None of
the above problems is insoluble. For if or when the Miers nomination
dies, and Bush sends up a Michael Luttig or Edith Jones, his base
would rally and he could lead his coalition in a decisive battle
over whose judicial philosophy should guide the Supreme Court.
The real
crisis the president faces, and we all face, is Iraq. If the war
ends in failure, no success will redeem the Bush presidency.
By the time
this column appears, the remains of the 2000th U.S. soldier to
die in a war that has lasted longer than World War I for the United
States will be on the way home. And it is difficult to visualize
the end of this war or the victory so often predicted and promised.
Even critics
now praise the successes of Bush's father: the liberation of Kuwait,
unification of Germany, the deft handling of the collapse of the
Soviet Empire and breakup of the Soviet Union. But the son's foreign
policy is on the precipice of failure. Only a third of the nation
still supports him as a war leader, while more than half believe
Iraq was a mistake and we should begin to bring the troops home
now.
A preliminary
list of winners and losers from our invasion seems to show that
it is our enemies who have prospered and our friends who have
suffered. As of today, the principal winner of the Iraq war is
Iran.
While our
invasion of Afghanistan smashed a Taliban regime hostile to Iran,
our invasion of Iraq was even more beneficial. It brought down
a Baathist regime that had inflicted hundreds of thousands of
casualties on Iran in their eight-year war in the 1980s. In power
in Baghdad today, in place of Saddam, is a Shia regime that looks
to Iran as patron and ally.
In 2001,
Iranians had demonstrated in support of the United States after
9-11, and in successive elections, a moderate presidential candidate
had carried 70 percent of the vote. The Tehran mullahs were on
the ropes.
But with
Bush declaring Iran an "axis-of-evil" nation, which
was to be denied, even if it meant preventive war, any nuclear
program or weapon of mass destruction, Iranians responded as nationalists.
A hard-liner won the presidency, and Tehran's defiance is now
a popular policy. Meanwhile, the U.S. threat of military strikes
to effect the nuclear castration of Iran becomes less and less
credible the longer the war next door goes on.
With Iraq
smashed and perhaps splintering after we depart, Tehran is set
to fill the power vacuum. History may yet record that the U.S.
Army did all the heavy lifting in the Persian Gulf to make Iran
its pre-eminent power.
A second
winner of the Iraq war is Al-Qaida. While the U.S. invasion of
Afghanistan dethroned the Taliban enablers of bin Laden, killed
countless followers and destroyed his base camp, our invasion
of Iraq compensated him for his losses. The Iraq war radicalized
the Islamic world, recruited thousands of jihadists and converted
Saddam's country -- inhospitable terrain for Islamists -- into
the world's training ground for Islamic terrorists.
Among the
other beneficiaries of America's Iraq war are the Shia fundamentalists
who stand to inherit their first Arab country. Among the losers
are the Turks, who must contend with Kurdish nationalism inflamed
by Kurdish successes next door, and Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Kuwait.
If the Iraqi
insurgency evolves, as it appears to be doing, into a civil-religious
war, the Sunni and Shia populations of those three autocracies
cannot but be affected and those nations perhaps drawn in. And
peoples' wars have almost always proven unfortunate for kings
and emirs.
How does
the balance sheet look for the United States?
Saddam and
his neo-Stalinist regime are history, the Iraqi people, especially
the Shia and Kurds, are free, a threat to U.S. interests and the
region is removed forever.
On the liability
side, there is the high cost in dead and wounded, in alienated
allies, in a radicalized Middle East, and in the creation in the
Sunni Triangle of a base camp and training ground for jihadists
that did not exist before the U.S. Army crossed the Kuwait border,
30 months ago.
As George
Bush's place in history is riding on the outcome of this war,
he is right to be angry and alarmed. But this war is not the doing
of any subordinate.
