Yet more revisionism and conspiracism about Iraq

Congressional Democrats, in spite of the recent Senate Intelligence Committee report, are continuing their campaign to rewrite history and avoid responsibility for their decisions and statements in 2002 and 2003 regarding Iraq.

Via Instapundit, read James Kirchick in the Los Angeles Times, then view this on YouTube. Circle back to Fred Hiatt's piece in last week's Washington Post. It says something - something really revolting - about the current Democratic leadership in Congress and their enslavement to the "permanent campaign" - in this case, permanent fundraising mode with the wealthy and ultraliberal wing of the party.

Meanwhile, historian Victor Davis Hanson is beating off another outburst of ignorant bullying from Pat Buchanan and his paleocon allies at the American Conservative. Hanson and I don't agree about the Iraq war, but that's neither here nor there: Buchanan is loaded for bear, recycling mythology stretching back to the pre-Pearl Harbor isolationist right. He's been doing that since the 1991 Persian Gulf war.

Of course, none of this would be necessary if we had a White House more communicative and forthright than the current one. Lots of people out here, both allies and critics of the Bush administration, are doing what the White House itself should have spent the last five years doing. But I guess you go to war with the White House you have.

Iraq, five years later

What people, including historians, in the future will think about the Iraq war is anyone's guess. The answer will depend in part on events that have not yet happened and things we cannot now know. But it has been more than five years since the US-led invasion of Iraq, and the operation seems to be coming to a conclusion. US troop levels will start dropping even before the election and drop faster afterwards.

The most important thing about the Iraq war is not how it started, but how it is ending, with the so-called "surge" that started late last summer - essentially, concentrating a large number of the best combat troops in and around Baghdad. It reflects classical counterinsurgency doctrine, with its origins in previous wars (El Salvador, Vietnam, Algeria, Philippines, etc.) only dimly remembered by most today, but carefully studied by the military. However, the "surge" only became a reality after the Republican defeat in the 2006 elections and Bush's relinquishing of operational control of the war. Instead, a civilian, Defense Secretary Gates, and a military officer, General Petraeus, were put in charge, with the civilian as the senior partner, the optimal approach. At the urging of the military and members of Congress (including McCain), Bush was forced to accept the policy, having nowhere else to go. His dogmatism and incompetence had left him in a deadend.

The surge has led to two large positive results: a sharp decline in violence and the decisive defeat of al Qa'eda in Iraq, reflective of its apparent larger disintegration. (See the articles by Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic.) Al Qa'eda's mistake was the most obvious one that can be made by any guerrilla movement or insurgency, choosing or being forced to fight an organized professional army in the open. Contrary to widespread myth, no guerrilla movement alone has ever won a war, and such movements cannot survive a direct fight with an army.

But the US has also had a large bit of luck here. To be defeated, an insurgency has to lose its cover among the civilian population, while the civilian population has to feel that casting its lot with the counterinsurgency is the lesser risk. In 2004, 2005, and 2006, al Qa'eda seemed on the way to winning in Iraq, because they had cover among Iraq's suddenly powerless and angry Sunnis. But al Qa'eda made the fatal mistake of imposing its harsh version of Islam on those Sunnis, who then turned on them in 2007 and 2008. Al Qa'eda had nowhere to run. It's a scenario that has played out before in the Arab and Muslim worlds: a population attracted to a radical Islamic movement, only to be totally alienated by it. Al Qa'eda took the lives of about 50,000 of their fellow Muslims to prove this, again.*

All of which demonstrates a perennial truth about war: it often ends in a place far from where it started.

The price of the surge. Like any such sudden turnaround, the success of the surge has come at price. There's the large amount of cash (bribes, essentially) doled out to Sunni tribal chiefs to cement their shaky loyalty to the Baghdad government. The US is now following a policy of no interference in purely internal Iraqi conflicts, which means that such conflicts and the mix of corruption and violence surrounding them evolve in their own way, without American attempts to shape them, so long as they do not become connected with jihadis.

Those changes reflect a larger change in American policy, the de facto abandonment of the democratization strategy. This policy lies in tatters elsewhere in any case, by the very forces that the Bush policy never came to grips with: jihadis from Iran, Pakistan, and Saudi Arabia; the persistence of powerful tribal-sectarian divisions in the Middle East; and the sharp rise in the price of oil, which provides these forces with more material resources.** Restoration of democratic sovereignty has failed in Lebanon, thanks to Syria and Iran. Where elections do occur, they fragment populations into religious and tribal shards and open the way for jihadist groups. These forces threaten the democratically elected governments currently in charge in both Baghdad and Kabul, which could not survive in their present form without the presence of Western (mainly American) troops.

Military transformation collides with nation building. By making do with the troops available, rather than vainly wishing for the much larger number needed for a traditional occupation and "nation-building" effort, the "surge" has reasserted a more conservative and realist conception of military force and succeeded in making lemonade from lemons.

But why the lemons to begin with? The immediate cause was the push for "military transformation" which began after the Cold War and entered a heightened phase under former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld in 2001. The essence of "military transformation" was to continue to shrink US troop levels, while improving their ability to fight hi-tech conventional wars against other states. The idea is to be ready to fight another army - as in Korea or World War II - but with the newest technology, moving the US forces even further in the direction of an agile, light force capable of defeating conventional enemies quickly, but even less able to act as an occupation and nation-building force. The quick defeat of the Iraqi army in the spring of 2003 demonstrated "military transformation" perfectly. It was a faster, cheaper, and less deadly version of the 1991 Gulf war.

But that was merely three or four weeks, of toppling Saddam, out of more than five years, of "now what?" The Rumsfeld doctrine of military transformation has been harshly criticized by both neocons and liberals as sacrificing "boots-on-the-ground" in favor of a shiny, hi-tech military future. Rumsfeld, like Colin Powell, was shaped by the Vietnam era and the rejection by American society in general, and the officer class in particular, of "nation building." Following this powerful prejudice of senior American military officers, its forces are prepared and equipped for wars only, in the narrow sense, like the 1991 war. The failure of preparation for a post-Saddam Iraq led to a spectacular collision of the military transformation doctrine with the reality of occupation and has put unprecedented strain on the American army.† Given that Rumsfeld was completely out of tune with what would be needed in Iraq, it's surprising he stayed as long as he did. He was originally opposed to the war and tried to resign at the end of 2003 and again in the spring of 2004. But Bush leaned hard to keep him from leaving. Here we get to another difficult puzzle, the strange effect of Bush's obsession with loyalty on the people around him.

The failure to foresee what post-Saddam Iraq would look like is at the heart of the depressing story told by the best books on the 2003-07 period. They include George Packer's The Assassin's Gate, Larry Diamond's Squandered Victory, Thomas Ricks' Fiasco, Bing West's No True Glory, and Ali Allawi's The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace. Where a realistic guess of a post-Saddam Iraq should have been was a void, eventually filled by Bush and White House staff with wishful thinking of the neoconservative type.

The neoconservative failure. Fallacious neocon theories about democratization and the Middle East are the core of the failed Bush policy. Similar intelligence was available to both Clinton in 1998 and Bush in 2002 about Saddam's weapons programs and stockpiles. One difference in 2002 was, obviously, that the 9/11 attacks greatly raised the stakes. Bush determined to prevent future attacks, not just respond to them. But the injection of neocon theorizing also made a decisive difference, because it transformed a narrow debate about terrorism and unconventional weapons into a fuzzier and open-ended fantasy of regional and political transformation. This thinking could have been taken seriously by someone who thought that the Middle East as a whole and Iraq in particular were like eastern Europe or Latin America in the 1980s, or Germany and Japan in 1945. Only conservative and libertarian critics and skeptics strongly objected to this once-liberal, now-neocon "well-intentioned" and "fuzzy-minded" thinking. (See here, here, and here for George Will's corrosive skepticism and steely-eyed, classic foreign policy realism.) But such criticism had little influence: the Republican party, led by Bush, had rearranged itself to exclude precisely such objections. Centrists and liberals took the ideas for granted with no coherent answer to the neocon theories. The far left became consumed with its own kooky counterreality of "American empire" and "Bushitler."

In this verbal snapshot, Bing West described the state of Basra at the start of the invasion:

In March 2003, I accompanied the Marine battalion and British engineers who seized the pumping station just north of Basra that facilitated a multibillion-dollar flow of oil. The engineers were appalled to find open cesspools, rusted valves, sputtering turbines, and other vital equipment deteriorating into junk. Heaps of garbage lay outside the walls of nearby houses. Yet inside the courtyards, tiny patches of grass were as well tended as putting greens. That defined Iraq: a generation of tyrannical greed had taught Iraqis to look out for their own, to enrich their families, and to avoid any communal activity that attracted attention.

It's not the sort of thing that can be changed with the snap of the fingers. This is a larger failure of "intelligence" than just misjudging the scope of Saddam's WMD programs (which were real, if small) and the size of his stockpiles (which were non-existent).

The intelligence failure. The continued obsession with WMD distracts most people from seeing this truth. The fact is, if Saddam had had such weapons or a large weapons program, the long-term results of the Iraq occupation would not have differed except in details. Al Qa'eda would still have itched to turn Iraq into a showdown. The gross inadequacy of the number and type of troops deployed; the almost complete lack of planning for a post-Saddam Iraq; the radicalization of the Iraqi Sunnis, enraged by their loss of exclusive minority rule over Iraq - none of these would have been any different. The comprehensive failure of the Bush strategy for thinking beyond the first few weeks after the invasion and the apparent fantasy of the administration neocons - that Iraq would just snap into place as a functioning civil society - remain the grand mistakes of the Iraq war. After all, there were good reasons to think that, after ejecting weapons inspectors in August 1998, Saddam had restarted his weapons programs and produced some for use. He had used chemical weapons in the past.††

That's not to say that the intelligence failure isn't important. But its importance is not what Democratic politicians, having supported the war and now running for political cover, want you to believe. If the "Bush lied, people died" trope is a little too familiar as a cliché, consider the recently released Senate Intelligence Committee report on the pre-war Iraq intelligence situation. It mostly confirms what everyone already knows, or should know: not just the CIA, but virtually all foreign intelligence services believed that Iraq had restarted of its advanced weapons programs. There is a very serious problem here, but it's not with "Bush lied" - there's no evidence that he did. In fact, Bush and the people around him fervently believed in what they were saying, and there lies the real failure: they believed too much and too well.

Midnight at the oasis. A long-running deficiency has plagued American intelligence in the Middle East since the late 1970s. We used to be able to collect our own Middle East intelligence, largely thanks to the relatively free country of Lebanon, the Arab world's previous and failed democratic experiment. When the Lebanese civil war started in 1975 and Western diplomats and spies there started being kidnapped in the early 1980s, that venue vanished, and the US began to rely on proxies for intelligence: first the Shah, who fell in 1979; then Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan.‡ This is not to let the Bushies off the hook - a failure of such long standing, including the failures that let to 9/11 - should have been dragged out front and center in 2002 for thorough scrutiny. The problem is that changing this dependency would require a complete overhaul of US alliances and, even harder, the policies and interests controlling our relationships with Saudi Arabia and Egypt.

If there is a specific thread that keeps popping up again and again in this history, it is the long-term degeneration and failure of the CIA. This failure is evident from the recent Senate report, the Kay report on Iraq's weapons programs, the 9/11 Commission report, and the CIA's repeated public misjudgments of the Middle East. The "work" (if it can be called that) of former CIA people gone public (Michael Scheuer, Valerie Plame, Joe Wilson) makes it clear that the CIA's mindset is so far off base from what's needed that the agency is probably beyond saving. It should just be shut down: if "empty suit syndrome" means anything, the CIA is it.

This large and costly lesson about intelligence should never be forgotten: decisions of war and peace should be made only on public and obvious things. Intelligence has been used, both successfully and unsuccessfully, during wars. But decisions to step from peace to war, and from war to peace, should only be made on something more reliable than guesswork. It doesn't preclude military action in the future; it does preclude the doctrine of pre-emption, unless the threat is sitting on someone's lawn, so to speak. It means the end of the distinctive mix of mistaken neoconservative ideas that went into the Iraq war: connecting secular dictators with jihadi terrorists, "regime change" with poor prospects for functioning replacement governments, pre-emption based on intelligence trusted as more certain than it can ever be, the belief that Middle Eastern democratization improves American security in any but marginal and costly ways.

A moment of silence. It is far from the first time soldiers have died for the strategic mistakes of their leaders, far from the worst instance, and probably won't be the last. I know that's small consolation to those who lost relatives and friends in Iraq. The intervention does have positive achievements: the overthrow of a cruel dictator, and the crushing defeat and apparent dissolution of al Qa'eda outside its home territory.

But these have come at too high a cost and taken much too long. While falling apart elsewhere, al Qa'eda is regenerating on its home turf, the mountains of Afghanistan and Pakistan. Supposed allies like Pakistan and Saudi Arabia continue to play a thoroughly ambiguous game with radical Islamic groups in no way in keeping with Bush's famous "you're with us or you're against us." In the wake of the debacle of neoconservatism, the big strategic issues are again up for grabs. In our present hyperpartisan hysteria, there's little hope they will be addressed, at least while we live under the evil sway of the "permanent campaign."

POSTSCRIPT: Listen here for a podcast interview with Douglas Feith, about his book War and Decision, the Iraq war, and more. What Feith says and documents in his book, and also what he does not address, are as important as the books mentioned above.
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* The civil war in Algeria, which led to the same result, ran for a decade after 1992 and took the lives of over 150,000. The Lebanese civil war (1975-1990, although it's never really ended) killed between 50,000 and 100,000. Iraq's 2003-08 civil war falls into the same class.

** Of course, it also provides them with more to fight over as well.

† An army of half a million would have been necessary to implement a traditional occupation, rather than the 150,000 deployed. To sustain that over time, with normal troop rotations, would have required a larger base of 2.5 million. Even the larger Cold War military of the 1980s, about 1.6 million and double the size of the post-Cold War military, could not have done it. The American military has not had an army that size since the earlier stages of the Vietnam war, when there was a draft. While most combat troops in Vietnam were volunteers, contrary to myth, draftees did free up volunteers to serve in combat roles.

†† Actually, the evidence is that Saddam thought he restarted his programs and had stockpiles - the people running these programs were evidently doing something else, like stashing money in European bank accounts - and his chemical weapons program ended up in Syria. It's not clear how much Saddam knew about his own regime. That's what dictatorships are like in their final stages. Think of the drug-addled Hitler in his bunker in the spring of 1945.

‡ Not accidentally, every president since Carter has had a misintelligence/misadvice-enabled Middle East folly. Carter had the fall of the Shah, the assassination of Sadat after the Camp David treaty, and the first US security guarantees to the Gulf kingdoms. Reagan had the Marines in Lebanon and the Iran part of the Iran-Contra affair. Bush Sr. had American troops in Saudi Arabia for the long term. Clinton had the Oslo process and not taking al Qae'da seriously (except briefly). Bush Jr. had not taking al Qae'da seriously (at first) and the Iraq war. The list of failures over thirty years is long and striking.

Good czar, bad czar

Something very bad has happened in Russia in the last eight years: the rise of Vladimir Putin and the new Russian mafia state. Contrary to myths still repeated in the West, this period has not seen Russia become more stable or a nicer place: on the contrary. The Russian state has prospered, because it's seized control of Russia's oil and gas wealth. It's now become another petro-dictatorship. The decline of Russian society, arrested in the 90s, is accelerating.

But there's also a whole army of bagmen (consultants, lobbyists, etc.) out there who've clouded the issue both here and especially in Europe. The West lacks the clarity on the issue that it had during the Cold War, even though Russia is causing problems in Iran and is about to in Kosovo. This is not the 90s "holiday from history" any more. And there's no good czar - Yeltsin - to deal with.

Bad - bad - czar - bad - bad.

A horrifying milestone

PRE-POSTSCRIPT: It's another Middle East sick-humor moment - but it's real: Pakis flee to the relative safety of Afghanistan (via Instapundit). It's also a measure of how rapidly the situation is evolving.
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There's not much to add to what's been said about the assassination of Benazir Bhutto. She wanted to return to Pakistan and, with Musharraf weakening in the last couple years, agreed with Rice and the State Department to a strange "arranged marriage" with the Pakistani government. While there's a lot of tongue-clucking about Bush's policy being dead, the reality is the opposite: it was the old policy of giving Musharraf a blank check that is now not only dead, but dead and buried. Bhutto's assassination was carried out by al Qa'eda-Taliban operatives, extremist groups that owe their existence to Pakistan's Inter Services Intelligence (ISI) service and Saudi money and ideology. These groups do not and have never had widespread support from Pakistanis, and the government's main repressive actions have been directed against liberal and secular movements, not against the extremists.

What Rice and others in the administration realized a couple years ago was that giving Musharraf a blank check after 9/11, when Pakistan decided to at least officially side with the US, was good short-term strategy, but bad in the long run. As with many of these apparently clever "realist" strategies, we're now living in the long run. The era of "he's our bastard" realpolitik is over.

The future of fighting these extremist movements lies with allying ourselves to and strengthening Muslim governments that have greater legitimacy. They don't necessarily have to be electoral democracies. They can also be conservative monarchies, if they are open to reform. Relying on rulers with narrow bases of support is a deadend.

For Pakistan itself, the problem isn't just radical Islam, because in the Islamic world, religion isn't just a belief system as we think of it. Radical Islam comes with a political program (the caliphate fantasy versus nation-states) and social forces (the world of village clans and tribes versus the urban, the middle class, and the liberal). The resurgence of purist Islam is a result of the failure of "modernization," itself a relic of European colonialism. All of these older forms of Westernization had a narrow basis and limited appeal. Without a broader popular demand for better government, the rebarbarization of former European colonies is a real possibility. And because we live in a smaller and smaller world, we will not be able to run away from the consequences.

Mark Steyn put it well:

Benazir Bhutto's return to Pakistan had a mad recklessness about it which give today's events a horrible inevitability ....

Since her last spell in power [in the 1990s], Pakistan has changed, profoundly. Its sovereignty is meaningless in increasingly significant chunks of its territory, and, within the portions Musharraf is just about holding together, to an ever more radicalized generation of young Muslim men Miss Bhutto was entirely unacceptable as the leader of their nation .... Miss Bhutto could never have been a viable leader of a post-Musharraf settlement, and the delusion that she could have been sent her to her death. Earlier this year, I had an argument with an old (infidel) boyfriend of Benazir's, who swatted my concerns aside with the sweeping claim that "the whole of the western world" was behind her. On the streets of Islamabad, that and a dime'll get you a cup of coffee ....

When you invent an artificial country, you better be sure that your artificial identity will stick. Pakistan today is not what the British and Jinnah had in mind, nor Ayub Khan, nor Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, nor General Zia, nor Nawaz Sharif. Instead, across 60 years, their failures incubated an identity that would have seemed utterly deranged to even the more excitable Punjabi Muslims of the early 1940s. As ... noted earlier, according to one recent poll, 46% of Pakistanis support Osama bin Laden.

What should be easy to agree [upon] is that Pakistan is getting worse. Even those who thought at the time that its creation was one of the most unnecessary mistakes in British imperial policy wouldn't have predicted that a mere half-century later it would be a coup-prone nuclear basket-case exporting both its tribal marriage customs and irredentist jihadism to the heart of the western world. Fifty years ago, Pakistanis emigrating to England and Canada brought with them an essentially Britannic education and a moderate Sufi Islam that was not a barrier to integration. Today they bring a narrow madrassah education and [Wahhabi- or Salafi-inspired] Deobandi Islam, which is deeply hostile to assimilation. In other words, what a "Pakistani" is[,] is profoundly different. I liked Benazir Bhutto very much, but she represented Pakistan's past, and her murder is a horrible confirmation of that fact.

I'm sure Steyn would love to be wrong about Pakistan, but there's a good chance he isn't.

Iran: What is to be done?

A recent issue (April 23) of the New Republic contained an excellent overview of Iran, its regional ambitions, and its nuclear program. Unfortunately, it's behind their subscriber firewall, so you have to find a print copy. But it is well worth it. Four authors contributed to it, but two especially - former ambassador Dennis Ross and Iranian-American author Azar Nafisi - should be listened to.*

The Iranian problem is headed towards a dénoument in the next 18 months, so it's important to understand what's happening. Condeleeza Rice has made it her final almost-impossible task in office to prevent a nuclear Middle East. Everyone should wish her success - failure (which is likely) means the end of nuclear non-proliferation and a regional military-nuclear competition. The first countries under threat are Iran's Sunni neighbors, followed by Israel. Rice is working to some extent at cross-purposes with her boss. Bush and Cheney have clearly given up trying anything more about Iran and now simply want the crisis to happen after they leave office. It's the final, rotten fruit of an administration that never had much interest in policy or much time horizon beyond the next election.

Nafisi indirectly comments on this trend:

The most important weapon in the U.S. arsenal is not its military might but its culture. Vigorously defending and promoting those values the United States was long thought to represent - freedom of expression, freedom of movement, freedom of conscience - will do a great deal more than any missile to neutralize Iranian radicals. And, though this wide-ranging task is probably beyond the capability of American politicians, it is not beyond the capability of America.

How did we go in twenty years from achievements like ending the Cold War, with giants like Reagan and Gorbachev, to a political landscape overrun by pygmies?
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* Of the other two, Robert Kagan is a little disconnected from reality, and the New York Times' Laura Secor is an example (sadly, not unique) of reporter-turned-apologist.

The coming war with Iran

It's usually bad a idea to stick one's neck out like this, but the coming crisis with Iran requires it. There will be war involving Iran by the end of 2008. The next president's first crisis will be this, not Iraq. See here for the skinny (requires subscription). An immediate consequence will be the end of the nuclear non-proliferation regime in place since the late 1960s, with Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Turkey, and others crowding in to get their nuclear weapons too. This is a certainty if the US can no longer demonstrate an ability to shield its "allies" (read: dependencies).

The latest idiocy on this issue emanates from the usual places and postulates a détente with Iran. Apparently, the chattering classes don't yet realize that détente with Iran has already come and gone - the faux-reformers of a few years ago are without influence in the era of Ahmadinejad. The original détente, with the Soviets in the 1970s, made a limited sense then; although in the long run, it was no more than an interlude. With the present Iran, it's loopy. The real problem is that by getting ourselves into Iraq with little preparation for the cost and consequences, we're now hobbled in dealing with a much more serious threat from Iran. The Iranian problem would have happened anyway, but the Iraq war has accelerated it. Bush has not used the Iraq war in any advantageous way against Iran. He clearly needs to be replaced by someone - of either party - who knows what he's doing.

What were the neocons thinking in the 90s? Some of them did correctly emphasize Iran, but that's not what got transmitted into policy. What got into policy instead was an undeserved obsession with a country - Iraq - effectively neutralized in 1991 and a lot of dubious, fuzzy ideas about how the Middle East was "ripe" for constructive, Western-style political change. Nothing could show more clearly how little connection neocon theorizing has with Israeli views than this. The Israeli political, military, and intelligence establishment shows rare unanimity when it comes to Iran: since the early 90s, they have viewed Iran's quest for nuclear weapons as their biggest threat. OTOH, they regarded Iraq as defanged, a spent force. And Israelis would have laughed themselves to death at the neocon fantasy of "democratic transformation" of the Arab world.

OTOH, the fantasy of "realism," as it's played itself out in the last year, largely consists of conventional wisdom recycled from 10, 20, or 30 years ago. They include myopic denunciations of American policy as being "too tough" on Iran - when in fact, it's more likely too little, too late. Here's a really real principle of realpolitik the chatterboxes in the news media might consider - if they're not distracted by Britney Spears' latest underwear malfunction: peacemaking negotiations are possible when there isn't a powerful player able to block peace. E.g., Sadat kicked the Soviets out of Egypt in 1974, moved towards the US, and was able to make peace with Israel. The end of the Soviet Union and the defeat of Iraq in 1991 made the Oslo process and the Israel-Jordan peace deal possible. When a hardline rejectionist state like Iran is on the ascent (helped by a large, sustained jump in crude oil prices), peacemaking becomes much harder. When Iran gets nuclear weapons, peacemaking will become history.

Iran's insistence on butting into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and using it as an inflammatory rallying cry for Islamic radicalism means that a new "warrant for genocide" is being assembled before our eyes - that was the real meaning of the Holocaust-denial conference in Tehran. While the academic liberals and leftists bellow on and on about "never again" - meaning, never again the Nazi Holocaust in 1940s Europe - the next one is being prepared. The left in particular has played a disgraceful role in paving the way for the next crisis - as apologists, rationalizers, and liars - just as the isolationists and Nazi fellow-travellers did in the 1930s. Along with Jim Baker and Lee Hamilton, they will be remembered - if they are remembered - as the Chamberlins and Halifaxes of this generation. The media will be remembered - if they're remembered either - as having helped the crisis happen - just as the media of the 1930s did.

And it's not just Iran that keeps dragging Israel into the region's problems - for some never-clear reason, so do a lot of other people. What the Shi'ite revival, the Iranian missile threat to the region or to Europe, or the near-destruction of Lebanon by Hizbollah, Syria, and Iran have to do with the Israel-Palestinian conflict is a mystery. Really, they have little to do with each other, except perhaps indirectly. In any case, how Israel is supposed to negotiate seriously with a Palestianian quasi-state now at war with itself is a further mystery. The fatal obstacles to the formation of a Palestinian state come from Arab governments and the Palestinians, not from Israel.

The Bush administration's expensive fiasco in Iraq also has nothing to do with Israel, except in the fervid imaginations of certain people. The driving impulse, as far as we know from the people who did it, came from the desire to finish the Persian Gulf war in a different and more decisive way. It would have been a good idea then, and you can thank Baker & company for that not happening. But, after the 9/11 attacks, this predominantly neoconservative view failed to see that the rising threat in the Middle East comes from radical Islam. After the Persian Gulf war and the end of the Cold War, secular nationalist tyrants like Saddam have become yesteryear's failed idols. Such men - starting with Nasser and proceeding to the late Assad père and Qaddafi - have clearly had their day. The new, rising, cutting-edge radicals who replaced them are the bin Ladens, the Ahmadinejads, the Nasrallahs, and so on, with a new ideology and a new base.

There is a grand irony in the fantasies of Israeli control of American foreign policy, and it is this: if the United States had been channeling Israeli thinking under either Clinton or Bush, it would have been paying attention to Iran, its radicalism, its terrorism, and its quest for nuclear weapons much sooner. Israeli judgment, even in regards their own self-interest, is not flawless: witness the Oslo process. But the Israelis grasped soon after 1991 that the future major threat to them would come from Tehran, a point that has taken 15 years to sink in over here. They rightly discounted the post-1991 threat from a contained and nearly-vanquished Iraq. We would be in a very different place today had this history played differently: we could be consistently rallying Americans and other countries against radical Islam, undiverted and unburdened by having to straighten out the remains of Saddam's mini-gulag. Of course, we'd still have the Sunni branch of radicalism (al Qaeda) to deal with - a largely Saudi-Egyptian-Pakistani creature. Not accidentally, all three countries are major US allies - we're their protector and sugar daddy and hence a target of those governments' radical malcontents. Some people say the Iraq war has diverted American attention from al Qaeda, and that may be. Nonetheless, the real negative legacy that Bush leaves will probably be, not Iraq, but the failure to do something about Iran.

And naturally, if the Bush and two preceding adminstrations had been on this wavelength, the 2003 Iraq war would not have happened.

Update on Middle East madness

Lots of stuff whizzing and banging around the blogosphere about Israel and the Middle East. Following up on my two earlier postings on Middle East lunacy and deep background, here are an additional two cents.

The narrow problem for Israel is dismantling or pushing out Hizbollah. Israel has obviously failed to do this, and Lebanese army control of the border is a questionable substitute. Israel has done a lot of damage to Hizbollah, however, so score a tactical victory here for Israel, even if it's still a strategic stalemate. But the Israel-Hizbollah conflict cannot be separated from the larger regional issue.

That issue is Iran's rising push for control of the region. The components of a counterstrategy are: dismantling or pushing out Hizbollah, isolating Iran's ally Syria, containing Iran and stopping its nuclear program, and preventing Lebanon from becoming this decade's Afghanistan or Sudan -- another ugly Jihadi-land paid for by a wealthy, reactionary sponsor swimming in oil money (Saudi Arabia in those cases, Iran now). Otherwise, Lebanon will become Tehran's western suburbs.

Of course, we can't duck Iran's major goal of getting nuclear weapons. This issue has conveniently and not accidentally vanished from people's attention during the Lebanese commotion. Iran's first use for such weapons will not be to attack Israel, but to intimidate and weaken existing Muslim governments in the region, push the US protective umbrella away from them, and get a hold of their oil revenues. If there are significant Shiite minorities present (like in Saudi Arabia's oil-rich eastern province), it's that much easier. In a world of abundant oil but heavy political control over a semi-monopolistic market and artificially elevated prices, that's the name of the game. (See here and here.) Iran will probably start with the oil-rich Shiites of Iraq, then move on to the Arabian Shiites. Coming from the reverse direction, Saddam tried to do just this in 1990 to Kuwait -- seize its oil fields and acquire a new stream of oil revenue. Saddam's attempt was justified on the fading appeal of pan-Arabism. Iran's will be based on some kind of Shiite caliphate claim.

Hey, maybe Ahmadinejad really is the Hidden Imam :^)

Strategypage gets it too: Israel has defeated (although not destroyed) Hizbollah, the diplomatic deal will probably self-destruct, but Hizbollah has won a real victory -- not over Israel, but by scaring Sunnis and Muslim governments, impressing them with the violent potential of a Shiite minority backed by Iran.

In my posting on Middle East lunacy, I suggested that Israel should offer to pay part of Lebanon's reconstruction costs. My suggestion has since been upstaged by Iran's generous offer of some of its $70/barrel oil money (see how oil $ twists the Middle East?), and it's unlikely to be accepted. But it should be out there anyway.

A friend wanted to know if I was suggesting reparations -- no, I wasn't. I was suggesting enlightened self-interest, a way for Israel to constructively stick its nose into the Lebanese tent and take advantage of the Sunni and Muslim elite fright of Iran and the Shiites.

And how about reparations for Israel?

And finally, not all is lost in Hollywood's narcissistic playpen: see the new L.A. Times ad about the Middle East from some serious star wattage.

LATER: Gadi Taub at TNR notes another aspect of Hamas and Hizbollah terrorism: they both operate from areas effectively not under the control of a sovereign government, and they both want Israel tied down as an occupier in Gaza and south Lebanon. Unilateral withdrawal has been a disaster for their strategy:

It's just that their use of the word "occupation" has a particular meaning. They're not referring to the West Bank or Gaza--they mean the whole of Palestine. Ending what we call the occupation is essential to Israel's long-term existence--the only way the Jewish state can survive in the face of new demographic realities and avoid unsustainable moral costs. Ending what they call the occupation means ending the state of Israel. Therefore, keeping Israel tied down in Gaza, the West Bank, and Lebanon is strategically rational if your goal is Israel's destruction.

He concludes, as I do, that it is in Israel's interest to stabilize and strengthen Lebanese sovereignty. (The case of Gaza and Hamas differs somewhat, but the same logic holds: sovereignty is the enemy of terrorism.) Read the whole thing here (requires subscription).