Jihadi Du Jour: Obama's Cute Foreign Policy in Iraq

Sen. Obama’s Cute Foreign Policy in Iraq
d.w. pack

According to the popular media, Barak Husain Obama is gifted with near genius intellect and perception that borders on prophetic insight. According to those who know me best, including my wife of twenty-two years, I have neither of these qualities. So, it is to be expected that when Sen. Obama soars into the intellectual ionosphere he leaves mentally earthbound persons like me behind. However, recently I found myself perplexed when I watched Sen. Obama articulate his view of what should be done in Iraq. His perspective demonstrated an amazingly facile temperament but a frightening lack of grasp of history and reality. He told Chicago and the world that he had gone to the White House with a message to President Bush saying
“I personally indicated that an escalation of troop levels in Iraq was a mistake and
that we need a political accommodation rather than a military approach to the
sectarian violence there.”
(for a print source see the AP’s article Democrats to Bush: Time to End Iraq War by
Stephen Collinson Fri Jan 5)

My first reaction at this cute but goofy suggestion - which appears so silly as to be laughable - was to suspect that I must have been misunderstanding some basic concept in Sen. Obama’s proposal. After contemplation, I now have concluded that Sen. Obama lost me with his novel use of the word “accommodation”. The concept that the USA could possibly find a political accommodation to solve the perennial and endemic problems of sectarian violence, jihadist ideology, insurrectionism, vendettas and family feuds, political interference from Iran and Syria, racial conflict, political instability, radicalism, religious intolerance, and corruption in both economic and political spheres, - all within a society awash in a deluge of weapons in an atmosphere of aggression and nuclear ambition - is, at best, cute. At worst, it is an inane idea that should have led to his being declared as unfit to pronounce on this topic.

Upon hearing Sen. Obama’s view, the first voice that came into my mind was that of the esteemed Saturday Night Live character the Church Lady. S/he would read or restate someone’s perspective and then say, with massive disdainful sarcasm, “Well isn’t that precious.” It would have been an entirely appropriate rejoinder to the Senator’s comments. So silly is Obama’s concept that I assumed I most certainly was misunder-standing what he was proposing. Certainly, by accommodation he meant something other than what I understood by the term - right.

I checked a dictionary to try to widen my understanding of the verb “accommodate.” I found the following definitions:

1. to do a kindness or a favor to; oblige; to accommodate a friend.
2. to provide suitably; supply (usually fol. by with): to accommodate a friend with money.
3. to lend money to: Can you accommodate him?
4. to provide with a room and sometimes with food.
5. to furnish with accommodations.
6. to have or make room for: Will this elevator accommodate 10 people?
7. to make suitable or consistent; adapt: to accommodate oneself to circumstances.
8. to bring into harmony; adjust; reconcile: to accommodate differences.
9. to become adjusted or adapted.
10. to become reconciled; agree.

Of course, I am being a bit disingenuine here. I knew that Sen. Obama did not mean that the USA was to do a kindness to solve the Iraq conflicts; he meant that we were to seek a political reconciliation in Iraq; one that would be sufficiently pleasing to all sides, thereby inducing them to lay down their arms or at least point them somewhere else. I hate to be the guy that breaks this to the good Senator, some dreams just do not come true regardless of the audacity of one’s hope. Please understand that I am not commenting on the merits, or lack thereof, of President Bush’s proposed surge. I am dealing with a mentality that Obama symbolizes well that refuses to see that we are easily fifteen years past the point of congenial discussions as a viable option of dealing with the political realities in the Islamic world.

In a nutshell, here is the problem of Sen. Obama’s cute, little solution to the scary, huge problem that is Iraq and the fight against Islamist terror: regardless of who we “accommodate” we make their enemies all the more implacably at odds with us and every single side of the conflict has enemies. Lots of ‘em. The conflicts in the Islamic world are not an old television western. There is not a nice little town being beat up upon by mean, bad guys in black. The United States cannot ride into town like a gunslinger, whip a bad guy, and hand the town back to its nice and lawful rulers in just over 90 minutes, because there are dozens of bad guys leading their criminal and terrorist groups of thugs and dozen of political agendas - all of which are dangerous. Further, there is no single recognizable “bad guy leader” whose demise signals the end of the conflict.

Persons with power and influence simply must call for specificity from Sen. Obama and those who espouse his views concerning the following two questions: What should we do then to politically accommodate? Whom should be accommodated?

Sen. Obama and those on his side seem to not grasp that the fight as it is going on in Iraq, while horrible and heart-rending, is - contrary to media portrayals - nominally controlled. Obama’s friends seem incapable of actually envisioning what the situation could look like if it were to spin out of control. So let me help. If we actually do loose control in Iraq, here’s what we get at the minimum:
A. A nuked-up Iran leading a revival of Shia’ militants through Iraq, Kuwait, Saudi
Arabia, Syrian/Lebanon, and Palestine.
B. A re-invigorated and solidified Wahabbi-oriented Islamist front.
C. The empowering and legitimating of the most extreme hawkish policy positions in
Israel.
D. A significant encouraging of Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan (has Obama ever seen a map
of the area?)
E. Empowering the imaginations of Islamists in the East Africa.
F. The reinvigorating of Libyan and Palestinian terrorist groups.

At that point, not even the most glib would suggest there would be room to accommodate; and to turn the Church Lady’s comment on its head, that wouldn’t be precious it would be disastrous.