seeks to depose America and destroy it as a world power. They wave an American flag or an Israeli flag but their hearts are belong to the hammer and sickle of the Soviets and Mao. You can hear them speak of these loyalties openly on the Internet if you look, but you will never see ANY REPORT of it in the media, including fox, unfortunately for all of us. The information is being hidden from the masses for good reason, for very logical reasons, if you are a Marxist.
Sorry to say it but both Bushes were idiots, who could not see, and still do not see, that the enemies within and cunning without exist, but they clearly do and may be observed as never before possible, but you must look and listen outside of the establishment media because they are the managers of news and information as well as entertainment propaganda and indoctrination. This can be clearly observed on any service which is viewed predominately by 12 year olds, who can't think critically and even so, would never get sufficient useful information from those sources anyway.
For our part, we should resist the temptation to parse our words, and seeking words of reduced harshness. We should call them what they are, LIARS and TRAITORS. All of them.
OBAMA, THE AGENT OF ISLAM.
JOIN THE "IMPEACH OBAMA" MOVEMENT!!!
ALLAN WEST FOR PRESIDENT !!!!!
It is amazing that all the wasted funding of "liberating Iraq" without requiring them to pay for the cost of their liberation is unacceptable.
Iraq is pumping over 200 million dollars of oil a day, and these stupid politicasn and US State Department idiots are never qualified to find ways to get our money back as if somehow we owe the world our hard earned funds.
How do you explain foreign politics to the american people?
Even before George W.Bush got elected the media launched a hate campaign against him that was so powerful and vicious that even here in Europe people hated Bush before they got a chance to know something of worth about the man. It was a character assassination of the worst kind. How can anyone explain anything in a climate of such hatefulness and disrespect?
Obama is being described by Thomas Sowell as an arrogant man who surrounds himself with leftist intellectuals who think they have a solution to every problem and who will never answer for the damage caused by the policies they devise. And I think he's absolutely right. But the truth is that presidents that have no attitude issues are rare, and they need our support to create a climate where error can come to light and solutions found. We can blame the darkness for being dark, but if we shine some light the darkness around us vanishes. To me your articles, Caroline, shed light in a dark world because they make us see things clearer, they help me to be more aware , to get down on my knees and to pray, to speak up when others remain silent.
Thanks
After all these political misapprehensions by our U.S."experts" why in the world is Hillary Clinton being spoken of as presidential material? She is constantly associated with ill thought out and embarrasingy public tactics, such as the Russian "re-start" gaffe.
although all of the "comments are true and valid it really comes down to " man not being able to govern him/herself!!!!!! , we actually think ( us humans) that "we" have the answers to all of our problems!!! and we can't even get along with each other !!!!! only when "that " changes can we even think to solve our other problems !!!!!!! , and that will never change unless " we ' admit that without the "CREATOR" the created are lost!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
"For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left."
"There is a price to be paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be paid for failing to do so."
"If you are not with us, you are against us."
George W. Bush
09/20/2001
I stand by the Commander & his statement.
LW
What is going to happen to the embassy staff in Iraq?
Does Obama acknowledge responsibility for them or are they expendable?
Dear Caroline,
There is more than enough truth in what you say to pin the tail on two US Presidents and still miss the bottom line. Bush went after the source of the 9/11 terror in Afghanistan and was convinced largely by a group of neo-cons to extend his campaign to the other great Satan Sadam Hussein. As for staying power again as you say Obama won the nomination let alone the Presidency in part because he unlike Clinton came out against the Iraq War. Elections matter in the US as in Israel and the American people are largely unwilling to sustain the costs of an American military presence in Iraq or Afghanistan even if the consequences are awful. However there is another election next year and although none of the Republican frontrunners is well versed in foreign policy it is likely that if one is elected they will do whatever they can to reverse the course of the Obama Administration.
Larry Snider
Caroline - this was a good article but how can you make the following statement without further explanation or proof:
"For its part, the Right refused to acknowledge the identity and nature of the US's enemy because it feared the Left."
"And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went to war against a tactic - terrorism." That's right. The US went to war, but within the confines of political correctness. That is, there are no bad people, just bad ideas that need to be corrected by showing a country the benefits of living under democracy. Never mind whether the host society lacks the foundation of civil discourse that's needed in order for democracy to have a fighting chance. And what's tragic is they're still not getting it.
True, they are paying for not having the courage to name the enemy. If an American leader of courage comes along, who understands he will be remembered and appreciated for it, he will. Meanwhile, countries in the ME, Europe, and Africa will continue to crumble economically and in civil unrest. The ugly face of islam is revealing itself, anyway.
Paul - "But the deed was done and we cannot stay forever in Iraq."
- You mean, America lacks the will and (possibly) the resources to stay forever - or for vastly longer period -in Iraq. There are almost no true absolutes in political options. The Allies ran Germany for 10 years after WWII, and kept troops there for decades. The US ran Japan for 15 years. It was recognized that rebuilding those societies, both economically and socially/politically to be self-sufficient and no longer a danger to the world would take such time.
Of course, some would argue that not even Imperial Japan was as separated from Western values as the Islamic world... Possibly, but Western powers have occupied Islamic nations for centuries before. The French ruled North Africa for a century, the British ruled modern-day Pakistan for closer to 200 years.
Whether you end up agreeing with him or not, everyone should read Nial Ferguson's book "Colossus" on the American Empire. Essentially, he characterizes America as an Empire in denial, and argues that the world would be a far better place if it stopped denying and accepted the responsibility of global empire. I'm not sure if I agree with that, but I do agree America needs to choose: either it is genuinely in the business of global policing, nation building and culture-changing, or not. If it is, it needs to accept commitments in the decades, costs in the trillions and casualties in the thousands, because that is what it takes. If it isn't or can't it should bring all the boys home now, because half-hearted global military endeavors are worse than none at all.
Mr. Netanyahu, you are confused. We are not your enemy. You do not seem to know who your heroes or your friends are. You move against your own people with the excuse of keeping rules and agreements, meanwhile ignoring the rules and even facilitating the rule breaking of your enemies.
http://www.israelnationalnews.com/News/News.aspx/150128#.TtIot7IipKY
And you Caroline keep defending this wolf in sheep's skin.
How sad.
Brilliant analysis, Ms. Glick. In effect, what Mr. Bush and Mr. Obama have done is create a contemporary version of the Ottoman Empire (sans absolute power coming from Istanbul) and have even created preliminary conditions for a second Holocaust.
Ms. Glick, you and Pamela Geller are today's wise women of Israel and you both should be blessed. Love to all fellow Jews during these difficult times.
It's not made clear what the distinction is between radical islam and terrorism. Bush invaded Afghanistan after 9/11, targeting the Taliban. That's a pretty good identification of an enemy. It seems to me that invading Saudi Arabia, Syria, Iran, though they supported terrorism,would have been quite a military undertaking at the time. When we invaded Iraq later on, a 2 front campaign didn't work out so well. Terrorism as a tactic of radical islam is cutting it too fine. I think you have to fight terrorism where you find it, especially when it comes to you or your allies. Within the Muslim world there are enough radical-islamist-terrorists that you'd need a world war to root them out.