Ground State

The title links to an interesting post by Jordan W. on Michael Totten's excellent blog. I disagree with the author but recommend the read.

That Iraq had chemical and biological WMD programs prior to the first Gulf war is inarguable. Their state prior to the second Gulf war was misunderestimated - but is in the end irrelevant. The UN sanctions program, Oil for Bribes Food, constrained Saddam. Absent the second Gulf war and with the sanctions ending, Hussein would have plenty of chemical and biological WMD today. That Saddam was supporting terrorists targeting the US is also inarguable, but is often argued anyway. Abdul Rahman Yasin of the first WTC bombing lived in Baghdad working for the Iraqi government after fleeing the US in 1993. The post 9/11 decision to topple Iraq's government was strategically sound in a purely realpolitik sense. Saddam was pursuing WMD and supporting terrorism against the US. Keep that principle in mind.

The easy path for the US in Iraq would have been to install a friendly general and leave town. What's been attempted is wholesale transformation of rival sectarian groups ruled by a vicious dictator into a pluralistic democracy. It was bold. Perhaps naive, but perhaps not out of reach for a nation that orchestrated the transformation of imperial Japan. It has been in the end a test not of us but of Islam. Relieved of a sadistic madman - would Iraq choose the 21'st century or the 7'th? The debate on whether Iraq was relevant to the war against fascist Islam took place in the West. There was no debate within Al Qaeda. They knew success of the model in Iraq meant the end of Al Qaeda's vision.

Progress in Iraq has come down to tribally-cohesive regions ruled by local Imams ridding themselves of Al Qaeda by using the US to do the fighting. We cannot decry Americans being used to fight Al Qaeda in Iraq, that is by our design. As we rightly applaud the success of the surge and Al Qaeda's defeat piecemeal we must note the failure of the elected national government. The body of Al Qaeda in Iraq is defeated, but not it's vision. The pluralistic democratic nation has not emerged and Iraq will partition itself. In a doomed attempt to prop up the failed national government against Iranian subversion we seek accommodation with Iran. Knowing this would be the endgame, we'd have been better off installing a friendly general.

To paraphrase Michael Ledeen, the recent NIE is not an intelligence estimate at all. It is a policy document. The policy announced is that we will bury our heads in the Iraqi sand and give Iran a free pass on killing Americans and developing nuclear WMD. Yet that is precisely the reason Iraq's government had to be toppled. We have retreated in the face of Islamic fascism hell-bent on obtaining nuclear weapons and destroying the West. And we have come full circle. We are abandoning our own post-9/11 first principle of national security.