As Gaza descends into civil war and Iraq threatens to accelerate its trajectory downward, it is useful to consider how these events are related and how they fit into our current strategic planning.
It is clear that we have the lost the initiative in the war against Islamic fascism. Israel has essentially committed itself to the policy advocated by most of the Democratic candidates, ie withdrawal from the field and a defensive posture, with the judicious use of extralegal attacks (analogous to the suggestion we rely on Special Ops to kill terrorists) and the use, at a distance, of "moderates" to ensure enough quiet to allow a return to the Peace process.
In Iraq we have not yet decided to pursue Plan "B" but it is hard to imagine that enough progress will be made between now and September to convince our politicians, the vast majority of whom are not marked by the taint of courage or conviction, to continue a policy that seems to have no short term culmination. Plan "B" will almost certainly be similar to Israel's current posture, most likely with American troops confined to bases in Kurdistan and a few other hospitable locales and the reliance on Iranian proxies and Iranian assurances to allow us to withdraw from the field and attain a fantasied peace.
(Strangely enough, Anbar province may become the locus of a defensive American posture; if the most recent bombings at the Imam al-Askari mosque in Samarra succeed in accelerating sectarian violence as the attacks last year on the same mosque did, the Sunnis and Americans may see it as in their best interest to form a tacit alliance against a common Shia enemy.)
How the events are understood by the Bush administration and our permanent governemnt (the bureaucracy at State and Defense) will be significant.
The Realist position in the Middle East for the last 40 years, honed to perfection in the Palestinian territories and with Iran, has been that there exist radical groups that can only be imperfectly controlled by the nominal powers (the PLO under Arafat, Hezbollah under Iran's tutelage.) This has allowed such polite fictions as the idea that Yassar Arafat was a man of peace deserving of his Nobel Prize. It also allows the polite fiction that Iranian weapons used to kill Americans, Iraqis, and Afghanis are somehow being diverted to Iraq and Afghanistan without the Iranian government's knowledge or responsibility. Such polite fictions are required to enable the naive Americans and Israelis (a shrinking number these days, but with a majority in the Knesset) to avoid recognizing with whom we are at war.
The meme lives on well past its useful life span:
Israeli officials are debating whether Fatah can stand up to Hamas in Gaza. They say they have been asked by Washington recently to approve another shipment of armored vehicles, weapons and ammunition to the Presidential Guards. But a senior Israeli official said Israel was worried that the weaponry would just be seized by Hamas, as much of the last shipment was.
“Hamas now has two million bullets intended for Fatah,” he said.
Israeli officials are explicit privately about their intention to damage Hamas and its military infrastructure in Gaza and try to give Fatah a boost at the same time. Israel, in retaliation for rocket fire into Israel from Gaza, has been bombing the buildings and facilities of Hamas’s Executive Force, a parallel police force in Gaza, that has not been firing rockets. Israeli officials argue, however, that the Executive Force and the Hamas military wing “share a command headquarters.”
Recognizing that Hamas and Fatah hate each other but hate Jews even more and that Shia fanatics and Sunni fanatics hate each other but hate Americans more, would require reassessing our current strategy. The situation has been destabilized only because our worst enemies believe they are winning against our lesser enemies:
"They're firing at us, firing RPGs, firing mortars. We're not Jews," the brother of Jamal Abu Jediyan, a Fatah commander, pleaded during a live telephone conversation with a Palestinian radio station.
Minutes later both men were dragged into the streets and riddled with bullets.
Sadly, no one in the Bush administration seems to be approaching the Middle East in anything more than an ad hoc manner, responding to each crisis as it arises, independently from every other crisis.
It is time to recognize that the ongoing civil war(s) in the Middle East, finding expression everywhere from Gaza to Iraq to Lebanon, and threatening to spread across the region, suits our enemy's objectives and is an expression of their strategic interests. Iran and al Qaeda have no interest in stability, despite the wishful thinking of the Realists who have been wrong with a level of consistency that is most impressive for its inability to effect their thinking in any meaningful way.
The Neocon position has been discredited by a combination of factors, including the neocon failure to recognize that in the 21st century the United States is incapable for a whole host of reasons from conducting Total War and that limited war is a guarantee of failure. If we cannot kill the young men who take up arms against us in sufficient numbers to discourage the growth of their ranks, we cannot win because the American public does not have the patience for a long drawn out affair and those who are most important in articulating our goals and strategies (which includes the President and an MSM which long ago replaced advocacy for explication) have failed to do their jobs.
Isolationism is no longer an option in our increasingly connected world.
We are thus left with no coherent strategic plan upon which to base our strategy going forward. This may or may not be rectified by our next election campaign, but even if a new consensus can emerge, in the mean time our enemies will continue to pursue the plans they have announced and pursued.
We are left with rather unenviable choices; perhaps the best choice of a bad lot would be to stand back and allow (encourage?) our enemies to kill each other; I suspect we have little choice but to make a virtue of necessity.
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