Iraq War Hawk, David Frum: "Iraq Isn't Ours To Save"

Iraqis who have volunteered to join the army and fight ISIS militants parade in Baghdad. (Reuters/The Atlantic)

A Hawk's Case For Caution

David Frum

I was a strong supporter of the Iraq war. Now I urge caution about military action against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) insurgency in the country.

U.S. intervention to defend its interests and support its friends remains essential. But the government in Baghdad is not an American friend, and action against ISIS will not advance U.S. interests. Instead, Washington faces a real risk of being drawn into conflict to protect an Iranian ally from the consequences of his own misrule—and paying Tehran a strategic price for the privilege. 

The United States handed the government of Nouri al-Maliki a real opportunity at the end of its troop surge in 2008. Iraq had been stabilized militarily, both by the battlefield successes of the U.S.-led coalition and—maybe even more—by American-designed political initiatives to bring Sunnis into the Iraqi political system. Maliki’s Shiite-dominated government proceeded to discard all these achievements.  

You can read a disturbing timeline of Maliki’s failures here. The bottom line: After finishing second in the elections of 2010, the prime minister held onto power through a sequence of parliamentary maneuvers that left him dependent on Iranian-backed Shiite coalition partners. This outcome probably suited his own inclinations more than the broader-based government midwifed by the United States in 2006. Maliki's second government retooled itself as an authoritarian and sectarian regime. Sunni leaders were driven from office, arrested, and in some cases executed. 

Maliki insisted that all U.S. troops leave Iraq by the end of 2011—a demand that was likely welcomed by the Obama administration. What wasn’t welcome was the new role Maliki chose for himself: an Iranian ally who allowed his airspace to serve as a resupply corridor for Bashar al-Assad’s Iranian-supported forces in Syria.

Now, the most extreme and brutal of the anti-regime forces inside Syria has turned against Maliki. He is seeking American help, and Maliki’s patrons in Tehran appear content to see the United States rescue their client. According to some reports, the Iranians view U.S. aid to Maliki as a strategic partnership that could smooth the way to a nuclear deal more favorable to them.

Is this situation not utterly upside down? It’s Iran that has a vital interest in the survival of Maliki, not the United States. It’s Iran that should be entreating the U.S. for assistance to Maliki—and Iran that should be expected to pay the strategic price for whatever support Maliki gets. 

ISlS has captured cities in northern Iraq because the Iraqi army collapsed there. But as it moves south, it will encounter much larger Shiite populations and Shiite militias as vicious as itself. We’re not going to see ISIS ruling the country. We may see carnage in Baghdad, as we’ve seen carnage in Syria. Both countries are suffering horrifying humanitarian disasters, but as security challenges they present only a local threat. Of all the potential actors, the United States is the one with the least cause to involve itself—and the one best positioned to insist on conditions for any involvement.

The United States overestimated the threat from Saddam Hussein in 2003. Without an active nuclear-weapons program, he was not a danger beyond his immediate vicinity. That war cost this country dearly. The United States failed in its most ambitious objective: establishing a stable, Western-oriented government for all of Iraq. It did, however, succeed in establishing a stable, Western-oriented government in a part of Iraq: Kurdistan. Let’s focus resources instead on strengthening our relationship with that impressive enclave—and hope that as much as possible of Iraq’s oil wealth ends up under Kurdish control.

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Alan: If George Bush and Dick Cheney had not waged their Whimsy War on Iraq, thus undermining a stable country that was a staunch ally of Ronald Reagan -- a country with no WMD and no involvement in 9/11 -- the current ISIS crisis would not exist. 

ISIS' seizure of Mosul and Tikrit (Saddam Hussein's hometown) would have been inconceivable --- like The Tea Party winning the Oval Office, both houses of Congress and packing the Supreme Court with nine judges all named Antonin Scalia.  

The prospect of a 9/11-type terror strike launched on the United States from Iraq or Syrian soil would have been unthinkable except in the delusional minds of paranoid xenophobes whose constituency (spearheaded by Wolfowitz, Cheney, Rumsfeld and Bolton) was solely responsible for kicking every hornet's nest in the Islamic world, then wondering why blowback was biting them in the ass.

If tables were turned, Americans would have already launched terror attacks across the Middle East. For that matter, the entire Iraq War -- from inception onward -- has been an unrelenting exercise in state-sponsored terrorism perpetrated by Uncle Sam.

During the run-up to The Iraq War, everyone with an internet connection and a folded cortex was aware that the invasion was monstrously stupid -- and grotesquely unjust.  (Pope Benedict XVI declared the war unjust. http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/07/pope-benedict-xvi-questions-if-modern.html)

Remember "Shock and Awe?" Remember "The Power of Pride?" 

Who's shocked now? 

And what about the pride - which, predictably, came before the fall - and wasted all those lives? 

The dead, the maimed.

The Americans, the Iraqis?

 Since the Vietnam War, two lessons scream at us. 

"You don't get involved in somebody else's Civil War." 

"And you don't start them." 

When we forget either lesson, American soldiers come home in caskets having accomplished nothing. 

We owe our troops trustworthy guidance, not swashbuckle, bluster and simian chest-thumping.

Fear-driven Christians,  cheerleading the Apocaplypse,  are the most reprehensible actors in this whole sordid scenario.

They are America's Taliban.  http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2012/09/the-newsroom-tea-party-is-americas.html

"Pope Benedict Questions Whether War Will Ever Again Be Just"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/05/benedict-xvi-from-now-on-there-are-no.html

Alan: Three star Air Force general friend, AWC, age 95, recently confided: "It seems we haven't fought a "good war" since World War II."

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"Terrorism And The Other Religions"

http://paxonbothhouses.blogspot.com/2014/04/terrorism-and-other-religions-juan-cole.html