I mentioned this obvious parallel yesterday, wondering why Glenn Reynolds doesn’t favor U.S. or allied occupation or re-occupation of the place. Glenn favors indefinite U.S. occupation of Iraq to prevent a terror-state emerging in the chaos we helped unleash there. So why is he happy to allow Gaza to become a terror-state without our military intervention? Isn’t the threat to the West the same – or maybe worse? Glenn responds by asserting that my point is a "mindless snark." He says
It’s not like we invaded Iraq for these reasons, after all.
Well: no shit, Sherlock. But this leads to an obvious further question: why did we invade Iraq four years ago? A gentle reminder: We did not invade Iraq to police a sectarian civil war for ever. We did not invade Iraq to permanently prevent an al Qaeda presence there with our troops. We invaded to remove what we were told were stockpiles of biological and chemical weapons, and to pre-empt the development of nuclear weaponry, because, after 9/11, we decided not to take the risk of Sddam handing over such weapons to Qaeda or Qaeda-style terrorists. Removing a brutal tyranny and creating a space for democratic life were secondary and tertiary reasons, and were designed to defuse the logic of Islamism in the Middle East. I agreed with all three rationales. But, ahem, what are we doing there now? We discovered that the WMD issue was a chimera or a lie. We removed and had Shiite goons execute the dictator. We tried to construct a constitutional order for a non-dictatorial, national political settlement. History will judge whether the subsequent disaster was a function of a hard task screwed up or an impossible task screwed up. But right now, we have done all we wanted to originally accomplish, except, of course, anything close to a stable state. So what is the rationale for staying?
According to the Republican candidates, it is because leaving would make matters worse (even Rudy Giuliani isn’t foolish enough to repeat the democracy objective). How worse? The emergence of a failed state where al Qaeda and other Islamist mass-murderers could regroup and thrive. Well … now look at Gaza.
It was a place once occupied in order to improve Israeli security. The occupation was then designed to prevent terrorism against Israeli citizens. Then it was handed over to the same kind of ramshackle, corrupt and mafia-like political apparatus we are sponsoring in Iraq. Now, with no political settlement or over-arching road to any sort of compromise, we see a new and much more dangerous terror-apparatus emerging in the failed mini-state. We first saw Fatah get overtaken by Hamas, and now we see Hamas being rivaled by al Qaeda. We have, in other words, another mini-Iraq.
Hence my question. Why don’t the neocons support reoccupation by Israel or the U.S.? Surely, if you support occupying Iraq idefinitely to prevent a terror-state, you also have to support occupying Gaza indefinitely to prevent a terror-state. In fact, don’t you logically have to occupy an awfully large number of places to do what we are currently supposed to do? And if our existence is at stake, as Giuliani has argued, why on earth aren’t we already occupying most of the Middle East? And, more importantly, since our and the Israelis’ experience undoubtedly suggests that occupation itself sustains and generates Islamist terror, why do we want to create more terror in the short term in the Middle East?
These are the hard questions we have to ask. We are obviously still at grave risk from Islamist terror – more risk, I fear, than we faced on 9/10/2001. And yet the major tool the government has offered to counter such terror has spawned more of it, and their response is to persist in, and even intensify, the strategy we are now pursuing. There is no safe future, and withdrawal won’t provide one. I’m not crazy. I favor major redeployment in Iraq but have no illusions about the dangers it wil spawn. I just think the dangers we are already spawning by the current strategy are clearly more severe.
Maybe the neocons believe we need more guns, more troops, and more occupation for another couple of bloody, brutal decades before things will improve. Fine: so say so. Be honest about what your vision entails: a bloody, brutal, endless empire that will only improve matters only after it makes them a lot worse. Tell the truth. And then the American people can decide whether this really is a good idea.
(Photo: Mahmud Hams/AF/Getty.)
The Dish 