If we are lucky, the regional “process” will afford American forces a fig-leaf behind we might obscure our strategic defeat. Heliborne evacuations from the Green Zone a la the fall of Saigon three decades ago may be avoided, provided our enemies allow us to effect a dignified “strategic redeployment.” More likely, we will be bloodied on the way out by terrorists, insurgents and others intent on compounding the ignominy insofar as it will serve their larger purpose: our destruction in the world beyond Iraq, including ultimately here at home.
Among the other predictable casualties of the regional strategy will be the people of Israel. Jim Baker’s hostility towards the Jews is a matter of record and has endeared him to Israel’s foes in the region. What could be more appealing to the latter than an international conference that will simultaneously undo the experiment in freedom in Iraq and compel Israel to make further territorial concessions. Of course, these will not mitigate conflicts in Iraq and Lebanon that have nothing to do with Israel. They will, however, allow the Mideast’s only bona fide democracy, the Jewish State, to be snuffed in due course.
We are, in short, poised to stand the U.S. Marine’s motto “No better friend, no worse enemy” on its head. If the Baker regional strategy is adopted, we will prove to all the world that it is better to be America’s enemy than its friend.
If these undesirable outcomes are so predictable, why are we slouching towards the hard place of the “regional solution”?
It comes down to a lack of seriousness on the part of too many elected leaders of both parties – exhibited in a failure themselves to understand the gravity of a global war in which Iraq is but one front, and a failure to educate their constituents about the stakes associated with such a war. This superciliousness has translated into political circumstances in the United States (including delegating great responsibility to unelected and unaccountable commissions) and strategic conditions elsewhere that make diplomatic options appear more real and appealing than they are.
Of late, it has become fashionable to assess blame for failures of intelligence and policy to “groupthink.” The term describes the phenomenon whereby lots of smart people feel pressure to conform to a consensus view and, in the process, lose (or at least suppress) their willingness to observe that the emperor has no clothes.
Rarely has the pressure to go along with such groupthink been greater than is increasingly the case with respect to the idea of relying on one or the other of our foes – Iran, Syria or Saudi Arabia – to solve our problems in Iraq. And rarely has it been more important that this strategy of appeasement, and the very hard place to which it will lead us, be rejected.