Flit

DEAD ON, SARGE I find

DEAD ON, SARGE

I find it amusing that the two soldier-type bloggers (and that's not to elevate my own experiences to theirs by any means) are consistently the ones most skeptical of the whole rope-a-dope, Iraq-invasion, this-is-all-part-of-a-cunning-plan rhetoric. Me, I'd go even farther than Sgt Stryker, though. It's not just that an Iraqi invasion isn't in the cards; it's that there's no way they could assemble a popular resistance movement like the Northern Alliance within Iraq before the end of Bush's first term, if then. They're working with nothing, here, people.

If you wanted to reshuffle the cards of the Middle East in the next two years, there is one way, and one way only, that I can see. Repudiate Wilson, and recognize a democratic Kurdistan. It's the Russians' Cuba strategy redux, really: prop up one communist state in the region, and let the ripples disrupt all the other totalitarian dictatorships of the region for decades. Likewise here, with an Islamic democracy and a pro-American population. Come on, we're not really going to turn these people over to the Iraqis some day, are we?

Unlike James Dunnigan, I wouldn't dare try to guess what would happen next. But I don't think there's any doubt it would be destabilizing... and destabilizing the Iran-Iraq-Arabia-Syria axis would take some of the pressure off Israel and could turn the Osama Islamicist revolutionary types in on themselves. (The downside is that repudiating the Wilsonian preservation of borders will likely destabilize a lot of other places in the world as well, particularly the Balkans, but I firmly believe that stability for its own sake should not be the ultimate foreign policy objective of democracies.)

Update: Of course, Stryker responds to my linking to him by turning his blog into "Beers Across America" for some reason known only to himself a couple hours later, killing my link to his piece. NP, it's here.