Dwight Stephens

Last week the President told “60 Minutes” that sometimes he has to be the Educator-in-Chief. So what’s the Educator-in-Chief studying these days? Alistair Horne’s “A Savage War of Peace,” about French President DeGaulle’s colonial disaster in a guerilla war against Muslims in Algiers from 1954 to 1962–a Henry Kissinger recommendation for the President. When asked by Maureen Dowd of The Times what the President could learn from his book, Mr. Horne replied “[t]he depressing problem of getting entangled in the Muslim world. Algeria was a thoroughly bloodthirsty war that ended horribly and cost the lives of about 20,000 Frenchmen and a million Algerians. There was a terrible civil war . . . DeGaulle ended up giving literally everything away and left without his pants.” Someone should ask the President what he has, in fact, learned from the book.

Meanwhile, the Administration appears to continue to believe that Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki will lead non-sectarian efforts to restore stability in Baghdad with American and Iraqi troops entering urban neighborhoods side-by-side with Iraqis in the lead. This seems to ignore Maliki’s personal history with the Shiite cleric al-Sadr dating back to the Hussein resistance and the extent to which Maliki is more beholden to Sadr than the U.S. for his current position. And it seems to ignore the very real possibility that Maliki is likely to be more certain than ever based on the current tide of U.S. public opinion that the days are numbered for the U.S. presence–meaning that he has to bide his time, get what he can from the U.S., and remember that Sadr will be there long after the U.S. is gone.

Reportedly, Maliki’s security plan for Baghdad, which was rejected by the Administration, called for U.S. troops to be deployed outside Baghdad–essentially protecting Maliki’s flank–to chase down Sunni terrorists flushed out of the City while Shiite and Kurdish troops established “order” in the City. Presumably believing that it could not trust Maliki to be non-sectarian in his deployment of the plan, the President’s very different plan apparently was forced on Maliki, making an inherently difficult plan to implement all the more unlikely to succeed. All of which explains Maliki’s current silence and apparent inability to even give lip-service supporting the Administration’s security plan.

Along these lines, Frank Rich opines in his column in The Times today that “[t]he president’s pretense that Mr. Maliki and his inept, ill-equiped, militia-infiltrated security forces can advance American interests in this war is Neville-Chamberlain-like in its naivete and disingenuousness. An American military official in Baghdad read the writing on the wall to The Times last week: ‘We are implementing a strategy to embolden a government that is actually part of the problem. We are being played like a pawn.’”

One central truth that should have informed our Iraq policy before the invasion and should continue to inform it today is Vice-President Cheney’s prescient observation long before the invasion: “I think that if Saddam wasn’t there that his successor probably wouldn’t be notably friendlier than he is.”