Right Side of the Rainbow

Boston Globe columnist Jeff Jacoby calls for more U.S. troops in Iraq:

This week, the Baker-led Iraq Study Group formally presents its report to President George W. Bush. Its key recommendations are reportedly that US troops in Iraq be gradually withdrawn and that the United States turn to Iran and Syria for help in reducing the violence. One study group member, speaking to The New York Times, summed up the bottom line : “We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out.”

The president will be urged by many to waste no time implementing the Baker group’s ideas. Which is indeed what he should do — assuming that he has come around to favoring defeat in Iraq, the death of the doctrine that bears his name, and the empowerment of the worst regimes in the world. If, however, Bush prefers success to failure and would rather live up to, not abandon, the principles he has articulated in the war against radical Islam, he should politely accept the ISG report and then do the opposite of what it recommends.

The Iraq Study Group, writes Ralph Peters in the New York Post, is “another panel of amateurs designing a military strategy:”

The proposal to embed more American military trainers with Iraqi units makes sense, but creates a grave danger: the prospect of a coordinated revolt among Shias in uniform who slaughter or take hostage thousands of our dispersed troops.

The best deterrent is the back-up presence of our own Army and Marine combat formations. As long as our cavalry can ride to the rescue, the prospect of a sectarian mutiny to “teach America a lesson” and humiliate us remains low.

Now early word has it that The Fabulous Baker Boys (straight from the political boneyard and known formally as the Iraq Study Group) will recommend withdrawing U.S. combat troops from Iraq by 2008, while leaving behind our embedded trainers and vulnerable support units.

This is the sort of nonsense that sounds great to civilians with no military experience. To veterans, it’s nuts.

If the Baker Commission gets its way, America will become the Green Zone, writes Chicago Sun-Times columnist Mark Steyn:

… I wonder whether the commission thought to hear from anyone such as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore. A couple of years back, on a visit to Washington just as the Democrat-media headless-chicken quagmire-frenzy was getting into gear, he summed it up beautifully:

“The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America’s credibility and will to prevail.”

As I write in my new book, Singaporean Cabinet ministers apparently understand that more clearly than U.S. senators, congressmen and former secretaries of state. Or, as one Baker Commission grandee told the New York Times, “We had to move the national debate from whether to stay the course to how do we start down the path out.”

An “exit strategy” on those terms is the path out not just from Iraq but from a lot of other places, too — including Iran, North Korea, Sudan, Venezuela, Russia, China, the South Sandwich Islands. For America would be revealed to the world as a fraud: a hyperpower that’s all hype and no power — or, at any rate, no will. According to the New York Sun, “An expert adviser to the Baker-Hamilton commission expects the 10-person panel to recommend that the Bush administration pressure Israel to make concessions in a gambit to entice Syria and Iran to a regional conference …”

On the face of it, this sounds an admirably hard-headed confirmation of James Baker’s most celebrated soundbite on the Middle East “peace process”: “F - - k the Jews. They didn’t vote for us anyway.” His recommendations seem intended to f - - k the Jews well and truly by making them the designated fall guys for Iraq. But hang on: If Israel could be forced into giving up the Golan Heights and other land (as some fantasists suggest) in order to persuade the Syrians and Iranians to ease up on killing coalition forces in Iraq, our enemies would have learned an important lesson: The best way to weaken Israel is to kill Americans. I’m all for Bakerite cynicism, but this would seem to f - - k not just the Jews but the Americans, too.

It would, furthermore, be a particularly contemptible confirmation of a line I heard Bernard Lewis, our greatest Middle Eastern scholar, use the other day — that “America is harmless as an enemy and treacherous as a friend.” To punish your friends as a means of rewarding your enemies for killing your forces would seem to be an almost ludicrously parodic illustration of that dictum. In the end, America would be punishing itself. The world would understand that Vietnam is not the exception but the rule.

Have you ever realized that you made a mistake the moment you made it?

On the morning that we withdraw under fire from Iraq, how great will our remorse and shame be? What will we have revealed about our national character? What lesson will our enemies draw? And won’t they be right?

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