General Clark's latest prescription

His NYT op-ed

My response:

The perfect can be the enemy of the good, and especially in the Middle East you often have to look for a lesser evil. Lesser evilism is actually a major principle in Islamic law.

Here's the problem I see with this column's conclusion:

First, the Iraqis must change the Constitution as quickly as possible after next week's parliamentary elections. Most important, oil revenues should be declared the property of the central government, not the provinces. And the federal concept must be modified to preclude the creation of a Shiite autonomous region in the south.

Asking Iraqis to change their constitution is probably unrealistic., and I'm not sure how much attention they are going to pay to the Constitution anyway. Federalism is not well understood in the Arab world, their only word for it is a loan, and this so-called "federalism" may be only a prelude to partition. And what if you got a unitary state? It and its oil revenues would be dominated by the 60% Shi'ites anyway.

I see no good option here, nor much chance of getting influence. Our least bad option now may be handing over to a Shi'ite theocracy. This was our nightmare from Reagan through Clinton, but Bush II has balled things up, perhaps beyond retrieval.

Also, a broad initiative to reduce sectarian influence within government institutions is long overdue.

That's been tried. It's called Ba'athism. It is totally discredited and didn't work very well at defusing sectarian tendencies. I think it's too late for us to try doing it now.

Maybe we should have tried to educate our Cold War clients, especially in the Islamic world, about American principles such as democracy, freedom of religion, and federalism. Maybe we should do that now. But we haven't. Secularism was associated with Saddam, just as multi-ethnicity in Yugoslavia was associated with Communism. Speaking of which, I'd be interested to hear your comparisons between Iraq and your experiences in the former Yugoslavia, general.

What's the least bad proposal for an American policy that I have seen yet? This column, even though I respectfully disagree with part of it. Thank you, sir, and I wish you were running American foreign policy, but right now I think our best option was our worst nightmare not long ago. The alternatives in Iraq seem to be civil war, or even a new Al-Qa'ida base. You're right that we can't just pull out, but we have to hand over to someone else, some kind of international force, that we can trust. And no one is going to help Bush out now.

Even worse, I don't see much chance of getting a change in US course before 2008.

When that time comes I'm ready to back you again.


His further discussion:

We have three interests in Iraq: preventing a "terrorist " claim of victory there, leaving behind a stable, integral and peaceful Iraq which doesn't threaten its neighbors, and dealing with other regional problems like Iran and Syria. A hasty pullout certainly will be cited by the terorists as a sign of their success. It will demoralize our friends and supercharge their recruiting. My OP-ED yesterday addresses the second interest. On the third, we need strength to deal with Syria and Iran. A pullout driven by cries of woe and partisanship at home just makes us weaker.

What I tried to say yesterday was that against the Sunnis we should be content to aim for reassimilation into society, rather than just killing them. If we continue to try to kill them we just make more enemies....


my comment:

Bush's classic tar baby policy #48157
Posted by Dan Juma on December 7, 2005 - 8:19pm.

We can't leave without making the situation worse, especially when there is no Iraqi security force to take over. What little there is seems to be Shi'ite militia in disguise.

Yet it is our presence which is inflaming the situation. We have to bring someone else into it, maybe Arab League, or UN, or international Muslim force. Yet the Republican administration will not even invite Democrats into a war cabinet the way FDR had Republicans in his WWII cabinet. Forget about anyone else.

The situation will continue to deteriorate until Bush is replaced. This policy proposal is the least bad option I have seen, and the best positioning for the 2006 and 2008 elections I have seen from a Democrat. Keep trying to explain the situation to people and especially keep trying to influence policy. Iraq is not Vietnam. Vietnam only involved Vietnamese nationalism, Iraq involves Arab and Islamic nationalisms.

Sure, we should try to bring the Sunnis into the society, but ultimately it is up to the Shi'ites to accept them. Can we make these people love each other? I don't think so.