I’m trying to educate people about why The Establishment is so incredibly resistant to admitting defeat in Iraq and accepting the consequences. Last week, you probably all read Michael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack’s happy opinion piece about their trip to Iraq. You may have missed that they were accompanied by a much less enthusiastic Anthony Cordesman. While Cordesman did not share O’Hanlon and Pollack’s optimism about the surge, he does have some tough love for those of us that think we should get out of Iraq…come what may.
IN an ideal world, arms sales are hardly the tool the United States would use to win stability and influence. America does not, however, exist in an ideal world, nor in one that it can suddenly reform with good intentions and soft power. Those pressuring Congress to kill the Bush administration’s proposed $20 billion arms deal with Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states need to step back into the real world.
America has vital long-term strategic interests in the Middle East. The gulf has well over 60 percent of the world’s proven conventional oil reserves and nearly 40 percent of its natural gas. The global economy, and part of every job in America, is dependent on trying to preserve the stability of the region and the flow of energy exports.
Washington cannot — and should not — try to bring security to the gulf without allies, and Saudi Arabia is the only meaningful military power there that can help deter and contain a steadily more aggressive Iran.
In case you are a little confused by his analysis, he did just say that Saudi Arabia was a ‘meaningful military power’. Of course, it is not. Saudi Arabia has spent hundreds of billions on American military toys (they have more fighter aircraft than the U.K.) but they have no clue how to use them and they have half as many men under arms as Eritrea. Iran’s army is over four times larger on a budget less than a third the size of the House of Saud’s.
Saudi military procurement is an exercise in American corporate welfare, and little else. We do, of course, offer to train Saudi pilots how to fly the planes we sell them, but that turned out to be a little bit of an error…don’t you think?
Cordesman thinks he is offering us grown-up advice. What he is really doing is explaining why America should continue a doomed effort to dominate and dictate to energy-rich Eurasian countries, in spite of our folly in Iraq.
And most Democrats fall for this crap. If they don’t fall for it, they’ve already figured out how to benefit from it. And if all that fails, it turns out that selling all that deadly arsenal to Arab nations will create or preserve jobs in their districts.
I got an email from John Kerry today. He told me:
Here’s the reality this week: Karl Rove is gone but a broken Iraq policy remains.
I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a party cling so disastrously to a policy that is as wrong as it is unsuccessful.
Kerry should have said, “I’m not sure I’ve seen two parties cling so disastrously to a policy that is wrong as it is unsuccessful.” He should have said that because it would be more honest. The American Establishment wants to dominate and dictate to all the energy-rich countries from Libya to Saudi Arabia to the Emirates and Kuwait, to Iraq, Iran, and Azerbaijan, to Kazakhstan and Turkmenistan. That is what the serious foreign policy thinkers in both parties want and their ability to do so is what is threatened by the neo-conservative fiasco in Iraq.
They hyped the threat of terrorism to mobilize the American people for a Eurasian power grab and now they have totally discredited themselves and bankrupted our country both financially and morally.
On top of that, they’ve betrayed our allies who will now be forced to cope with the mess we’ve made.
The Establishment knows that there is no way out and that we’ve overextended our hands. They just don’t want to fess up to the problem and deal with it. Not now…not with an election coming up.
But there is always an election coming up.
Cordesman is just another guy that wants to keep the gravy train going for another Friedman Unit or two. He and his Establishment have led us to disaster and now they think they can tell us what grown up, serious people know has to be done.
I don’t buy any of it. It’s time to throw these bums out and rethink the entire post-Cold War foreign policy approach of this country. It has been a disaster. And we can do better.
