Partner With Terror Supporters? I’d Rather Lose The War
To be sure, if we are forced to leave Iraq and it plunges into chaos, it will be a stain on our honor; but an even bigger stain will spread if we allow ourselves to be the conduits through which Iran and Syria spread their influence. Consider this story from TIME:
Iran is smuggling weapons through Syria to re-arm Lebanese allies Hizballah, despite renewed efforts by United Nations peacekeepers and the Lebanese army to seal off the mountain borders with Syria in the wake of last summer’s war between the Shi’ite militia and Israel, according to reports by Saudi and Israeli intelligence sources that have been confirmed by western diplomats in Beirut.
Israeli military officials in Tel Aviv say that Hizballah replenished nearly half of its pre-war stockpiles of short-range missiles and small arms. But western diplomats in Beirut say these calculations under-estimate the weapons flow and that Hizballah has now filled its war chest with over 20,000 short-range missiles—a similar amount to what they had at the start of the conflict, during which the group is believed to have fired over 3,000 rockets at Israel. “The Iranian pipeline through Syria was already working during the war,” despite constant Israeli bombing raids on the roads into Lebanon from Syria, this Beirut source said. Officially, Syria and Iran deny that they’re supplying weapons to Hizballah. As for the Shi’ite group itself, when asked about receiving a new shipment of arms from Syria and Iran, a spokesman told TIME, without elaborating, “We have more than enough weapons if Israel tries to attack us again.”
Over the past three months, according to a knowledgeable Saudi source, Iranian Revolutionary Guard officers have been operating out of a military base on the outskirts of Damascus. The Iranian government has dispatched shipments of small arms and what appear to be missile components to this military base, according to the source. From the secret base, weapons have been shipped by truck across the border into Lebanon.
Making common cause with these enemies of peace is taking realpolitik to Kissingerian extremes that we would do well to keep in our past. If the Iraq Study Group is really planning on making the recommendation that we involve Syria and Iran more in Iraq’s future, then they need to rethink that stance and excise it from the report. It’s simply not credible to believe that Damascus and Tehran will do anything other than add to the violence and chaos…
Hello Mark, Welcome to the real world.
Iraq has already plunged into chaos.
The US has already greatly facilitated the rise of Iran as a regional power, by taking out its two biggest enemies – the Taliban and Saddam, and by leaving a chaotic vacuum in Iraq, where Iran’s influence is naturally strong.
Using pure Bushian logic, Olmert has, with US support, already helped to strengthen Hezbollah by launching a devestating (to the civilians) war in response to a kidnapping.
The question that you should consider is what we can do to stop adding to the violence and chaos.
If we didn’t want to help Iran spread its influence, then we shouldn’t have gone into a war that removed the main counterweight to Iranian influence in the region, allowed Iran much greater influence in Iraq than it could ever have dreamt of otherwise, and pinned our military down within striking distance of its forces, thereby allowing Iran both to act with impunity while we’re in Iraq and, by affecting what happens there, to have a lot more power over when we get to leave than we should ever have given it.
By invading Iraq, we threw over two decades’ work containing Iranian influence out the window. The time to worry about that was in 2002-3, not now.
So it would have been best to leave Saddam in power, remove the sanctions, allow him to acquire whatever weapons he deemed necessary, nukes included, and we would now be in some happy, peaceful, terrorism-free state of being because Iran and Syria would, presumably, be contained?
Lebanon must be supported and its democracy defended. Of course, assassins will continue to murder the opponents of Syrian autocracy or Hezbollah terror [or the Syrian-based Hamas terrorist Kamel Mishaal].
At the same time, it is predictable that the UN’s “Investigative Inquiry” will submerge as the evidence and counter-evidence that crime forensics in the Muddled East produces surround the process. Professional assassins [remember the art form was invented in its derivation from "hashishiim" who killed the enemies of the Old Man of the Mountain while stoned] know how to cover their tracks as part of their metier and when caught, assassins tend to die quickly and unexplainably, so as not to reveal their paymasters. Although Islam did have a cultural flowering from 850-1258, the political/economic trajectory of the Middle East has been downward relative to its neighbors since then. And one of the reasons for the Arab caliphs cession of their ascendancy to the Turks was that Arab caliphs rarely died a peaceful death. The Turks were able to counter this murderous tendency by killing all the brother-relatives of the Ottoman Caliph at his accession, and before that accession, sequestering them in the so-called Golden Cage. Read Lord Kinross’s Ottoman Centuries for the details.
Ike landed in Lebanon in ’58 to defend democracy, as did Reagan in the ’80s, to terrible consequences. But the US has to be the bulwark of democracy since the Euroweenies appear intent on cutting deals and electing Spanish surrender-monkeys rather than face the consequences of defeatism.
So it would have been best to leave Saddam in power
Nah. What upside could there possibly have been in working with a secular dictator that was hated by al-Qaeda and counterbalanced the radical theocracies in the region?
Yeah, forget the fact that he was a genocidal maniac who used chemical weapons and twice invaded his neighbors…he was a great asset to the region…
Let’s can the nostalgia for Saddam, for cryin’ out loud…
I have zero nostalgia for Saddam. I just think that if you’d rather lose than advance Iranian interests, you should have thought of that before we invaded. At that point, we actually had the option of not advancing Iranian interests and also not losing a war by the simple expedient of not invading. (And of course this wouldn’t have meant letting Saddam get nuclear weapons; we had sanctions and inspections that were quite effective.) Invading was advancing Iranian interests. I mean, that’s why Reagan cooperated with Saddam in the 1980s: I thought he was wrong, but he wasn’t doing something inexplicable and crazy. He was using Iraq as a counterweight to Iranian influence, which it was. Not any more.
Well, hilzoy, I didn’t make the decision to invade, though I supported it then, and I support it now. The sanctions regime was on the verge of collapse, thanks to the French and Russians, so to believe they would still be in place is to ignore what the trend clearly was pre-invasion. And to take an action that happens to strengthen Iran as a by-product, as depressing as that may be, is not the same as to open collaborate with them…