Those Who Will Fight The War We Don't Want

Last week, I posted some speculations from Jack Wakeland on whether the Israelis will fight the war we don't want to fight and thereby save us from the Obama administration's supine posture against Iran. Jack complained that I didn't include a link he particularly wanted. I didn't include it, because it is by a more dovish author who is complaining about the war preparations being advocated by everyone else, which I thought might be a bit confusing. But with that explanation, here it is.

Jack also sent me a link to an article at DEBKA File revealing information on the deal that was struck between President Obama and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu at their first meeting last week.

Jack begins with this note about the source: "One of my favorite sources for early indicators of military action in the Middle East is DEBKAfile. Unfortunately, the guys at DEBKAfile tend to lean a little bit too much towards the sensational, so I look to the mainstream press (Haaretz, the Jerusalem Post, the Daily Telegraph, the Washington Post, the New York Times, and others) for confirmation of evidence DEBKAfile cites for it more speculative claims." With that proviso, here is what DEBKAfile reports:

Most of all, [Obama] was after space to engage in negotiation with Tehran without the threat of a surprise Israeli military strike against Iran's nuclear sites hanging over the talks….

The Israeli prime minister himself felt the need to keep hidden his concession of a six-month time limit for Washington's dialogue with Tehran. On the one hand, he persuaded Obama for the first time to accept a time limit for those talks; on the other, it is longer than Israel thinks safe.

DEBKAfile's Washington sources note that Netanyahu convinced the president to agree to an Iranian deadline while standing by his refusal to endorse Obama's "two state" solution of the Palestinian issue in return.

Still, he knew the deadline would be hard to sell at home, especially after Iran successfully test-fired its first accurate long-range surface to surface missile while he was still in Washington.

If such a deal was made, delaying any potential Israeli strike on Iran until November, it was apparently done for nothing. As CNN reports today, "Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad on Monday ruled out nuclear negotiations with other nations, saying, 'Iran's nuclear issue is over, in our opinion.'"

This is, of course, utterly predictable. The main Iranian goal is to acquire nuclear weapons, and all of their offers of diplomacy were just a delaying measure to buy time for their weapons program to reach that goal. So when we vaguely threatened to bomb the Iranians, they said they wanted to talk. But now that we've stopped threatening them and say we want to talk, they turn around and say they don't want to talk.

It's time to end the charade and take out the Iranian weapons program by force. And we should be ashamed if we sit back and let the Israelis take all of the risks to do what we should have done years ago.

Unfortunately, even if the War on Terrorism won't go away, the Obama administration seems eager to act as if it doesn't exist. In doing so, they may be endangering one of our few clear successes in that war. The Los Angeles Times carries a disturbing report about how America's increasing diplomatic and military disengagement from Iraq threatens to cause a return of the Sunni insurgency.

One of the keys to our counter-insurgency victory in Iraq is that we turned former insurgents into allies against al-Qaeda, largely by promising to address their main legitimate grievance against the Iraqi government: the fear that the new government would engage in sectarian persecution of Sunnis on behalf of the Shiite majority. As a neutral party, a force with no sect and no tribe, America was able to be the impartial guarantor of the Sunnis' freedom from persecution. But without continued American political and diplomatic leadership, starting with the president, that could rapidly unravel.

With US forces preparing to withdraw from Iraqi cities next month, insurgent groups see no sign of progress on their demands for the Americans to guarantee their entry into the political system and protect them from the parties in power.

As the insurgents watched and waited, they saw the government continue to jail their fighters, despite their decision to hold their fire. Likewise, they noticed the inability, or unwillingness, of US troops to stop a crackdown against leaders of the Awakening movement, their Sunni brethren who left the insurgency for formal partnerships with the Americans….

A US military official, speaking on condition of anonymity, says military and US Embassy personnel are frustrated by their inability to reconcile the government and armed groups. They worry that it's only a matter of time before insurgents renew their uprising.

"When they finally realize America is an impotent force, or acting like one, are they going to give up and say it's useless and return to armed conflict to topple the government?" the official asked. "Are they going to take up arms against the coalition as well?"

As I have argued for years, there is no such thing as retreating from Iraq in order to refocus our efforts and win somewhere else, because failure in one theater of the war emboldens our enemies and demoralizes our potential allies everywhere else. Thus, the LA Times report continues by pointing out how an unraveling counter-insurgency in Iraq would sabotage counter-insurgency efforts in Afghanistan:

The disenchantment of the Sunnis also could have implications for Afghanistan, where the US military hopes to reproduce the success of its alliance with the Awakening movement by reaching out to moderate Taliban elements. [This is a bit of a misstatement; the idea is to switch the loyalty of the tribes that aid and support the Taliban.—RWT] But the fate of the Awakening members and the inactive insurgent groups could cause Taliban fighters to think twice before embarking on a similar path.

Meanwhile, in another theater of the war—Lebanon—we get an idea of what is at stake. The Middle East Media Research Institute transcribes an interview with German prosecutor Detlev Mehlis, who originally headed up the international investigation into the assassination of pro-Western, pro-independence Lebanese leader Rafik Hariri. Mehlis describes Syria's threats against Hariri and the evidence for involvement of top Syrian intelligence officials in the assassination.

But the latest report, from the German magazine Der Spiegel, is that a new international investigation has unearthed detailed evidence showing that Hezbollah, the Shiite Lebanese terrorist militia, planned and carried out the killing.

Intensive investigations in Lebanon are all pointing to a new conclusion: that it was not the Syrians, but instead special forces of the Lebanese Shiite organization Hezbollah ("Party of God") that planned and executed the diabolical attack.

There is apparently a lot of concrete detail behind this claim, so follow the link to read the whole article.
This is not to say that the Syrians didn't know about the assassination and weren't involved. But Hezbollah answers more directly to its masters in Tehran—so this is one more reminder that what is really going on is Iran's attempt to dominate the Middle East by promoting the rule of Islamic terrorist gangs under its control.

This is the war that won't go away, until we finally choose to fight it and win.—RWT