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No more nightmares

Daniel Gallington
November 15, 2007

The secretary of state told Congress recently that Iran is “perhaps the single greatest challenge” to U.S. national security. This classic diplomatic understatement came after the president's more realistic assessment that a nuclear-armed Iran represents the threat of “World War III” — and the vice president's warning that we would “not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon.”

No kidding. Not to be sarcastic, but the Iran nuclear threat has been developing — relentlessly — for many years, through Democratic and Republican administrations alike, and has never shown any signs of abating. If the Bush administration doesn't do something about it, the next administration will have to, because the grim realities of large-scale Iranian fissile nuclear material production will soon be upon us. In this context, it has been suggested — several times by several commentators — that President Bush will not pass this problem on to his successor — no matter who it is — or alternatively, that he will not leave office without resolving this threat.

Again — no sarcasm intended — but that's really the least the administration should do under the circumstances: The now rapidly gathering Iran crisis is directly related to our preoccupation with Iraq and pursuing the wrong policy objectives there.

Ironically, the primary reason for our lack of strategic success in Iraq is that we didn't follow our own proven principles: Ronald Reagan's view of the Cold War was that “we win and they lose” — and we did and they did. Somehow, however, we forgot that idea in Iraq, and the situation there is described by the former U.S. coalition commander as a “nightmare with no end in sight.” It's not encouraging to hear such assessments, especially after we have been at it so long.

”OK, smart guy” you say — what should we have done differently and what should we do now?

The past: Forget the faulty intelligence issue — everyone believed in good faith that Saddam had weapons of mass destruction (WMD) — including both Clintons. Nevertheless, our manpower-intensive mission in Iraq should have been over fairly quickly. How? Destroy the WMD infrastructure; secure and/or selectively destroy the other weapon storage areas; take out Saddam, his sons and the rest of the regime's Ba'ath Party senior leadership. Keep the Iraqi army mostly intact, but with new, vetted and closely supervised leadership — primarily to offset radicals inside Iraq and from Iran. And, leave a few strategically located coalition logistic bases in-country or in-region with enough forces to neutralize outside interference and put down local risings. Then, get the manpower-intensive part of the U.S. military mission — in Iraq — out of there. For those accusing me of “20-20 hindsight”, I made a similar case here in 2003, except I urged we allow a certain amount of sectional conflict to both identify and dissipate the various radical factions.

The present: As Iraq's current borders were arbitrarily drawn in the first place, the postwar internal political goal for Iraq should have been a simple federal structure with three semi-autonomous regions: one each for the Sunnis, Shi'ites and Kurds. This is essentially the “Biden plan” that was rejected by the administration.

Ultimately, this concept may be the only political solution that will work in Iraq, and it's also an effective organization for our own interests and policies in the region, which we seem to have forgotten along the way. Democracy — while a worthwhile but much longer-term goal for the region — is simply not a realistic current policy.

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