The View From 1776

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Last week the Iraqi parliament selected a new, consensus prime minister, thereby putting its constitutional process back on track.  This new evidence of progress by the Bush administration was too much for the Democrats.  They had to find some rallying cry for their hate-Bush constituency, some headline-grabbing utterance to overshadow Secretary of State Condolezza Rice’s concurrent announcement of progress in Iraq.

Senator Joseph Biden, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee, eagerly leaped to the podium.

The Senator proposed to the news media that the Iraqi constitutional process be stopped, all of our diplomatic efforts be abandoned, and Iraq be split into three autonomous regions of Kurds, Sunnis, and Shiites.

This is sabotage in the literal sense of wooden shoes (sabots) being thrown by disaffected workers into machinery to wreck it. 

Senator Biden’s actions should be no surprise.  He has in the past ignored common sense or ethical considerations standing in the path of his quest for political power.  In 1987, after investigative reporters revealed that his closing speech in a debate had been plagiarized from a speech by British Labour Party leader Neil Kinnock, Senator Biden was compelled to withdraw from the Democratic Party presidential primary race.

This was part of a long-standing pattern.  As reporter Jim Geraghty wrote in a January 22, 2003, article appearing in National Review Online, Biden’s withdrawal from the 1987 Democratic primary had been preceded by “...a serious plagiarism incident from his law-school years, boastful exaggerations of his academic record at a New Hampshire campaign event, and the discovery of other quotations in Biden’s speeches pilfered from past Democratic politicians.”

However reprehensible the party-politics motivation of Senator Biden’s proposed vivisection of Iraq, its lack of judgment is equally so.

A few points that Senaor Biden’s proposal ignores:

1.  Iraq’s current problem is that neither Al Queda nor Iran want a united, independent Iraq, hence their terrorist attacks aimed a disrupting the constitutional process in Baghdad.  Biden’s proposal would mean that Al Queda had triumphed with American assistance.  Osama Bin Ladin would happily have paid the senator to make his disruptive proposal.

2.  Senator Ted Kennedy and other Democratic Party leaders have declared that the constitutional process in Iraq already has failed and that the country is in the midst of civil war.  This is belied by current progress in the Iraqi parliament.  Implementation of Senator Biden’s proposal all but guarantees disintegration of the political process into civil war. 

3.  Seeking to protect themselves against each other and foreign powers, Kurds, Shiites, and Sunnis would get into a frantic arms race, abetted by Iran, North Korea, Russia, China, France, and Germany, each vying for political and economic power over the oil-producing regions in the Kurdish and Sunni north and the Shiite south.

4.  An autonomous Kurdish state in the north, on Turkey’s southern border, would be strongly opposed by Turkey for fear that it would incite rebellion among its own Kurdish population near the Iraqi border.  Would Senator Biden counsel our standing aside when Turkish armies roll into the newly autonomous Kurdish state, as Syria did in the disintegration of Lebanon?  Or should we be prepared to send a military force to protect the new Kurdish state?

5.  Iran, which has continuously meddled in the Iraqi political process since Saddam’s fall, would have an open field to exert control over both the Sunni and Shiite nominally-autonomous states, with leverage supplied by its large army, vast oil resources, and its soon-to-be-operative nuclear weapons capability.

6.  The next domino to fall would be Saudi Arabia on the western border, abandoned by Senator Biden’s proposal and left open to joint Al Queda and Iranian terror tactics.  The United States would shortly find itself paying very high prices indeed for oil, as Saudi Arabia and the Iranian-dominated Iraqi states deliberately curtailed production to raise world oil prices.

7.  If we abandon Iraq and tell the contending forces to fight it out among themselves, our allies such as India and Pakistan would rightly conclude that they can place no reliance upon American commitments to aid them against aggressors. Losing them would leave us militarily and diplomatically isolated in the Far East, with South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan overshadowed by growing Chinese military force, and India and Pakistan more likely to see their foreign policy interests coming into line with those of China.

8.  Senator Biden’s proposal would take us back to Senator Kerry’s “sensitive” foreign policy that amounts to abdicating responsibility and handing our foreign policy over to the UN for a repeat of its twelve-year fecklessness in dealing with Saddam Hussein.  When French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin is cashiered for his role in the recent student and labor union riots in France, his French buddy Senator John Kerry can have him appointed to run our foreign policy.

How any of this benefits the United States is difficult to see.  But it would no doubt appeal mightily to the placard-waving street mobs of liberal left-wingers.  For them, hurting the Bush administration is worth paying any price in American blood, including ultimately the triumph of Al Queda in the United States, particularly as that would mean the obliteration of Christianity. 

It would also have the effect of fulfilling Senator Kennedy’s characterization of the Iraq invasion as another Vietnam quagmire.  Sacrifices by our military personnel would be thrown into the gutter and hate-Bush Democrats could ecstatically trash our American service personnel, just as their parents did with Vietnam veterans in the 1970s.

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