Next month, America’s long campaign in Iraq will come to an end with the
departure of the last US forces from the country.
Amazingly, the
approaching withdrawal date has fomented little discussion in the US. Few have
weighed in on the likely consequences of President Barack Obama’s decision to
withdraw on the US’s hard won gains in that country.
After some six
thousand Americans gave their lives in the struggle for Iraq and hundreds of
billions of dollars were spent on the war, it is quite amazing that its
conclusion is being met with disinterested yawns.
The general stupor was
broken last week with
The Weekly Standard’s publication of an article titled,
“Defeat in Iraq: President Obama’s decision to withdraw US troops is the mother
of all disasters.”
The article was written by Frederick and Kimberly
Kagan and Marisa Cochrane Sullivan.
The Kagans contributed to
conceptualizing the US’s successful counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq,
popularly known as “the surge,” that president George W. Bush implemented in
2007.
In their article, the Kagans and Sullivan explain the strategic
implications of next month’s withdrawal.
First they note that with the US
withdrawal, the sectarian violence that the surge effectively ended will in all
likelihood return in force. Iranian-allied Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki is
purging the Iraqi military and security services and the Iraqi civil service of
pro-Western, anti- Iranian commanders and senior officials. With American
acquiescence, Maliki and his Shi’ite allies already managed to effectively
overturn the March 2010 election results. Those elections gave the
Sunni-dominated Iraqiya party led by former prime minister Ayad Allawi the right
to form the next government.
Due to Maliki’s actions, Iraq’s Sunnis are
becoming convinced they have little to gain from peacefully accepting the
government.
The strategic implications of Maliki’s purges are clear. As
the US departs the country next month it will be handing its hard-won victory in
Iraq to its greatest regional foe – Iran.
Repeating their behavior in the
aftermath of Israel’s precipitous withdrawal from southern Lebanon in May 2000,
the Iranians and their Hezbollah proxies are presenting the US withdrawal from
Iraq as a massive strategic victory.
They are also inventing the
rationale for continued war against the retreating Americans. Iran’s
Hezbollah-trained proxy, Muqtada al-Sadr, has declared that US Embassy personnel
are an “occupation force” that the Iraqis should rightly attack with the aim of
defeating.
The US public’s ignorance of the implications of a
post-withdrawal, Iranian-dominated Iraq is not surprising. The Obama
administration has ignored them and the media have largely followed the
administration’s lead in underplaying them.
For its part, the Bush
administration spent little time explaining to the US public who the forces
fighting in Iraq were and why the US was fighting them.
US military
officials frequently admitted that the insurgents were trained, armed and funded
by Iran and Syria. But policy-makers never took any action against either
country for waging war against the US. Above the tactical level, the US was
unwilling to take any effective action to diminish either regime’s support for
the insurgency or to make them pay a diplomatic or military price for their
actions.
As for Obama, as the Kagans and Sullivan show, the
administration abjectly refused to intervene when Maliki stole the elections or
to defend US allies in the Iraqi military from Maliki’s pro- Iranian purge of
the general officer corps. And by refusing to side with US allies, the Obama
administration has effectively sided with America’s foes, enabling
Iranian-allied forces to take over the USbuilt, -trained and -armed security
apparatuses in Iraq.
ALL OF these actions are in line with the US’s
current policy towards Egypt. There, without considering the consequences of its
actions, in January and February the Obama administration played a key role in
ousting the US’s most dependable ally in the Arab world, president Hosni
Mubarak.
Since Mubarak was thrown from office, Egypt has been ruled by a
military junta dubbed the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces. Because SCAF is
comprised of the men who served as Mubarak’s underlings throughout his 30-year
rule, it shares many of the institutional interests that guided Mubarak and
rendered him a dependable US ally. Specifically, SCAF is ill-disposed toward
chaos and Islamic radicalism.
However, unlike Mubarak, SCAF is only in
power because the mobs of protesters in Tahrir Square demanded that Mubarak
stand down to enable civilian, majority rule in Egypt. Consequently, the
military junta is much less able to keep Egypt’s populist forces at
bay.
Throughout Mubarak’s long reign, the most popular force in Egypt was
the jihadist Muslim Brotherhood. The populism unleashed by Mubarak’s ouster
necessarily rendered the Brotherhood the most powerful political force in Egypt.
If free elections are held in Egypt next week as planned and if their results
are honored, within a year Egypt will be ruled by the Muslim Brotherhood. This
is the outcome Obama all but guaranteed when he cut the cord on
Mubarak.
Recognizing the danger a Brotherhood government would pose to
the army’s institutional interests, in recent weeks the generals began taking
steps to delay elections, limit the power of the parliament and postpone
presidential elections.
Their moves provoked massive opposition from
Egypt’s now fully legitimated and empowered populist forces. And so they
launched what they are dubbing “the second Egyptian revolution.”
And the
US doesn’t know what to do.
In late 2010, foreign policy professionals on
both sides of the aisle in Washington got together and formed a group called the
Working Group for Egypt. This group, with members as seemingly diverse as
Elliott Abrams from the Bush administration and the Council on Foreign
Relations, and Brian Katulis from the Center for American Progress, chose to
completely ignore the fact that the populist forces in Egypt are overwhelmingly
jihadist. They lobbied for Mubarak’s overthrow in the name of “democracy” in
January and February. Today they demand that Obama side with the rioters in
Tahrir Square against the military. And just as he did in January and February,
Obama is likely to follow their “bipartisan” advice.
FROM IRAQ to Egypt
to Libya to Syria, as previous mistakes by both the Bush and Obama
administrations constrain and diminish US options for advancing its national
interests, America is compelled to make more and more difficult choices. In
Libya, after facilitating Muammar Gaddafi’s overthrow, the US is faced with the
prospect of dealing with an even more radical regime that is jihadist, empowered
and already transferring arms to terror groups and proliferating nonconventional
weapons. If the Obama administration and the US foreign policy establishment
acknowledge the hostile nature of the new regime and refrain from supporting it,
they will be forced to admit they sided with America’s enemies in taking down
Gaddafi.
While Gaddafi was certainly no Mubarak, at worst he was an
impotent adversary.
In Syria, not only did the US refuse to take any
action against President Bashar Assad despite his active sponsorship of the
insurgency in Iraq, it failed to cultivate any ties with Syrian regime
opponents. The US has continued to ignore Syrian regime opponents to the present
day. And now, with Assad’s fall a matter of time, the US is presented with a
fairly set opposition leadership, backed by Islamist Turkey and dominated by the
Muslim Brotherhood. The liberal, pro-American forces in Syria, including the
Kurds, have been shut out of the post-Assad power structure.
And in
Egypt, after embracing “democracy” over its ally Mubarak, the US is faced with
another unenviable choice. It can either side with the weak, but not necessarily
hostile military junta which is dependent on US financial aid, or it can side
with Islamic extremists who seek its destruction and that of Israel and have the
support of the Egyptian people.
HOW HAS this situation arisen? How is it
possible that the US finds itself today with so few good options in the Arab
world after all the blood and treasure it has sacrificed? The answer to this
question is found to a large degree in an article by Prof. Angelo Codevilla in
the current issue of the
Claremont Review of Books titled “The Lost
Decade.”
Codevilla argues that the reason the US finds itself in the
position it is in today owes to a significant degree to its refusal after
September 11, 2001, to properly identify its enemy. US foreign policy elites of
all stripes and sizes refused to consider clearly how the US should best defend
its interests because they refused to identify who most endangered those
interests.
The Left refused to acknowledge that the US was under attack
from the forces of radical Islam enabled by Islamic supremacist regimes such as
Saudi Arabia and Iran because the Left didn’t want the US to fight. Moreover,
because the Left believes that US policies are to blame for the Islamic world’s
hostility to America, leftists favor foreign policies predicated on US
appeasement of its enemies.
For its part, the Right refused to
acknowledge the identity and nature of the US’s enemy because it feared the
Left.
And so, rather than fight radical Islamists, under Bush the US went
to war against a tactic – terrorism. And lo and behold, it was unable to defeat
a tactic because a tactic isn’t an enemy.
It’s just a tactic. And as its
war aim was unachievable, the declared ends of the war became
spectacular.
Rather than fight to defend the US, the US went to war to
transform the Arab world from one imbued with unmentionable religious extremism
to one increasingly ruled by democratically elected unmentionable religious
extremism.
The lion’s share of responsibility for this dismal state of
affairs lies with former president Bush and his administration. While the Left
didn’t want to fight or defeat the forces of radical Islam after September 11,
the majority of Americans did. And by catering to the Left and refusing to
identify the enemy, Bush adopted war-fighting tactics that discredited the war
effort and demoralized and divided the American public, thus paving the way for
Obama to be elected while running on a radical anti-war platform of retreat and
appeasement.
Since Obama came into office, he has followed the Left’s
ideological guidelines of ending the fight against and seeking to appease
America’s worst enemies. This is why he has supported the Muslim Brotherhood in
Egypt. This is why he turned a blind eye to the Islamists who dominated the
opposition to Gaddafi. This is why he has sought to appease Iran and Syria. This
is why he supports the Muslim Brotherhood-dominated Syrian opposition. This is
why he supports Turkey’s Islamist government. And this is why he is hostile to
Israel.
And this is why come December 31, the US will withdraw in defeat
from Iraq, and pro- American forces in the region and the US itself will reap
the whirlwind of Washington’s irresponsibility.
There is a price to be
paid for calling an enemy an enemy. But there is an even greater price to be
paid for failing to do so.
caroline@carolineglick.com