What is Our Mideast Strategy?

Democrats have been complaining for years that the US went into Iraq without a plan for peace. Sure, we overran the country in three weeks, but then what? Chaos and mistakes, that’s what. They have been suggesting that the Bush administration didn’t have a strategy.

Their criticism was damaging because the Bush administration couldn’t exactly say “we do too” and then spell out our plans exactly for the benefit of friends and foe. So when the administration released its National Strategy for Victory in Iraq we can be pretty sure that they are pretty sure that we already have victory in Iraq, bar shouting. The document talks about three tracks to victory—the Political Track, the Security Track, and the Economic Track—which must be glaringly obvious to anyone that hasn’t been asleep for the last three years.

The remarks of General Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, at the National Defense University the day after the release of the stragegy document point all this up. He talks willingly about strategy in Iraq, referring his audience to the Iraq strategy document, but when asked why “four years after 9/11 we still don’t appear to have a comprehensive strategy to fight that global war” says of future strategy that

there’s a lot of this puzzle that we would need a classified forum to be able to talk about. You are correct that we are publicly and in most of our fora talking about the immediate center of gravity, but I can assure you that we also have an enormous amount of energy being put into the other, longer-term requirements of having a global capacity with our friends to be able to respond. And that’s about as good as I can do for you in an open forum.

It’s pretty obvious what that strategy is, but we just can’t talk about it because it probably involves long-term presence in Iraq, regime change in Syria, and covert activities in Iran. The point, after all, of invading Afghanistan and Iraq was to contain Iran to the east of Mesopotamia.

But what is our strategy with regards to Mark Steyn’s Eurabia? Good question, Senator. My guess would be that the plan is to remove our troops from Europe, so that the Euros wake up from their 60 year social-democratic dream and get with the program.