Seeker Blog

Richard Fernandez offers a remarkable essay in response to Andrew Sullivan’s withdrawal plan. A must read:

But instead of accepting that this problem is unmanageable it may be better to simply accept that America hasn’t currently got the tools to face this challenge, and set about getting them.

Because sooner or later America needs better options than standing back . Standing back and letting Khomeini take over Iran, as Carter did; or letting Syria into Lebanon in exchange for support to drive Saddam Hussein out Kuwait, as the elder Bush has been accused of doing; or leaving Saddam in place at the end of Desert Storm while exhorting the Shi’a and Kurds to rise up; or maintaining an expensive naval and air blockade against Saddam as Clinton did. All those instances of standing back and operating from a distance have bought America no love and have led it “tomorrow, tomorrow and tomorrow” to this dusty place. No one should forget that Osama Bin Laden’s stated motivation for attacking America arose from its presence in Saudi Arabia for Desert Storm and the No-Fly Zone patrols afterward. September 11 happened long before Operation Iraqi Freedom.

But more fundamentally, America has no hope of staying out of the civil war between Sunni and Shi’a. That has been raging and gathering momentum, not since Operation Iraqi Freedom, but from the Islamic Revolution in Iran and the founding of the Sunni counter-militance al-Qaeda in response. It was the fear of the Shi’ite crescent that fueled the decision to drive Saddam out of Kuwait but no further. It was that same fear that drove al-Qaeda to send Zarqawi to Iraq; that made him in the end decide to provoke a Shi’ite backlash as policy. Credit where credit is due. The carnage was Zarqawi’s achievement and not Bush’s. America will go on long after the term of George W. Bush has entered the rolls of history. Posterity will judge him as it will. But it will also judge the men and women who come after. They too will face the problems which George W. Bush tried, with greater or lesser success, to solve. And it will not be enough to say ‘we gave up trying because George W. Bush messed it up so badly’. Reality accepts no such excuses. If America lacked the doctrine and the means to bring order and civility to the Middle East then it should set about acquiring them. Because the challenges will not go away. It must get what it needs. The translators, the cultural knowledge; the weapons systems, the training; the information strategems; the confidence. And whether it can obtain these from the vantage of Kurdistan is the essential question the advocates of withdrawal must ask themselves, for it will be asked of them.