This week’s Sunday Wankery candidate was relatively low-hanging fruit: the weekly WSJ guest op-ed by Josef Jofee. Now, you expect anything out of the Paper of Propaganda to be bad, but this one had me hurling expletives before I got done with my breakfast. It’s the “We Can’t Possibly Ever Leave Iraq” show again, but taken to it’s illogical endpoint.
In contrast to President Bush’s dark comparison between Iraq and the bloody aftermath of the Vietnam War last month, there is another, comforting version of the Vietnam analogy that’s gained currency among policy makers and pundits. It goes something like this:
After that last helicopter took off from the U.S. embassy in Saigon 32 years ago, the nasty strategic consequences then predicted did not in fact materialize. The “dominoes” did not fall, the Russians and Chinese did not take over, and America remained No. 1 in Southeast Asia and in the world.
What makes Sunday Wankery special? Starting off with logical arguments is one thing, but actually using facts — not “pulled out of my various orifices” quasi-facts, but accepted truths, only means the perversion of these facts through the Wankification(tm) process (It’s like Martinizing your dry cleaning, except it involves turning your clothes into rabid, genetically mutated abominations) is all the more anger-inducing to those of us in the reality based community.
In other words, there’s the wind-up…and the pitch:
But alas, cut-and-run from Iraq will not have the same serendipitous aftermath, because Iraq is not at all like Vietnam.
Unlike Iraq, Vietnam was a peripheral arena of the Cold War. Strategic resources like oil were not at stake, and neither were bases (OK, Moscow obtained access to Da Nang and Cam Ranh Bay for a while). In the global hierarchy of power, Vietnam was a pawn, not a pillar, and the decisive battle lines at the time were drawn in Europe, not in Southeast Asia.
The Middle East, by contrast, was always the “elephant path of history,” as Israel’s fabled defense minister, Moshe Dayan, put it. Legions of conquerors have marched up and down the Levant, and from Alexander’s Macedonia all the way to India. Other prominent visitors were Julius Caesar, Napoleon and the German Wehrmacht.
Iraq was the Most Important War Ever to all these guys, I’m sure. Here’s a freebie for Josef here: when trying to argue that America should stay in Iraq in order to slake imperial bloodlust, it’s bad form to list a number of ultimately failed empires that failed to take and keep Mesopotamia in the name of imperial bloodlust.
That kind of thing turns out to be, you know, a shining historical example that we should leave.
This is not just ancient history. Today, the Greater Middle East is a cauldron even Macbeth’s witches would be terrified to touch. The world’s worst political and religious pathologies combine with oil and gas, terrorism and nuclear ambitions.
In short, unlike yesterday’s Vietnam, the Greater Middle East (including Turkey) is the central strategic arena of the 21st century, as Europe was in the 20th. This is where three continents–Europe, Asia, and Africa–are joined. So let’s take a moment to think about what would happen once that last Blackhawk took off from Baghdad International.
There you go again. The first time was a freebie. Now you’re clearly saying “Yeah, this wasn’t such a great idea, was it?” You get one of those, you already used it up, and now you have to spend the rest of the piece trying to out-argue yourself in your own freaking column.
Wankery at its finest. But it gets better.
Here is a short list. Iran advances to No. 1, completing its nuclear-arms program undeterred and unhindered. America’s cowed Sunni allies–Saudi-Arabia, Jordan, the oil-rich “Gulfies”–are drawn into the Khomeinist orbit.
Wouldn’t they converge in a mighty anti-Tehran alliance instead? Iran’s Shi’a, you know.
You might ask: Wouldn’t they converge in a mighty anti-Tehran alliance instead? Think again. The local players have never managed to establish a regional balance of power; it was always outsiders–first Britain, then the U.S.–who chastened the malfeasants and blocked anti-Western intruders like Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia.
Translation: “Even though this region’s people have survived as a civilization for several thousand years, they are incapable of self-governance, the savages that they are. Throughout history, the Empire Du Jour has grabbed these little bastard sand castles and chucked them against the wall just to make ’em stick. That’s why this region exists: to have a country to pimpslap. Get with the program.”
With the U.S. gone from Iraq, emboldened jihadi forces shift to Afghanistan and turn it again into a bastion of Terror International. Syria reclaims Lebanon, which it has always labeled as a part of “Great Syria.” Hezbollah and Hamas, both funded and equipped by Tehran, resume their war against Israel. Russia, extruded from the Middle East by adroit Kissingerian diplomacy in the 1970s, rebuilds its anti-Western alliances. In Iraq, the war escalates, unleashing even more torrents of refugees and provoking outside intervention, if not partition.
Which is an interesting scenario, except for our inability to prevent all of that from happening if we stay in Iraq. (Short of the Syria reclaiming Lebanon thing, and actually that’s far enough along the proxy war we helped create to be pretty likely too now.)
But we’ve heard this all before. Recycled stuff from the run up to the 2006 elections doesn’t constitute wankery, just laziness. Where’s the beef?
Now, let’s look beyond the region. The Europeans will be the first to revise their romantic notions of multipolarity, or world governance by committee. For worse than an overbearing, in-your-face America is a weakened and demoralized one. Shall Vladimir Putin’s Russia acquire a controlling stake? This ruthlessly revisionist power wants revenge for its post-Gorbachev humiliation, not responsibility.
China with its fabulous riches? The Middle Kingdom is still happily counting its currency surpluses as it pretties up its act for the 2008 Olympics, but watch its next play if the U.S. quits the highest stakes game in Iraq. The message from Beijing might well read: “Move over America, the Western Pacific, as you call it, is our lake.”
Europe? It is wealthy, populous and well-ordered. But strategic players those 27 member-states of the E.U. are not. They cannot pacify the Middle East, stop the Iranian bomb or keep Mr. Putin from wielding gas pipelines as tools of “persuasion.” When the Europeans did wade into the fray, as in the Balkan wars of the 1990s, they let the U.S. Air Force go first.
Yeah, it was about here that the blue streak was being cursed into existence. Keep in mind the argument is that Iraq is The Most Important War Ever because of the legions of Raghead Sunzabitches waiting to come cross thousands of miles of ocean to blow up your house specifically. Also keep in mind that Iraq is nothing like Vietnam because unlike Vietnam, it’s The Most Important War Ever.
So how do we justify staying in Iraq? Abandon the first argument altogether, and whip out the oldest Vietnam canard in the book: The Domino Theory…which you spent the first part of the article saying it was the oldest Vietnam canard in the book. It’s not the terrorists, it’s Putin and China, meaning really…this is a proxy fight between us and the great Red Menace. But Iraq is nothing like Vietnam except for all the ways it’s umm…exactly like Vietnam.
Oh, and there’s oil.
Now to the upside. The U.S. may have spent piles of chips foolishly, but it is still the richest player at the global gaming table. In the Bush years, the U.S. may have squandered tons of political capital, but then the rest of the world is not exactly making up for the shortfall.
Nor has the U.S. become a “dispensable nation.” That is the most remarkable truth in these trying times. Its enemies from al Qaeda to Iran–and its rivals from Russia to China–can disrupt and defy, but they cannot build and lead.
For all the damage to Washington’s reputation, nothing of great import can be achieved without, let alone against, the U.S. Can Moscow and Beijing bring peace to Palestine? Or mend a global financial system battered by the subprime crisis? Where are the central banks of Russia and China?
Yes, so despite the HUGE FREAKING MISTAKE we made going into Iraq, and given your argument that it’s not too late for America to display actual leadership and correct the mistake and that the damage isn’t too extensive or systemic…your advice is to keep doing the same stupid thing we’ve been doing that cost us all that political capital and goodwill in the first goddamn place. Nice!
The Bush presidency will soon be on the way out, but America is not. This truth has recently begun to sink in among the major Democratic contenders. Listen to Hillary Clinton, who would leave “residual forces” to fight terrorism. Or to Barack Obama, who would stay in Iraq with an as-yet-unspecified force. Even the most leftish of them all, John Edwards, would keep troops around to stop genocide in Iraq or to prevent violence from spilling over into the neighborhood. And no wonder, for it might be one of them who will have to deal with the bitter aftermath if the U.S. slinks out of Iraq.
These realists have it right. Withdrawal cannot serve America’s interests on the day after tomorrow. Friends and foes will ask: If this superpower doesn’t care about the world’s central and most dangerous stage–what will it care about?
America’s allies will look for insurance elsewhere. And the others will muse: If the police won’t stay in this most critical of neighborhoods, why not break a few windows, or just take over? The U.S. as “Gulliver Unbound” may have stumbled during its “unipolar” moment. But as giant with feet of clay, it will do worse: and so will the rest of the world.
It’s called “a phased withdrawal” there Skippy. Maybe you’ve heard of the plan. The Democrats have been talking about such a phased withdrawal plan for a couple years now, but people like Joey here seem to think that “phased withdrawal” equals “leaving Iraq literally overnight and letting everyone who worked with America die” and therefore the result is that the argument magically morphs into “there are only two options: ‘Stay and Fight’ or ‘Cut and Run’.”
Nothing could be further from the truth. But then again, that’s why this piece is Wankery…it defeats itself with its own staggering illogic.
I’m gonna go clean something. Sheesh.