A Quartet of Iraq Stories
Here’s a quartet of interesting Iraq stories I’ve seen in the last day.
First, Scott Forbes considers how the neocons’ vision of a wave of democracy that would sweep the region have largely come unraveled: Domino theory.
My sense now is that George W. Bush has neither the political capital nor the international prestige to follow through on the neocon vision, if indeed that vision was ever possible. In fact, I suspect that no Republican, in the present circumstances, can lead us to victory in the so-called War on Terror: It’s an “only Nixon can go to China” problem, but in reverse. Only a Democrat can now argue the case for democracy without getting tangled up in doctrines of pre-emption and intelligence failures; Bush and his GOP colleagues can’t make the argument effectively.
Next, Fred Kaplan has an interesting, if depressing, piece in Slate: No way out.
This is a terribly grim thing to say, but there might be no solution to the problem of Iraq. There might be nothing we can do to build a path to a stable, secure, let alone democratic regime. And there’s no way we can just pull out without plunging the country, the region, and possibly beyond into still deeper disaster.
Joshua Micah Marshall is afraid that Kaplan is right, and offers additional commentary: Fred Kaplan has a bleak but, I fear, quite possibly accurate piece on Iraq today…
As the shrewdest thinkers on the left and the right concede on this issue, our true strategic challenges in the Muslim Middle East are not conventional military ones, but hearts-and-minds challenges. The trick is to figure out how we can solve or ameliorate that hearts-and-minds problem while simultaneously destroying the relatively small (in numerical terms) but highly lethal groups that constitute an imminent danger. Or, to put it more crisply, how do we wipe out al Qaida (and al Qaida-like groups) without generating so much bad blood in the Islamic world that the Islamic world keeps producing new al Qaidas faster than we can destroy them?
It’s not clear to me necessarily what the best way to strike that balance is. But I think this is probably the worst way — engaging in pitched battles with fighters who pose no direct danger to the US whatsoever in a way that does profound damage to our standing within the population that al Qaida and other similarly-inclined groups hope to do their recruiting.
Finally, as the death toll (on all sides) continues to climb, here’s another one of those depressing reminders of the still larger number of lives being blasted by horrific injuries: A purple heart for Jessica.
