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dogjudge

My apologies for not getting back to this sooner. Not sure if you will see this post, but here goes.

I also appreciate your taking so much time to present thoughtful comments and reactions. It's much more worthwhile responding to people who will actually -- wow -- discuss the issue. Not always a guarantee at these forums.

I find that we don't agree on many basic premises, and my guess is we won't get a lot closer. But, a few comments:

1. I've posted this link before, but here it is again: the US policy for Iraq, including our objectives there and the definition of the end-state we seek.

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_strategy_nov2005.html#part1

It helps in knowing that such documents exist to have a military background. I served at Central Command until just after 9/11, and in Operations Iraqi Freedom and Enduring Freedom (Afghanistan) in 2003, in the USS Nimitz Carrier Strike Group, before my retirement. My perspective on the Bush administration's objectives and direction of the actions in southwest Asia is that they have been clear, consistent, and executable, if not ideal in every regard.

(An example of the non-ideal would be the justly criticized decision in the spring of 2004 to leave Fallujah in the hands of Sunni insurgents and terrorists. This was a bd precedent that we are still feeling the effects of, even though Fallujah was eventually retaken.)

I can't agree that Bush has been inconsistent or erratic in his Iraq policy. I do agree with those who think he and his senior leaders could have done better explaining the overall strategy for the war on terror, how Iraq fit into it, and what the roadblocks to achieving our stated goals in Iraq were likely to be.

2. On the nature of the current conflict in Iraq, I don't agree with your "civil war" formulation, as stated. There is certainly sectarian strife in Iraq, Shi'a vs. Sunni being the key rift. But from the earliest days after Saddam's fall, in April 2003, Iran has infiltrated its paramilitary "Qods force" into Iraq to instigate terrorist attacks, and numerous groups of less-organized Sunni wahhabis (from all points of the Islamic belt) have done the same.

One of the things that make this war so hard to come to grips with is that we don't have a common vocabulary or common understanding of what expressions and assertions mean. Too often people are reading into others' statements the leftover concepts of predatory Marxism, which don't really apply to Islamic terrorism.

So I want to be very clear here. When I say Iran, and various Sunni wahhabist groups, are infiltrating Iraq, I don't mean that they are acting in the way Moscow's proxies used to act, in Africa or Latin America. They are not trying to seize power in a coup, or rig elections. They are not "in charge" of some centrally-organized effort to gain state power in Iraq, nor is there a single "brain" behind them.

Equally, the factions within Iraq are not exploiting the assistance of outsiders in order to consolidate power. I see a lot of conservative writers trying to fit both the Iraqi factions and the outside influences into the patterns of the old Cold War players, and the truth is they don't fit. This is a different game.

In this game, the extremist idea of Islam "wins" as long as the US cannot achieve our goal of a stable, self-governing, non-terror-sponsoring Iraq. Conversely, if the US does achieve our goal, that will be a severe blow to the reputation, meaning of, and prospects for "jihad." Of course this outcome would not end or suppress Islamic extremism, but it would deny terrorists the territory, population, and wealth of Iraq, and be a material tactical defeat for jihadists.

(This does NOT assume that most or all terrorists are in Iraq, BTW. The Bush strategy has been to systematically deny to the terrorists the MEANS for successful long-term terror: national territory for training, planning, and safe haven; sponsorship from national leaders that has provided things like cash, false passports, and intelligence; and ultimately, disaffected populations to intimidate, hide in, and recruit from. Successfully denying the resources of both Iraq and Afghanistan to Islamic terrorists would be an advance in this regard; all Islamic terrorists don't have to be in Iraq for that attritional success to be real.)

3. Regarding Vietnam, the argument that fighting there would avert a bigger war later was most definitely NOT the argument that was made for involving America in the conflict. Rather, the key arguments were that Vietnam would represent the fall of a domino that would provoke other dominos to fall, and would thereby make America's security progressively less stable.

I'm not aware of anyone ever advancing the argument that a larger war would ensue on losing in Vietnam. Proponents of our intervention there said that the strength and geographic depth of our global defensive position, vis-a-vis the Soviet Union, would be weakened. (A few also pointed out that millions of Vietnamese would also be subjected to brutal dictatorship.)

Although the Vietnam war was mishandled from start to finish, and the conflict in Vietnam was never of urgent significance to the territorial security of the American land mass, the "domino theory" crowd was actually right about one thing. The year South Vietnam fell to Communist North Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos fell to Communist dictatorships too.

It was also true that America's position versus the Soviet Union, as well as among the nations, was weakened in a number of ways after the defeat in Vietnam. Had Reagan not been elected in 1980, America's slide into greater disadvantage would have continued. No time to expand on everything here; the bottom line is that our Vietnam involvement was not represented as necessary to avert a war.

4. That said, the substantiation for warning that a loss in Iraq will precipitate a greater challenge from the Middle East, one that America will have little choice in taking up, is history. We have the history of ideological zealotry to consider, as well as the general history of power and alliances.

Both Nazism and Communism took tactical victory badly; never satisfied, they built on it to generate larger-scale conflict later. Although Islam is somewhat different, in that it is less oriented than the Western socialist ideologies on achieving secular state power, it behaves much the same in the matter of incentives and disincentives. Its exponents will not be satisfied with brutally subjugating Iraq; they will be emboldened, and materially enabled by victory there, to press further.

The two main lines of jihadist thought -- Sunni wahhabism and Iran's special brand of Shi'a -- would press in different directions, but both would collide with the entire world, not just the US. Wahhabis would step up their attacks on moderate regimes like Egypt, Turkey, and the Persian Gulf nations; Iran would seek to gain the power of force over all economic activity from the Caspian Sea to the Red Sea.

The world would care, not just because of oil, but because the Middle East lies along the maritime trade routes between East and West. Again, it helps to have been a Naval officer to appreciate this: we are all much more heavily dependent on the freedom and security of maritime trade (guaranteed, since WWII, entirely by the US Navy) than almost anyone realizes. The waterways of the Middle East are one of two places in the world (the other being southeast Asia) where a very few political turns toward hostility ashore would put everyone's shipping at risk.

(Shane7's reference, above, to the history of European colonization and client development in the Middle East arose, in the last three centuries, from the geographic reality that maritime trade with India and China had to go through the chokepoints of Middle Eastern waterways. Indeed, before that, as in the Crusades era, it arose largely from the Middle East's position along the LAND routes to Asia.)

And we can't forget the demographic significance of the Middle East, and Islam in general, for increasingly childless Russia, China, and Europe.

(Vietnam never had any of these factors going for it. Unfortunately for the Vietnamese, Indochina WASN'T significant enough to the rest of the world to keep us all there.)

So of course, as you say, stability in the Middle East will matter to everyone, not just the US. But this fact must be considered in context: there is no steady state for the world's nations outside of great powers and alliances. There never has been, and there is not now, even with the UN in existence.

A gathering storm in the Middle East, abetted by US abandonment of Iraq, would be very much like the storm that gathered with the rise of Nazi Germany in the 1930s. Alliances everywhere were weakened, not strengthened, by the failure of some allies to stand firm, and the consequent determination of others to arrange for their own security, regardless of what happened to anyone else.

If America is not the go-to ally to improve political conditions and stability, for the long term, in the Middle East, we will lose support from the world, not gain it. If we stand aloof from the Middle East and its effect on other nations long enough, other big countries will take up the slack. Frankly, it wouldn't have to be very long: Russia has historically had designs on the Middle East, and would most likely take the lead, and with surprising speed.

The US-centric world most of us grew up in is a historical anomaly, and will disappear almost immediately if we cease to lead. We don't have allies because we need them; we have allies because they need us. If the US pulls out of Iraq -- making our bases in Bahrain and Qatar less viable, and our stabilizing Naval presence in the Persian Gulf less sustainable -- we will be less and less the ally other nations need.

It would take recounting a lot more history to outline all my reasons for predicting a large-scale conflict over the Middle East, if we leave Iraq to its fate. Suffice it to say, if that conflict comes, and we decide we have to fight, I wouldn't necessarily expect any of the nations that are our allies today to fight on our side.

5. I do agree with you on one thing, although I think you draw the wrong conclusions from it. Today's conflict with Islamic jihadists is unlike the prelude to WWII, in that the Islamists are not conducting straightforward military invasions.

The problem with insisting that the US can only use force if another nation has mounted an unequivocal military invasion of us is this: nations have changed hands, peoples have been subjected and slaughtered, and the map of the world has changed a number of times since WWII, WITHOUT unequivocal military invasions taking place.

Terrorists are the latest to exploit this phenomenon. We had a tough enough time getting this underhanded "non-invasion invasion" stuff straight in our minds when it was Communists doing it. Now that the perpetrators are Islamic terrorists, who for the most part would rather kill as many as possible than keep some alive to be ruled, we are stumped -- there is no way to fit this real threat to our existence and way of life into our traditional categories for diplomacy and armed force.

Neither Iraq nor Afghanistan invaded the US. (Neither did Germany, in WWII, and certainly North Africa's nations and Italy -- where we put our own invasion forces first -- never even came close to doing so.) It is an entirely legitimate question whether 9/11 was a good enough pretext for invading the two countries that were, at the time, the biggest sponsors of international terrorism outside the Middle East.

(There are a lot of people who think Iran or Syria held this title; but neither did in 2001. Syria's sponsored attacks had declined rapidly after the demise of the Soviet Union, and were confined throughout the 1990s to Lebanon and Israel. Iran's terrorism focus was also Israel and Lebanon, where its proxies often attacked Westerners as well as locals. Neither nation sponsored terrorism in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas on anything like the level of Iraq and Afghanistan. These facts are not an argument that Saddam was specifically connected with the 9/11 attack -- that has not been established; but has also not been "disproven," as too many people incorrectly claim.)

At any rate, I don't think anyone is stupid who questions the validity of attacking sovereign nations that have not attacked us. But I do think the idea that that is the most unassailably moral posture is being undermined by terrorism and technology. There may never be an unequivocal military attack on the United States again, but we could certainly find our allies, the security of our trade, the safety of our cities and homes, and our civil freedoms all steadily undermined, as we wait for that military attack before we will use force to defend ourselves.

This has been very long, but you raise a lot of significant points. Maybe this will be useful for some folks out there.