Welcome to the New Middle East

Welcome to the New Middle East. They used to say "warmly welcome" in China. Now we have a new Middle East, and we say warmly welcome to it. It seems all my thoughts fly away when I sit down to write. Well, that's not true. I do think of good things to say when I'm at the keyboard. I just seem to convince myself that I'm too tired, or too uncreative, or too something or other.

What if you were to write about the current war without being bitter about it? What subject do you want to write on? It had better be politics tonight. I'll write a few thoughts about the new Middle East, and about the soldiers who wondered when the government in Iraq was going to kick in and do its part.

I googled World War III during the recent war between Israel and Hezbollah. I found an article about some remarks that Prince Hassan of Jordan made two and a half years ago. Already, that long ago, he looked around him and saw the beginnings of World War III.

Well, not long after I ran across those comments by Prince Hassan, I heard the king of Jordan on the radio. Is his name King Abdullah? He's the gentleman who succeeded King Hussein when he died a few years ago.

Well I heard him on the radio when I was driving to work the other day. He said, "I look around me. I see war in Afghanistan. I see war in Iraq. I see bombing and people being killed everywhere. Now we have war in Lebanon. This is the new Middle East?"

No one should put any faith at all in our government.

Let's summarize the government's arguments in favor of their actions. By removing Hussein from power, they intended to start a chain of events in the region that would lead to democratic governments for the countries there. When democracy is the order of the day in the Middle East, they reason, we will have transformed the Middle East from a region of enemies to a region of friends. But how can that be? I can't go any further. The argument is too unsupportable on the face of it. I just can't go any further.

These are all unconnected fires now: Somalia and the Sudan, Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, Iraq, Afghanistan and Pakistan. Like our fires during late summer in the west, though, they can grow together. When they do grow together, you can't control them anymore. The conflagration becomes too hot. Do you know what's going to make them all grow together? When we wind up in a war with Iran. Then we'll have a war of the United States and Israel against everyone else. Not one country in the region will join us. We won't even have help from any of our allies in Europe at that point. We'll be on our own, and there's no way we can win.

We don't even have a name for the war we are in. We call it the Iraq war, but what do we name the war that started on September 11? We can't even distinguish the two any more. The White House calls it the war on terror, and it intentionally does not distinguish between the two. It says that Iraq is the central front in the war on terror. And the war on terror is the one that began on 9/11. Well come on, it's not a war on terror to begin with. What kind of a concept is that? We have to make war on an identifiable enemy, not on a method. That's what terror is, a method. We have to make war on Al Qaeda, or on Al Qaeda and its allies - some identifiable people who intend to do us harm. If we want to make war on terror, we might as well make war on bombing, or make war on shooting, or make war on some other vague idea.

I can't even get motivated to argue against these guys anymore. Did Bill Homan shut you up? Did he make you afraid to speak out? Did he make you lose confidence in your own point of view? Don't let it happen! Write with conviction, passion, seriousness, and hope! Write as Churchill did, and don't give up. You can't second guess yourself because Bill Homan kept bugging you. You can't keep yourself quiet because you had a correspondent who would not shut up. You can't shut up because he wouldn't let you alone, because he kept pestering you.

Our soldiers wondered almost plaintively, when is the Iraqi government going to do its part? We've helped them with all these elections, and with writing a constitution, and with forming a government. Isn't it time that the government help with the security situation now?

The problem is, the government that we said we were nurturing has been a fiction all along. It is not capable of restoring order because it is not a government. It is a bunch of puppets in the Green Zone. It's a bunch of wannabes who want to get their hands on the contract money from the United States, and who want to get their hands on oil revenues, and who want to get their hands on the other advantages to be had if you hang around the Green Zone. Yes, there are some Iraqi patriots among the people in the government. I'm sure many people ran for parliament in good faith. But the people who bickered for five months in 2006 as they decided about how to assemble a coalition government? That's not how a real government behaves. That's how a bunch of toadies behave when they can't do anything else.

Hitler sent his troops to Stalingrad, and when the Russians surrounded them, the troops still trusted that the Fuehrer would get them out. Our troops in Iraq still trust that Washington knows what it's doing, that things will turn out if only the Iraqis will do their part. But I keep thinking of what van Creveld said: "He sent his legions across the mountains into the barbarian north and lost them all." Bush sent his legions into Iraq in 2003, and now the country is not willing to fight. We've lost this war not because our enemies have defeated us in battle, but because our enemies have so clearly prevented us from succeeding. Hezbollah's fighters did not defeat the Israeli Defense Forces in battle, but they prevented the IDF from succeeding. That means they won the war. A scorekeeper would call that major skirmish a draw, but the whole region is calling it a victory for Hezbollah. They did better than expected, and prevented Israel from forcing them out.

The same thing is happening over a longer period of time in Iraq. Our enemies have not defeated us in battle, but they have prevented us from establishing a client state, friendly to our interests, in Baghdad. The whole region and the whole world can see that we are too weak to force our way in Iraq. No amount of air power can force a victory for us there, and we don't have enough combat soldiers to occupy a country of that size. By now, the war has proceeded a long way. I don't believe we can force it back into a direction that's in our favor. But no one is willing to say that. "Stay the course" versus "cut and run" still outline the debate. Where will a sophisticated analysis of this conflict come from? Who will initiate it? By now, any analysis that is realistic is sophisticated!