As you’ve probably seen, there’s been a flurry of articles over the last week about Vice President Cheney, possible plans for war against Iran and murmurs from within the upper echelons of the US armed forces of possible resignations if the White House opts for that new adventure. But beyond all the scary predications and wild tales, Kevin Drum and Andrew Sullivan have picked out the real nugget: Cheney and the rest of the crew at the White House can’t even seem to get clear on what side they’re on or even what war it is they’re fighting.
That takes strategic incoherence into truly uncharted territory.
Here are the details.
In the Hersh piece in The New Yorker we learn that the US has essentially decided to get out of the al Qaeda/Sunni-jihadist fighting business and redirect our efforts toward fighting the Iranian peril. The real war we’re in the midst of now, it turns out, is the trans-Middle Eastern Sunni-Shi’a civil war. And we’re going to side with the Saudis, who will in turn enlist a bunch of al Qaeda type groups to work on our behalf against Iran.
Now, you may be worried that this sounds rather like how we got into this mess in the first place. But don’t worry. As Hersh writes, the Saudis are assuring the White House, that “they will keep a very close eye on the religious fundamentalists. Their message to us was ‘We’ve created this movement, and we can control it.'”
Okay, for the sake of argument, let’s say we’re convinced. Back to teaming up with the Sunni jihadists it is …
But wait … Only a short time ago we were told that Cheney and his crew at the White House wanted to take the side of the Shi’as in Iraq’s burgeoning civil war. In other words, for all the attention to who we’re going to attack and how and how many soldiers we need to do it, there appears to be a basic debate (to be generous) or confusion (to be less generous) within the administration over which side we’re even on.
We talk a lot about the ‘surge’ and that’s important since it assumes a intensive military commitment in Iraq for years into the future. We worry about tactics and strategy and whether the White House is going to plunge us into another war as a way to wriggle out of the blame for the current one. But this is a level of folly that transcends all of that: at the most basic level, the folks running the show can’t even decide who’s side we’re on. There’s no real strategy here or grand aim or even stable aim — more like a rather panicked set of improvisations aimed at finding a way to retrospectively justify the mistakes that got us here in the first place.
