Needless to say, both the history and geography contained in the warnings from Cheney et al are more than mildly suspect, as PHK illustrates. But the Caliphate is certainly a colorful way to package the President's claims that the West is engaged in another generational struggle of near-apocalyptic proportions akin to the Cold War. Norman Podhoretz and the World War IV advocates must be highly gratified.
"D" is for Dominoes?
Few would argue that the US is not facing a long-term threat of terrorist attacks on US interests at home and abroad. The debate is rather about the appropriate strategy for addressing that threat, which depends in part on how one views the nature and sources of the enemy's strengths and weaknesses, and the best means to reduce its strength and counter its ability to cause lasting damage. And one of the central points of contention in that debate is the place, within the "global struggle against violent extremism" (yes, GSAVE is actually a useful concept despite its origins) of the current fighting with the AlQaeda-linked insurgents in Iraq.
By introducing the caliphate argument, the Administration seems to be shifting away from crude "flypaper" logic, although certainly not abandoning the rhetoric entirely, based on the President's Sunday speech from the Oval Office. The handy feature of the caliphate argument is that it doesn't simply equate Iraq as the "central front in the GWOT" because that's where the terrorists are fighting. Rather, Iraq is proclaimed to be the main line of defense against the encroachment of a geopolitical enemy. We can't leave Iraq because it could be taken over by AlQaeda -- step one in the march to the caliphate. Echoes of dominoes anyone?
Big Media Justin and his Cato colleague, Christopher Preble, have addressed the Administration's fear of an AlQaeda victory in Iraq in The Daily Star. After examining Iraqi and Arab public opinion, as well as the hostility against AlQaeda of other well-armed Iraqi insurgent groups and sectarian militias, they conclude that if America leaves, AlQaeda will not inherit Iraq.
As Logan and Preble parse recent speeches by Administration figures, what emerges is not only the argument that AlQaeda's defeat in Iraq (by the US or by Iraqi forces?) will be critical to preventing AlQaeda from achieving its goal of a caliphate. That argument is supplemented by the assertion that a withdrawal by the US would be greeted by AlQaeda as a moral victory, which would in turn attract legions of bandwagonning Muslim supporters across the arc of instability.
And "P" is for Peace with Honor?
Shades of Nixon and Kissinger's "peace with honor," the President's Sunday speech expanded on the theoretical costs of America's losing credibility by prematurely withdrawing from Iraq, providing a laundry list of international audiences:
We would abandon our Iraqi friends and signal to the world that America cannot be trusted to keep its word. We would undermine the morale of our troops by betraying the cause for which they have sacrificed. We would cause the tyrants in the Middle East to laugh at our failed resolve, and tighten their repressive grip. We would hand Iraq over to enemies who have pledged to attack us and the global terrorist movement would be emboldened and more dangerous than ever before. To retreat before victory would be an act of recklessness and dishonor, and I will not allow it.
Logan and Preble respond to the President's final warning:
The jihadis will certainly claim that the American withdrawal represents a victory for their side, but they will do so whenever U.S. forces leave - be that next year, or 10 years from now. In his Johns Hopkins speech, Rumsfeld declared that a "retreat in Iraq" would tell our enemies "that if America will not defend itself against terrorists in Iraq, it will not defend itself against terrorists anywhere."
That is absurd. An American military withdrawal from Iraq would not signal that the U.S. has chosen to ignore events there; it expects all countries around the world to cooperate with it in the fight against terrorism. The withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq must be coupled with a clear and unequivocal message to the people of Iraq, and to the world: Do not threaten us; do not support anti-American terrorists. Meanwhile, the U.S. must continue to pursue Zarqawi and his network, just as it pursues bin Laden and his network. The world can be assured: the U.S. will take all necessary measures to carry the fight the enemy, wherever he might reside, be that in Germany, Afghanistan or Iraq.
An American military withdrawal from Iraq will hardly be a stepping stone for Al-Qaeda's grandiose plan to establish an Islamic super-state from Morocco to Indonesia. The Bush administration ought to stop inflating the costs of leaving Iraq, and take a more serious look at the benefits.
That's not to suggest that the Iraqis, the US and Iraq's neighbors shouldn't be concerned about AlQaeda taking advantage of chaos and low-grade civil war in western Iraq to maintain fluid bases of operations from which attacks outside Iraq could be carried out. The recent bombings in Amman underscore that threat. But that argues more in favor of working on the political dimensions of the non-AlQaeda insurgencies. (More on that later.) Not on casting the conflict in Iraq with Zarqawi's supporters as the battlefield on which the future of a caliphate is to be determined.
As I've argued for a long time, the US needs a "peace with honor" exit for its own political equilibrium, not for its international standing, which will be helped, not hurt, by significantly scaling back its involvement in Iraq. And I'm willing to engage in a few harmless fictions from the Administration if it's helpful to that process. But ginning up new existential battles is a pernicious distortion of the threat from terrorism America is facing as well as of the nature of the conflicts in Iraq and the Middle East. As we should already have learned from the Iraq/WMD fiasco, fashioning and executing sensible strategy is considerably more difficult when the Administration engages in fanciful threat inflation.
cross-posted at American Footprints
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