The realists are now ascendant. The signs are everywhere: a new Congress promising to withdraw or redeploy; a new commission advocating overtures to the thugs that dominate the Middle East; a new defense secretary hinting at a return to the old way and an end to the audacious democracy-building project in the region.
But it’s not only politicians who are ready to choose the old path. A recent CNN poll found that 48 percent of the country opposes the war in Afghanistan, the very place that spawned al Qaeda’s mass-murderers. More than half the American people—56 percent—are resigned to the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. Less than 10 percent of the country supports military action to prevent that increasingly likely and bleak outcome. Plus, a dwindling percentage identifies the war in Iraq as part of the wider War on Terror.
Yet as Karlyn Bowman of the American Enterprise Institute has found in a massive survey of post-9/11 polling data, 77 percent of the country reasoned (rightly) in early 2003 that Iraq was part of the War on Terror. It remains so today, just as Iran and Syria—two regimes the well-meaning realists say we need to work with and talk to—remain part of the War on Terror. Recall that these two have fomented a war in Israel and lower Lebanon, pumped jihadists into Iraq to kill Americans and bludgeon Iraq’s nascent democracy, and used their proxies to light the fuse of another civil war in Lebanon. Plus, Iran’s leaders openly talk about crippling the U.S., destroying democratic Israel and building a nuclear arsenal. Syria, for its part, has played a role in at least two assassinations of moderate leaders committed to democracy.
Any real war against jihadism and its terrorist offspring has to recognize that regimes like this—regimes which support the likes of al-Qaeda, Hamas, the Mahdi Army, and Hezbollah—are enemies. This doesn’t necessarily mean the U.S. should launch military strikes against Iran or Syria—there are many ways to wage war, as the Iranians and Syrians remind us every day—but it should put to rest the notion that these terrorist states can help heal Iraq.
It’s one thing to make common cause with the enemy of my enemy. It’s quite another to partner with the friend of my enemy. Indeed, reaching out to the blood-smeared hands of Ahmadinejad and Assad would push realpolitik to a new low, if that’s possible.
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