Why is our foreign policy failing?

I am not a general or a president, but I am writing this because I do not believe that the power of the Executive is sacrosanct in a time of war. Especially since the incompetence of the Bush administration, deliberate or not, that led to this, should dispose you to believe that they may not necessarily be the best equipped to know how to conclude this business. That having been said, the details of how we got into a war on terror is not as important as how it can be stopped and not given reason to restart. And, that we never again embark upon such folly as long as we are able to call ourselves a nation.

What will happen in Iraq?

The Bush administration’s goal in Iraq is to establish a modern secular democracy in a Muslim country. If you think about it, that is quite a bit like having the goal of establishing the inverse, a theocracy, in the United States. Never mind the consequences of trying to force it with armed intervention.

In the Muslim world, there can’t be a separation of church and state. The state is the servant of the church. No state in Islam can exist without the blessing of the consensus of religious leaders. They are very powerful, the people believe in them, and they do not see any sense in giving up their control. Saddam tried to persecute them out of existence in Iraq, but they are still there and he is gone.

The three religious/political factions in Iraq couldn’t be a worse mix. The Kurds have been struggling for independence since Iraq was formed. The Shites and the Sunnis have a religious rift going back a thousand years, nurtured by religious leaders in an unbroken line of bigotry and intransigence. Add the Sunni fundamentalist Al Queda to the mix and you get Iraq today.

No secular government will be able to keep control in Iraq. The religious leaders will not accede to it unless they have control of the government. So a consensus of democratic secular leaders is moot until and unless they are subservient to the religious leaders. This is the root case for civil war in Iraq.

Al Queda is quite ruthlessly exploiting the tension between government and religious leaders and the history of hate between Sunni and Shite. They are growing stronger by the day blossoming under the rallying cry of holy war against the west. There are now 100 times as many active Al Queda as there were when we invaded Iraq, and 10,000 times more sympathizers. It has become a vast training ground for terrorists and there is no indication that the tide has even slowed.

Civil war or not, Iraq will remain a nightmare of terrorist breeding for at least a generation. This is just a fact we must recognize.

Our goal in Iraq should not be the creation of a western style democracy in a country and culture that is not prepared to assume the imperfect and perilous path of government by the people. You need only to study Islam briefly to understand why secular democracy is its mortal enemy. The difference is the emphasis of the religion. Christianity emphasizes rules that every individual is responsible for upholding in himself. Islam emphasizes prayer, how, when and where, and the channel of the god head through the religious leadership. Indeed, the core conflict between Sunni and Shite is the claim to legitimacy of the path of inheritance of the authority to speak for God. A Muslim is assured heaven in the following of religious leadership. A Christian must seek heaven in an individual battle within himself. In the certainty that this will offend the Muslims, it is a stone fact that Islam does not engender enough maturity in its followers, as a culture or to the level of each and every individual, to function as citizens in a democracy, each responsible to form and act on his own internal moral conclusions. Hell, Americans can barely do it and we have had a good deal of practice.

The December 2005 Iraqi elections reflect the complete allegiance of Sunni to Sunni and Shite to Shite, a division perfectly split on religious lines. How can anyone be foolish enough to hope that this result could presage a shift to secular governance?

What must be done in Iraq, in order to prevent the eventual emergence of a wildly unstable state in the middle east, years of civil war and a terrorist training super nova, is to let the country split up into three new states. Have an orderly civil war. Displaced population and regional migrations will be the result, but the alternative is continued violence that will produce identical results at a higher human toll. Each faction could then see to it’s own internal and external security and sectarian tensions would be less easily exploited by Al Queda. The newly formed states would form an alliance, economic and military, to afford better protection against cross border incursions by Al Queda and to diffuse any economic rivalry about oil revenues. This alliance would overseen by a council of Islamic states, representatives to which would be appointed by Islamic states that are adjacent to Iraq or otherwise have demonstrable interest in the stability of the region. A permanent garrison of U.S. troops in Iraq will accomplish nothing but to continue to inflame Jihad.

What will happen in Afghanistan?

The Taliban are still a powerful force in Afghanistan, as is Al Queda. Add the semi-outlaw warlords of the region and the picture is one of a nation that will not survive without financial and military support for its fledgling government. Since their only cash crop is the opium poppy, their becoming self supporting is problematic.

They too are in a civil war. Their civil war is a contest between the former leadership and the current U.S. puppet government. If we pull out, the government will only last a few days. Afghanistan will revert to the Taliban and pick up where they left off training terrorists of Islamic Jihad. The solution here is the same as in Iraq. Regional interests should take the mantle of responsibility for Afghan stability. Their troops with financial support from the international Muslim community will go much further in stabilizing the new country than will occupation by the infidel troops of the west.

What is a war on terror?

Terrorism crosses the line of civility between justifiable warfare and crime. There have always been aspects of crime in war, it has only been the personal honor of professional soldiers that have bred a code of conduct for war. Born of the horrible experience of butchering your fellow man, men who have done it acknowledge the reality of its perpetual existence, and have sought through the authority of that experience to contain the carnage to those most able to bear it, brave young men.

Terrorism, Guerilla warfare has been with us for millennia. Whether history has recorded an episode of it as an heroic endeavor or an act of cowardice has been up to the survivors. That is what it is about, the ability to characterize history in the way you see fit is an irresistible charm. The one thing that a Master Sergeant of the Army knows that few others do, is that even a drop of blood of his young men is the most precious gem of all. He is honor bound to spill it in buckets if need be, and he will do it without hesitation for what ever cause you set.

A terrorist, by whatever belief that sustains him, seeks the same purity as any man of honor. If you belittle him, you infuriate him to more acts of horror. If you applaud him, you encourage more acts of horror. If you honor him as a warrior, you elevate him. If you elevate him, he will participate in the formulation of the future. As distasteful as this may seem, it is the only answer there has ever been to terrorism.

This is the war on terrorism. Like Israel invited the terrorists of the Diaspora to participate in the formation of a new nation, the next century will be shaped by inclusion or destroyed by exclusion.

How do we regain our stature in the world community?

We have recently set our feet on a path that will lead to the end of liberty. Of the things that we must respect, in the shadow of our history, the autonomy of sovereign nations is paramount. If we do not respect the sovereignty of other nations, they are unlikely to respect our sovereignty. We must defend ourselves and the interest of our citizens against any such incursions by other nations that will do us material harm. We are the vessel of liberty and a shining light to the world’s best minds. If we cease to be that and are instead the purveyors of a tyranny of the aristocracy of wealth, we will not survive, because we will not deserve to survive.

We have been the enemy of tyranny in principle, although that principle has been compromised all too often in our colored history. Still, it is just an experiment some two hundred and a quarter years old. Now, this year, this week and this day, we are still offered an opportunity, by God’s grace, to shape a future for mankind that will include anyone of merit with and idea of how to conduct a future.

It is astonishing that we still seem to believe that what we have been taught and what we believe is not what other nations believe. However flawed the flagellations of the world’s cultures, the world’s people seek justice, honor and the rights of man in their souls. The precise definitions of justice, honor and rights, is and should be a local matter. Self determination is the key to peace, whether it is derived through democracy or theocracy, or in rare instances, a popular dictatorship. We should conduct our foreign policy in accordance with and in recognition of that fact.

Lately, our foreign policy has been very much like what you might expect from a high school class president. And of course, that is what has happened. We are attempting to force our version of the minutiae of ideals and values on communities and cultures that disagree with us on the mere details of how life is to be lived. We have gone to war for our liberty, to free our slaves, to conquer territory that established our borders and to defend the liberty of the world. It was not too long ago that we were helping the Afghans defend themselves against an ideological hegemony by the U.S.S.R. We have never before gone to war to force a style of government on a people, with possible exception of Iran-Contra. Iraq is imperialism of ideology. If we are willing to do this abroad, you must ask yourself how long it will be before we undertake a war of ideology on ourselves. The term Nazi comes to mind.

A policy of preemptive action might have prevented a disaster like Pearl Harbor, where huge amounts of highly visible naval ordinance had to be marshaled prior to the attack. Israel has been highly successful with preemptive policy when troops were massing on their borders. Still, it is hard to imagine anyone could have justified an invasion of Afghanistan to the world prior to 9/11. The FBI was helpless, even in light of some very good information, to prevent 9/11. A preemptive policy against terrorism is extremely flawed in that you can't predict which of the many millions of people that would like to blow up something in America will actually do it. Which of these people do we preemptively attack and how? To quote George Bush, "I'm not going to use a million dollar cruise missile to blow up a ten dollar tent." Well, he hasn't, he has used a 400 billion dollar invasion instead. This illustrates that the quality of your intelligence has a very great bearing on the results you are going to get with preemption. The fact is that, depending on how aggressive you are, you will persecute many more people that would not have actually done anything than you will people that would have committed a terrorist attack. Even at that, the fact that someone would have committed a crime in the future is not necessarily a crime until significant preparations are made, a conspiracy. So preemption of terrorism through violence or detention is a crime against civil rights committed to prevent a crime. This will not be good for our reputation, and it will lead to less and less cooperation from the world's nations.

We are most successful when we are able to lead by example. We must preserve and protect our economy. It is what enables us to do the heavy lifting of global justice. We can and should endeavor to protect the rights and human dignity of peoples of other nations, but we cannot dictate to them, any more than we would accept them dictating to us. Certain exceptions like fighting nuclear proliferation do transcend any self restraint on our part.

Warfare is justifiable when there is a mortal danger or a social injustice so grievous that it can’t be overlooked. America is a better place because of the Civil War. Hitler would not have made us happy as our “Leader“. Vietnam ultimately served a purpose. The first Gulf War was justifiable if ill advised, as was Afghanistan. Iraq is not justifiable, on top of being ill advised.

Communism has come and gone in about a century. The life span of Radical Islam will be shorter because it offers no solutions for real problems, whereas communism did, no matter how flawed. Our posture with the U.S.S.R. was containment. That is what our policy should be with Radical Islam. Fighting wars on their soil will only enable the radical’s message. Without the U.S. as a catalyst of hate, Radical Islam will quickly burn out, because it serves no life purpose, it only serves the political prestige of Islamic theocrats, and is useless in our absence.