IRAQ STUDY GROUP co-chairmen Lee Hamilton and James Baker were the weekend’s most popular guests, but we’re going to start with the one show on which they did not appear. This Week featured an interview with British Prime Minister Tony Blair. On Iraq, and the consequences of a premature withdrawal, Blair said “to be absolutely blunt about it, we have to make sure this works. . . . The consequences of strategic failure are immense. . . . You’ve got to build the Iraqi capability.” He also reminded viewers what we are up against in the Middle East: “This is a profound struggle between moderation and modernization on the one hand, and extremism and sectarianism on the other. . . . This is part of something which is far bigger, which is basically, about whether we can create a sufficiently strong alliance of, as I say, moderate and modernizing people, across the whole of the region of the Middle East, that we turn it in a different direction. Because if I look at the terrorist threat that we face in my country today, that other countries in Europe face, that has happened right around the world . . . I think this was a long time in the making, and will take a long time to unmake.”
Sen. Gordon Smith (R-OR) appeared on This Week and called for a new strategy in Iraq or withdrawal. “If we’re going to be there, let’s win, if we’re not, let’s at least fight the war on terror in a way that makes sense. . . . The way you fight an insurgency is to clear, hold, and build. What I have seen with my own eyes on several occasions is that we clear, and we retreat. . . . That is just fundamentally wrong.” Joe Biden condemned the Iraqis with the bigotry of low expectations, saying “the president thinks there is a Thomas Jefferson or a Madison behind every sand dune waiting to jump up, and there are none.”
In the roundtable, George Will tried to dispel some of the sillier ideas contained in the Iraq Study Group: “The problem is it’s built around two highly controversial propositions. One is, they say Syria and Iran have an interest in preventing chaos in Iraq. Prove it and why. And then, as an almost verbal tick in this town, they say the solution is bound up with solving the Israeli/Palestinian dispute, which can be solved–second dubious proposition–by giving back the Golan Heights. Now try a thought experiment. You’re a Shiite terror, killer squad, or a Sunni killer squad, and you’re going out to kill your neighbors that morning, and you receive word that peace has come to the Israelis and Palestinians. So you say, ‘oh, in that case I’ll go home and become a proper citizen.'”
Face the Nation, Meet the Press, and Fox News Sunday all featured Hamilton and Baker, and if you were already familiar with the report’s findings you wouldn’t have learned much. But here are some of the highlights anyway. On Face the Nation, Hamilton emphasized the need for a political solution: “Look, every–every general, including General Chiarelli just yesterday, has pointed out that you cannot solve this problem with military force, that you have to get a political solution. We do not think we have 50, 100,000 troops to put there on a sustained basis. We heard that from a lot of people.”
On Fox News Sunday, Baker said “We are suggesting changing the primary mission of U.S. forces there. The training of Iraqi forces has been a secondary or tertiary objective; we’ve only had about 4,000 troops committed to that process, we suggest a five fold increase, up to 20,000; we suggest changing significantly the way it’s done, using our very best people, incentivizing them to a greater extent, and embedding them down to the company level.”
On Meet the Press, Hamilton talked about the danger of the Maliki government crumbling: a “Lot of things bad can happen there, and the fall of that government is certainly one of them. We are where we are. That’s a democratically elected government, he is in power. He has not taken the steps we’d like him to take, but the fact of the matter is, he’s there. And so our whole proposal is to deal with the real world–both in Washington and in Baghdad–and to say, ‘OK, this is where we are.’ What we want to try to do is strengthen this government, because we have a shared interest in bringing this war to a conclusion, and to do it in a way that protects the interests of both nations.”
Meet the Press‘s had a lively roundtable this week. Thomas Ricks, author of Fiasco, said “right now it’s not an insurgency, it’s a civil war. It’s, I think, the pure Hobbesian state, the war of all against all at this point. It isn’t a–it’s worse than a civil way in many ways. It’s in a state of meltdown. The country is falling apart. What strikes me: Neighborhoods in Baghdad are now essentially little armed fortresses. People have put up barriers, walls, even just burned-out cars so that most neighborhoods only have one entrance and exit. And this is true across the city that sprawls for 30 or 40 miles. It, it essentially is a series of armed camps now.”
Eliot Cohen, military historian and professor at Johns Hopkins University’s School of Advanced International Studies, was also on the panel, but he focused more on the wishful thinking that girds the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations:
Sonny Bunch is assistant editor at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.
