The chattering class, across the political spectrum, is now talk, talk, talking about the mess that George W. Bush and the neoconservatives have gotten us into in Iraq, and what do we do about it now. The adults, led by Jim Baker, the most adult of them all, except perhaps for Henry Kissinger, are working on devising a plan to extricate us from this unfortunate debacle caused by Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, and Bush.
Afghanistan is also a mess, but nobody is talking about it, because nobody is willing to say that overthrowing the Taliban and kicking Al Qaeda out of its sinecure was a mistake. So Afghanistan is a mission that must be completed, but Iraq is a mistake that should never have happened. The unspoken assumption here (very unspoken), is that everything would be better if Saddam Hussein were still in power. This is madness.
It’s as if Saddam Hussein, and his intention to acquire nukes, and the massive oil for food bribery, and the crumbling of the sanctions, and the no-fly zone, and the incipient civil wars in Iraq and Lebanon, not to mention Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran, didn’t exist before George Bush became President. These angry, inflamed abscesses were there, needing to be lanced, long before the Presidency was a gleam in George W. Bush’s eye. There has never been a clean, easy, safe, cheap way to avoid dealing with the war that was brought home to us on 9/11. It comes to us from the Middle East. The Middle East is where it must be fought. The Middle East is a mess. This is not a war of choice. It will not be sidestepped somehow if only we would engage in talks with Bashar al-Assad and Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. If only we would pressure Israel to make more concessions to the Palestinian death cult.
If we quit, withdraw, pick up the pieces and go home, expecting peace in our time, we will be sorely disappointed. It will get worse. It is going to get worse regardless, for a long time, before it gets better. Our enemies are not a mirage cooked up by Karl Rove to win elections, as Ted Kennedy would have it. This terrible mess in the Middle East is not the result of incompetent diplomacy that John Kerry would have saved us from. And Jim Baker is not going to produce a deus ex machina to make it all better. There must be a bipartisan, WWII-like, commitment to do whatever it takes to prevail. If we are unable to muster the spirit to defend who we are, we will, in the long run, lose everything.