Decision ‘08

Our New ‘Partner’ For Peace?

David Sanger of the New York Times confirms what everyone already knows: the Iraq Study Group will recommend direct talks with Syria and Iran.

A draft report on strategies for Iraq, which will be debated here by a bipartisan commission beginning Monday, urges an aggressive regional diplomatic initiative that includes direct talks with Iran and Syria but sets no timetables for a military withdrawal, according to officials who have seen all or parts of the document.

While the diplomatic strategy appears likely to be accepted, with some amendments, by the 10-member Iraq Study Group, members of the commission and outsiders involved in its work said they expected a potentially divisive debate about timetables for beginning an American withdrawal.

In interviews, several officials said announcing a major withdrawal was the only way to persuade the government of Iraq’s prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, to focus on creating an effective Iraqi military force.

Several commission members, including some Democrats, are discussing proposals that call for a declaration that within a specified period of time, perhaps as short as a year, a significant number of American troops should be withdrawn, regardless of whether the Iraqi government’s forces are declared ready to defend the country.

Among the ideas are embedding far more American training teams into Iraqi military units in a last-ditch improvement effort. While numbers are still approximate, phased withdrawal of combat troops over the next year would leave 70,000 to 80,000 American troops in the country, compared with about 150,000 now.

The report may yet change, and to oppose one recommendation is not to close the door on all of the ideas presented, but here’s another reason why the Syria and Iran talks should not be considered:

Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad predicted the collapse of Israel, the U.S. and Britain, attacking what he called their “oppressive behavior.”

“The Zionist regime is on a steep downhill towards collapse and disgrace,” Ahmandinejad told supporters at a rally of Basiji militia forces near Tehran today. In a reference to the U.S. and U.K., he said “the collapse and crumbling of your devilish rule has started.” The speech was carried live on state television.

Iran doesn’t recognize Israel, and Ahmadinejad drew international condemnation after saying in October 2005 that Israel should be “wiped off the map.” The U.S. and Iran have had no diplomatic ties since 1980 following the seizure of diplomats at the U.S. Embassy in Tehran in 1979.

The U.K., which has an embassy in Tehran, is among the three European countries pushing for sanctions against Iran over its nuclear program.

The Iranian president also called on neighboring countries to drive out “foreign occupiers,” in a reference to U.S.-led forces in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“The people of the region are well able to establish regional security,” the president said in the speech near the shrine of the Islamic Republic founder Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini. “The presence of foreigners is the source of discord and conflict.”

Iran and Syria are involved in Iraq, already; their involvement is destructive, and it’s resulting in the death of Americans, Iraqis, and our allies. If we do talk to them, it should be to say that until they change their terror-supporting ways, there will be no further ‘official’ involvement if we have anything to do with it…

4 Responses to “Our New ‘Partner’ For Peace?”

1 too many steves Says:
November 27th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
I have a lot of respect for James Baker, he was actually a guest speaker for me and a number of my colleagues this past June at a company meeting - a very interesting guy. But he rose to prominence in the days of realpolitik and it is, I’m afraid, the only tool he knows (if the only tool you have is a hammer, then every problem looks like a nail).

That said, I will take a moment for optimism: perhaps by engaging Syria and Iran we can stabilize Iraq, get our troops out of harms way, and eliminate one of Iran’s stated reasons for wanting nukes. So long as we don’t have to barter away Israel to get these things…
2 Colin Says:
November 27th, 2006 at 2:42 pm
“That said, I will take a moment for optimism: perhaps by engaging Syria and Iran we can stabilize Iraq, get our troops out of harms way, and eliminate one of Iran’s stated reasons for wanting nukes. So long as we don’t have to barter away Israel to get these things… ”

We can leave, pull out, bring our troops home, “get them out of harm’s way”, as you put it (despite nearly destroying their morale and esprit de corps by making 3000 combat deaths essentially meaningless), but the unresolved situation we leave behind will come back to bite us in the ass. Iran might set up a puppet regime in Iraq, but it would not exercise control over the whole country. No, instead we’ll see Saddam’s terrorist training camps re-established, this time not a joint venture but rather a sole-proprietorship run exclusively by al Qaeda. We’ll see Western Iraq become, in Walid Phares’s words, a “super-Taliban state), and no one will have the resolve necessary to combat these camps. Not Iran, despite the threat they pose, because they will act as a distraction for the West. Definitely not us, for after an ignominious retreat in the face of not even real resistance, rather just civil violence, we will never again muster the national will necessary for any kind of military incursion. Not for a generation or more.

No. There are only two choices right now. One is to continue as we are doing right now, more or less. More troops might help, but essentially keep to our three-track approach. It will be messy, as more Iraqis and more Americans die in terrorist attacks (oh, and the Thanksgiving Day attack was a TERRORIST ATTACK. Simply lumping it in with sectarian violence is very misleading. It was al Qaeda attacking the Iraqi state as surely as they attacked the Spanish State in 2003 with their Madrid bombing.), but the eventual rewards will be as great as the eventual consequences of our hasty withdrawl. We can still, despite the great deal of pessimism infecting much of this country right now, turn Iraq into the model state we set out to. We can midwife Iraq through the current troubles, and give an embryonic democracy the breathing room it needs to grow and become stable. At that point, several years from now, Iraq will be what the democratic model we planned it to be.

The other option is to withdraw, pull back to our borders under vague assurances of non-intervention by our enemies who’ve never inked an agreement that they didn’t violate, issue vague threats of force that no one will take seriously after seeing our cowardly withdrawl from a fight we wern’t losing, but wern’t really “winning” either, at least according to the chattering classes. No, we’ll come back here, behind our “vast” oceans, cowering here in “fortress America”. Little America is more like it. We will try to ignore the world, like a 19th century isolationist 3rd rate power could, but we’re not in the 19th century, and we aren’t a 3rd rate power. We’ll sit here in Little America undergoing various waves of self-flagellation over how we got stuck in that awful war to begin with, but happy in the fact that the troops are out of harm’s way. Then, eventually, we’ll discover that instead of putting our guardians in harm’s way, utilizing the people with the skills necessary to meet force with force, that we’ve simply shifted the bullseye. No, our troops won’t be in harm’s way. Our civilian population will be. The American people will no longer be targeted by car bombs in crowded bazaars in Baghdad. They will be targeted by God-knows-what in anytown, USA.

This may all sound a little bit like hyperbole, but let me leave you with this. Staying in Iraq and winning is a recipe for victory in the overall War on Terror. If we stick it out, no one will ever doubt our resolve. Premature withdrawl from the battlefield is a recipe for nothing less than national death. The event that sparks a slow decline towards a kind of European uselessness.

I’m sorry for the length of this post.
3 too many steves Says:
November 28th, 2006 at 5:39 am
Man, there goes my optimism. Eh, that’s ok, I’m more comfortable being a pessimist anyway.
4 Andy Says:
November 29th, 2006 at 11:53 am
Colin, well said.