Moderately Uninformed

Writing at the Moderate Voice, Shaun Mullen gets quite a few things—almost everything—wrong, in just four short paragraphs:

Robert Gates got it wrong right out of the, er . . . gate on Tuesday in the opening session of his nomination hearing to replace Donald Rumsfeld as secretary of defense.

Gates declared that Iraq is "one of the central battlefronts" in the war on terrorism, but failed to note why. His omission compounded the biggest of President Bush's Big Lies: The U.S. didn't go to war in Iraq because it was awash with terrorists. It is awash with terrorists because Rumsfeld's horribly botched occupation opened the door to Al Qaeda and others.

Gates did get a couple of big things right: The U.S. is losing the war and the resulting mess may trigger a regional war.

His candor is a refreshing change, but I fear that Robert Gates is too little too late.

First, Gates never claimed that we were losing in Iraq. As a matter of fact he expressly said we weren't losing (nor winning, implying a stalemate). I invite Mr. Mullen to go back and re-read what actually happened, instead of printing what he apparently wanted to hear.

I'd also point out that prior to the 2003 invasion, several terror groups called Iraq home, that Saddam paid bounties to the families of Palestinian suicide bombers, and that Abu Nidal, Abu Abbas, and Abdul Rahman Yasin, the 1993 WTC bomb builder, all lived in Iraq with Saddam's knowledge and perhaps his blessing. In addition, Iraq's intelligence services were complicit in planning, financing, training, and executing terror attacks internally and regionally. Iraq had quite a stable of terrorists and terrorist-enablers prior to the invasion, and I frankly resent Mr. Mullen's patently dishonest mischaracterization that Iraq wasn't waist-deep in terrorism.

As the Man said, the stated objective of the invasion was "to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein's support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people."

Mullen might not like those facts, but he isn't allowed to make up his own history in response.

I will agree that the post-war occupation (the war itself lasted weeks and was a decisive U.S. victory) has been botched horribly, but it wasn't all Rummy and Bush; State and other government agencies have proven to be every bit as much incompetent as the civilian leadership at the Pentagon, even if they aren't as visible.

Mullen also seems to imply that everything going wrong in Iraq happens only as a result of U.S. actions and/or inactions, a patently dishonest rhetorical position that flies directly in the face of reality.

His position—rancid "blame America first" pabulum echoed by far too many "serious" people who should know better—ignores the fact that other regional actors such as Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, etc all have the capability to influence the situation within Iraq for good, or ill.

Sadly, most Arab nations such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and others that could have a positive influence have adopted a mostly "hands off" policy, which had the Iraqi foreign minister today blaming them for not doing more. The two nations that have been making a concerted effort to affect conditions in Iraq have both been negative, with Syria supporting the Baathist insurgency and Iran supporting Shiite militias. It also ignores the free will of Iraqis, some of which (particularly some of the Sunni tribes in al Anbar) is self-defeating.

Mullen’s next-to-parting shot is ignorant along those same lines, another failure of shortsightedness.

He states a U.S failure could trigger a larger regional war. I've got a news flash for him and you as well; the war between western and Islamist philosophies—the larger regional war, or if left unfinished soon, a probable world war—has been building in its latest incarnation for nearly 30 years. It is merely the latest iteration in a war over a thousand years old, and renewed conflict is a certainty. It will occur, regardless of the proximate trigger.

If we are very very lucky we will fight this as a regional war instead of a world war, and sooner rather than later. We should fight it before bare democracies in Iraq and Lebanon fall to the influence of Shia Islamists, and preferably before Iran completes and uses nuclear weapons on Israel, wiping out the Gaza Strip and the West Bank in the process, prompting a dying Israel to launch a nuclear counterstrike that will kill tens of millions of Iranians.

Robert Gates has a terminal weakness common to many realists, the inability to realize that the "other" does not think like us, or even necessarily opposite of the way we think. The term for this sort of failure is called mirroring, an it was such disastrous thinking that convinced the Japanese 65 years ago that a strike on the U.S Naval base at Pearl Harbor would knock us out of the war.

The Japanese did not understand the psychology of America then, just as Gates, Baker, and other realists make the mistake of misunderstanding how the apocalyptic Hojjatieh sect thinks now. The Hojjatieh sect ruling Iran is a branch of Shia Islam so extreme that Ayatollah Khomeini outlawed it in 1983. These are not rational Cold War Russians, but zealots hoping to expedite the return of their Messiah, and they are sure that they have the Allah-given mandate to bring the Madhi back to earth through nuclear fire.

We will fight this war. The only question is how high the butcher's bill will be, which is in part determined by howe much longer we procrastinate.

Mullen fundamentally misunderstands what the nomination of Robert Gates represents. He isn't "too little, too late." The realist school of foreign policy to which Gates subscribes created the problem with which we are now confronted.

Robert Gates may be a fine man and great public servant, but unless this leopard has changed his spots considerably, he is precisely the wrong man for the job.