Seriously...Iraq could turn out OK
Responding to news that Iran may be worse news than ever, Syria is still a threat, and Pakistan is problematic, Glenn Reynolds links to people caught up in a "boys' night out" mood: Thank goodness we're in the middle of all these conflicts! The bad guys don't have a chance now!
More soberly, Michael Young says "the perception of failure" in Iraq is "ambient (and utterly mistaken)." As usual, I don't know what's going on there.
For Bush's critics, it may be enough to say the U.S. effort in Iraq has not been a brilliant success, and strategically it was a distraction from the true war on Islamic terror, which should have been fought to more of a completion in Afghanistan and Pakistan. Apparently the 9/11 Commission says very little about the war in Iraq, while emphasizing that it is of the highest importance to fight Islamic terrorism. By implication, Bush has missed the boat at least to some extent.
Young comes to Bush's defence, although in a surprising way, with a strategic argument. He first outlines how severe are the problems with Saudi Arabia. These go deeper, and farther back in time, than harping on relations between the Bush family and their Saudi friends would indicate.
"The real difficulty with Saudi Arabia is that it poses a problem with no solution, at least in the short term: The despotism, brutality and corruption of the Al-Saud has reinforced domestic Islamists, many of whom sympathize with Osama bin Laden and detest the United States; yet democratic elections could well bring these people to power. At the same time, if the Al-Saud crush Al-Qaeda in their midst, this would allow the royal family to ward off real change, generating new forms of violent opposition."
Young literally can't see much of a solution other than for the U.S. to take over the Saudi oilfields.
"Short of this option, there is an alternative, namely deriving advantages from democratization in Iraq. This may be a long shot given the ambient (and utterly mistaken) perception of failure there. But as Americans consciously turn their attention away from the grand ambitions that accompanied the war in Iraq and embrace a more urgent desire to head for the country's exits, they might want to recall that one of the inherent aims of the Bush administration's campaign was to protect the U.S. against the dangerous vicissitudes of Saudi politics.
"Nothing has changed: In the long run a truly democratic Iraq would surely be more stable than most other Arab states; it could also provide a substitute model to the Saudis than the one presented today by Islamist extremists???Saudi liberals may be weak, but they are not nonexistent. But if pluralism proves too idealistic an alternative for the kingdom, and fails, a democratic Iraq, which will presumably also be a fairly pro-American Iraq, will be a far better regional bet than Saudi Arabia. That means that heading for the exits in Iraq is simply not an option."
Of course the Islamic terrorists are largely "non-state actors," and must somehow be treated as such. Yet some regimes are more dangerous to the U.S. and the world than others--and perhaps none is more dangerous than the Saudis. It is in this light that a substantial U.S. presence in Iraq, leading--we hope--to some kind of democracy, is such a hopeful development. We can hope that Young, Reynolds and others are correct that things in "Wild West" Iraq are not going as badly as some reports indicate. And we can soberly hope that Iraq will come down strategically on the side of the U.S. and West--whether the regime is really a democracy, or even dramatically better than Saddam's, or not.
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