The "colossal foreign policy mistakes" of the United States, said a former U.S. ambassador to Sudan on PBS's Newshour this week, have made it impossible to intervene militarily in Darfur. (Whispering one last time, what might have been.)
Reality bites. Reality bit George Packer's commentary, "Unreality," in the latest New Yorker.
Asserting cynically that "[w]e are all realists now," Packer castigates us all: "Iraq has turned conservative and liberals alike into cold-eyed believers in a foreign policy that narrowly calculates national interest without much concern for what goes on inside other countries."
His litany of examples of those who selfishly want to exit Iraq -- from James Baker and Robert Gates to John Murtha and George McGovern -- goes along swimmingly until, at the commentary's piddling end, Packer has to come up with his own feeble plan to save Iraq. He begins with this holy humdinger of a sentence, "Though it may well be too late, politically a new Iraq policy is finally possible." Packer wants to get all the factions together in a room to brainstorm about saving Iraq, with decisions about U.S. troop levels contingent on the success or failure of the "effort."
But there is no Iraq, George ...
In today's "Helicopters on Rooftops," Cenk Uygur writes that "[n]o one in the streets of Iraq believes in their country above their ethnicity anymore."
That was brilliantly postulated in terms of Iraq's civil war last night on PBS's Newshour segment, "Attacks Spur Reprisal Killings in Baghdad." University of California history professor Mark LeVine vividly described the chaotic violence in Iraq as "the first globalized civil war ... a weak ineffectual state and a society that has literally been shattered ... that is what makes Iraq so difficult to put back together."
In Huffington Post's "Helicopters on Rooftops," Cenk Uygur goes on:
I am a huge advocate of constructive criticism. It is easy to say what is wrong, much harder to say how to fix it. At every step along the way of this great Iraqi misadventure, I have tried to lay out what I thought was the best choice out of all the bad options in Iraq (there have been no good options in Iraq since we invaded, only the lesser of horrible evils).
But now we are completely out of options. ...
First of all, we are training an Iraqi army when there is no such thing as Iraq. No one in the streets of Iraq believes in their country above their ethnicity anymore. A united Iraq is a western fantasy. In reality, we are training a Shiite army that will eventually butcher the Sunnis, become an ally of Iran and, in the end, turn on us. This is so obvious. I find it shocking that people can't see what is clearly in front of their eyes.
Do the Shiites look like they're going to live with the Sunnis happily ever after? Why on God's green earth wouldn't a Shiite Iraqi army be a natural ally for a Shiite Iran? Why can't we learn the lesson of the mujahideen in Afghanistan and Saddam Hussein Iraq - that when you arm people in the Middle East to fight against your enemies of the moment, they wind up coming back to fight you eventually?
I've noticed in the past few days that the talking head experts are beginning to critique James Baker's advocacy for opening a dialogue with Iran and Syria. "As if!," they're all starting to say. In Newshour's regular Friday night analysis segment, David Brooks spoke up:
JUDY WOODRUFF: ... Could there be a regional answer somehow?
DAVID BROOKS: I hope so, but I guess I'm a little dubious. In the first place, as somebody mentioned earlier in the program, Muqtada al-Sadr is having trouble keeping up with reality on the streets. I really have trouble thinking that people in Tehran, or Amman, or Damascus are going to be any better at keeping up with what's actually happening on the streets than Muqtada al-Sadr who's sitting right there.
[...]
DAVID BROOKS: I really have trouble believing people outside Iraq are going to be able to do a better job than we have or anybody else has in imposing order in Iraq. And by the way, I'm not totally convinced that Iran's interests dovetail with ours to any great extent, let alone Syria's interest.
Syria has an interest, for example, in Lebanon, in destabilizing the Lebanese government. We have an interest in propping up that government. Our interests just don't dovetail with regimes like Syria and Iran.
JUDY WOODRUFF: And, E.J., you know, isn't it what -- I mean, aren't we hearing from different sources that talking to the region may be what the Baker-Hamilton Iraq Study Group is, among other things, that they're going to suggest?
E.J. DIONNE: When you have no really good options left, you go to options that may or may not work, but they're all that you can try.
And I agree with David. I think that the regional powers have real conflict within themselves over what they want. He's right that our interests conflict with Syria's and with Iran's.
On the other hand, as he said earlier, Syria and Iran, and certainly Saudi Arabia, and certainly Jordan, do not have an interest in this thing flying apart. I mean, it could be very, very dangerous to them. And so, while this is not a great option, I do think that it is one option worth pursuing, trying to get some regional cooperation to ending this.
Iran and Syria, just like the U.S., need to have some entity with which to deal. But there is none. Even al-Sadr's militias have gone beyond his sphere of influence. There is no there there. Not anymore.
NEXT UP? The Tariq Aziz solution.
Oh yeah.
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NOTE: There's no transcript up yet of the Newshour segment, but you can listen via Real Audio or MP3 player. Professor LeVine is pretty far left, but he knows the Middle East, speaks Arabic, Hebrew, Turkish, and Persian, and has been in Iraq as recently as 2004.
I hope you listen and then comment here. I found the discussion with Prof. LeVine, and Salameh Nematt of the Arab newspaper Al Hayat, compelling, and as bracing as ice water in January.
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A variation is posted at No Quarter.