March 3, 2006
The Neocon Temptation
By Pat Buchanan
"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Mere anarchy is
loosed upon the world, The blood-dimmed tide is loosed ..."
There may
be a better description of what is happening in Iraq than the
words of Yeats'. It does not come to mind.
Before President
Bush ordered Gen. Tommy Franks to invade, four forces held Iraq
together: Saddam's regime, the Baath Party, the secret police
and the army. The conquering Americans, as has been their way
from Sherman to LeMay, smashed them all.
The center
that held Iraq together, repulsive as it was, is gone. But, the
comment of Yuval Diskin, head of the Israeli security agency Shin
Bet, may yet prove incisive: "I'm not sure we won't come
to miss Saddam."
The Shi'ites
have been the principle beneficiaries of our intervention. Liberated
from Saddam's rule, under U.S. rules of one-man, one-vote they
were, with 60 percent of the population, the certain inheritors
of the estate. Yet, Shi'ite conduct calls to mind the remark of
the Austrian prime minister after Tsar Nicholas I intervened to
save the Hapsburgs from revolution in 1848: "We shall astonish
the world with our ingratitude."
America
has made many blunders in this war. The greatest was to invade
Iraq on the pretext it was a threat to the United States and inflame
300 million Arabs and a billion Muslims against us.
But that
decision, endorsed by a Democratic Senate that gave Bush a blank
check, cannot be revisited or reversed. As Dean Rusk used to say,
"We are there, and we are committed."
What should
we do? And what will Bush do?
In surveys,
63 percent of Americans believe Iraq was a mistake, 70 percent
have lost confidence in Bush as war leader and 72 percent of U.S.
forces in Iraq believe we should be out by year's end. Bush's
base is slipping away, and 2006 is the make-or-break year.
So, where
do we stand on this third anniversary of Operation Iraqi Freedom
to bring democracy to Mesopotamia?
The dynamiting
of the Golden Mosque in Samarra has brought reprisals against
Sunni mosques and imams, and pulled Iraq close to the brink of
sectarian and civil war. To understand what could happen to the
Shi'ites north and west of Baghdad and to Sunnis in the south,
one might reread what became of the Greeks in Smyrna when the
Turks arrived in 1922, or to the Hindu and Muslim peoples when
India and Pakistan tore apart at independence in 1947.
The new
Iraqi government, army and security forces are too weak and divided
to prevent civil war without the U.S. presence, the indispensable
pillar of the state.
Our fate,
it seems, is to be that of Prometheus, who stole fire from the
gods and gave it to man. As punishment, he was chained to a rock,
as vultures ate at his liver. And so, too, are we chained by our
own responsibility for what is about to happen -- to the rock
of Iraq.
If Bush
should reduce our forces to 100,000 by year's end as planned,
he risks the civil war that will destroy all we have accomplished
and wash down a sewer everything for which 2,300 Americans died
and 16,000 have been wounded. That sectarian war could spread
across the Islamic world.
It is impossible
to see how Bush, who must know a pullout could bring chaos and
civil war and convert into a historic defeat and debacle a war
he launched, is going to do this. A stubborn man who yet believes
in the cause, Bush seems certain to soldier on in the hope it
will all turn out well, as it did for Lincoln.
But while
we retain the forces in Iraq to prevent a collapse, we do not
have the forces to defeat the enemy. And as our allies depart,
it is unlikely Americans will support more U.S. troops or many
more billions to rebuild the country.
Were this
a financial investment, Iraq would have been written off and our
losses cut a long time ago. But for Bush to write it off is to
write himself off as a failed president who committed the greatest
strategic blunder in U.S. history.
And so the
president is now being offered a way out by his neocon counselors:
escalate. Take the war to the enemy, as we should have from the
beginning. Use U.S. air power to wipe Iran's nuclear facilities
off the map. Go all-out for victory. Emulate Lincoln, Churchill,
FDR, Truman.
With his
poll ratings in the pits, and his party facing almost certain
and heavy losses in the fall, Bush may yet yield to the neocon
temptation. For unlike LBJ in 1968, he does not seem reconciled
to going back to his ranch as a failed president.
Copyright
2006 Creators Syndicate
