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The Human Conspiracy Blog

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Only a truly great, but self-indulgent country can afford to be merely annoyed and cranky when its soldiers quickly and with surgical precision take down a major Middle Eastern tyrant, scour his defeated country from corner to corner in a search for banned weapons, just because the ensuing occupation doesn’t go as well as the original invasion.

Spare me from the faux-moral arguments against the Iraq Project.  Taking down a brutal, murderous tyrant of the ilk of Saddam is inherently a good deed.  Though the arguments are camouflaged in the language of sanctimoniousness and moral superiority, the real question about the Iraq Project has been and remains how much of this effort was in /still is in our nation’s, separate and – let’s not put too fine a point on it - selfish - interests?

The answer to that question seems to be entangled with three sets of worries and unanswered follow-on questions: (1) If the Iraq Project was all about oil, why didn’t we just appropriate Iraq’s post-liberation oil supplies for ourselves? (2) If the Project was all about destroying a key threatening regime in a sensitive part of the world, why didn’t we just leave a few large craters behind and wash our hands of the whole dirty business? (3) If life is so simple, why is it that we still honor Murphy’s Law? Or the Law or Unintended Consequences?

There is one major moral dimension to the practical, self interest calculation. But it complicates things only if we fail to see that we face one of those messy real life situations in which the moral and the practical lead us to pretty much the same conclusion.  Here it is: It will neither be moral nor in our national self interest to allow Iraq to go down the toilet into full-on chaos.  That would be a human disaster with such ripple effects that our own security interests would be gravely threatened. Somehow Iraq needs to be stabilized and made friendly to our side of the jihad while we persuade Iran to back off, while at the same time holding a metaphorical pistol to the head of Iran’s jihad-friendly regime, loaded, cocked and safety off.  The metaphorical pistol is our declared willingness and evident ability to do “whatever is necessary” to avert the prospect of the emergence of yet one more nuclear power in the Middle East.  And, yes, we know about Israel and Pakistan.

What this all means is that even a liberal democratic administration would be faced with the above described Reality in January 2009.  Truth be told: Every new administration makes a fresh start with the situation it has been handed by history.  Past mistakes are assumed.  They are just part of the inherited situation.  In W’s case for example, it was the sudden arrival on our very doorstep of an unwanted jihad against Western civilization at a time when the pursuit of the post-Berlin Wall “peace dividend” had dangerously hollowed out our military forces. 

No new administration will have a grace period before it must face the Reality of the Jihad. Recriminating about past “mistakes” will not be on the agenda.

Instead, a President Clinton, Edwards, Giuliani, McCain, Obama, Romney or Thompson would begin with a meeting with key national security experts – not the political friends that are typically brought on board, but the apolitical DIA and CIA specialists that actually tell it “as it is”. 

Imagine being a fly on the wall at such a first briefing.  The picture that will be presented to the next president will be complicated and difficult, but several things will emerge with clarity: (1) The U.S. can no longer hope to retreat into isolation, secure in the delusion of an unreachable “fortress America.” (2) The jihad is real. A serious effort is underway to destabilize all friendly regimes in the Middle East and to replace them with Islamist extremist ones that can continue to make trouble behind a nuclear shield.  (3) We will be unable to do take (or credibly threaten) the effective measures that will be needed to counter this growing and grave threat until we rebuild our military capability to the pre Gulf War I force levels. (4)  Iran is run by a duplicitous and dangerous regime that is bent on leading the Islamist resurgence and will acquire a nuclear weapons capability unless, through a combination of imposed duress, incentives and – if needed –active military force it is compelled to curtail its ambitions.  This requires that the US set up a credible and effective deterrence-response to the Iranian nuclear effort. (5) The American people have not yet adequately been prepared for the struggle that is coming.

I am willing not to prejudge how such a meeting would go with any of the list of seven candidates above.  I can only hope and pray that the next president is less like a Jimmy Carter and more like a Harry Truman.

JBG