Kevin Sullivan

If John McCain Wins, This Baby Will Die

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Blog posts

Chuck Todd rightfully pans the latest ransom video from MoveOn.org:

Of course, Matt Stoller is outraged.  Baseless, emotional appeals such as this one make perfect sense to folks like him (appeals to America’s national security populism are pretty common from both sides).  Let’s ignore the fact that the kid appears to be no older than 12 months; placing his service eligibility somewhere around 2026.  Barring some kind of constitutional amendment (and a few advances in medicine), I don’t think John McCain would be in any position at that time to “have” this woman’s baby, even if he wanted adorable and vulnerable little Alex.  There are a few other reasonable interjections–such as the absence of a draft, America’s volunteer military, etc.–but I think the unlikelihood of a McCain dictatorship in 2026 should suffice.  The ad is simply stupid, and it treats Americans like idiots.

But remember, the activists and careerists like it that way.  Policy is incidental to them.  For them, it’s about mobilizing voters and scaring the crap out of them enough so that they not dare vote Republican ever, ever again.  Reminds me of a certain presidential “brain”/FNC contributor I know of. 

John McCain is the wrong man for president in 2008.  Democrats shouldn’t have to run like jackasses to prove it, and they certainly don’t need fringe groups like MoveOn screwing it up.

More at memeorandum

Your Hypotheticals Need Work

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

Spencer Ackerman does a poor Persian:

Let’s say you’re Iran.

You look to your east and there are a bunch of U.S. troops. You look to your west and there are a bunch of U.S. troops. You send out peace feelers, but they’re rejected. Then you get pissed off and elect a Holocaust-denying asshole as your president. You get it through your head that the people who have encircled you and who for nearly 30 years have talked incessantly about overthrowing you (again) might have inadvertently given you a gift. What gift? The gift of thinking your best friends are actually their allies? Well, there’s that. But the real gift is tens of thousands of their troops that you can pay someone to attack. You might even try to kill U.S. troops at several steps removed — like the U.S. did the Soviets in Afghanistan not too long ago.

Facts are important things. It’s not yet proven that the Iranians truly are doing this. But it makes perfect sense to me that they would. Not only have we invaded and occupied two of their neighbors, we’re involved in a worldwide effort to stop them from achieving any form of nuclear technology, we step up patrols in the Persian Gulf and we even build military bases a stone’s throw from their border. In the hands of the dolts and warmongers who both staff this administration and have their designs on the next one, the U.S.-Iran War is a Gulf Of Tonkin incident just waiting to happen. A patriotic Iranian — certainly one who works for a bellicose Iranian president — would, most likely, try to kill U.S. troops while leaving no fingerprints.

First, let’s address the “backs against the wall” theory.  The Iranian government supported anti-Taliban factions–such as Ishmael Khan and various Shi’a Hazaras–in Afghanistan, and their basic interests in the region were essentially parallel to our own in 2002 (despite the Supreme Leader’s rhetoric).  They supported the invasion of Afghanistan, and in fact believed the Taliban to be an American/Sunni plot against them!  Surely, it must trouble the Iranians to know that a hostile occupying force stands to their immediate east, but it hasn’t been any worse than dealing with the anti-Shiite factions that dominated Afghanistan prior to the invasion.  Our “occupation” of Afghanistan has been half-assed at best, and if anything, has likely made some of the Sunni factions there rethink their rivalry with Iran.  Iran applied a layered foreign policy in Afghanistan, wherein they supported dissidents, nationalists and even logical opponents (something we should keep in mind while addressing Iranian involvement in Iraq).  In short, the United States handled some Iranian housekeeping in Afghanistan, and probably forced some of their Afghan enemies to come calling with hats in hand.  Much like in Iraq, we’ve given the Iranians some regional leverage in Afghanistan.

The Problem with Body Bag Politics

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

I think Dave gets it:

I mourn each and every death and if I’d had my way none of our soldiers would be killed in Iraq. But I didn’t get my way and the question now is whether it would be better for us and the Iraqis if we left now or if we left when the country was more stable than it is now. I think the former but, then, I care about the Iraqis, too.

And, when you tie your policy to the ebb and flow of casualties, you risk undermining your own argument for withdrawal.  Whether ten soldiers or ten-thousand soldiers give their lives up for the country, policies have to be considered in a broader context: What, if any, is the progress of Iraqi civil society?  Does a prolonged presence undermine or strengthen stability in the region?  Are the costs of the war–including treasure and lives–worth it?

More at memeorandum

Not So Sure

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

Captain Ed is confident that Nouri al-Maliki has shaken his Iranian masters:

Standing up to Iran is the next step. Maliki himself appeared too close to Iran in the early days of his tenure, making Sunnis and Kurds especially suspicious of the former Dawa leader. With Sadr on the run, he needs to show now that he will not tolerate Iran propping up any militias in Iraq, and he has that opportunity now. Iran may be in a position where they will have to listen; Sadr has turned into a major disappointment, and all of the Iranian interference has not kept the green Iraqi Army from destroying the inept Mahdis in straight-up military battles.

If the US wanted an ally in the region with the strength to stand up to Iran, the Iraqi mission could be heading for success. Maliki needs to crush the Mahdis to completely secure Iraq internally, and then needs to push the Iranians out of the south altogether and secure Iraq’s borders. Reconciliation appears to be within his grasp, and Iran may find themselves with a much stronger Iraq on their border than they anticipated even a few months earlier.

With all due respect to Ed, I think this is a misunderstanding of the situation as it stands today.  The other possibility here is that there’s now more cohesion than ever between Baghdad and Tehran.  We now know that the ISCI/Badr faction may be handling conscription in Iraq, essentially consolidating and nationalizing the country’s military (Iran ties or not, I believe this to be a positive move).  There needs to be one force, one voice and one nation in Iraq.  All of that is understood.

But I think that’s the case Maliki is making to the Iranians.  I am not an Iranian chaos theory kind of guy, and I have often said that their interests are in fact parallel to our own in Iraq (to a point).  The Iranians have no reason to be invested in the Mahdi Army.  The Mahdi militia, contrary to popular belief, isn’t a sectarian organization bent on violence.  They are nationalists, and they have their own internal disagreements. 

Iran is most certainly invested, however, in al-Sadr.  He’s more valuable to them as a figurehead than he is a warlord, which is why he’s spending his days in Qom.  I’ve said this numerous times: The Iranians have a better long-term strategy for Iraq than we do, and that’s why they’re winning.

And the Sky is Blue

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

I’m a little bit perplexed by the way war proponents and war critics are handling the Iranian level of influence in Iraq.  Regarding the Pentagon’s confusion, I think a lot of it stems from the Al Qaeda brand problem.  I blame the administration for this, mostly, but I also blame the “progressive internationalist” community for turning the war on terrorism into a 1930’s crime novel.  In this novel, there is a clear and obvious bad guy named Al Qaeda.  When you catch that bad guy, or bring them to justice, you’ll have vanquished the problem and made the world safer.  It’s just like jaywalkers and shoplifters, except these guys use bombs and RPG’s. 

The problem with this narrative, as I’ve mentioned before, is that it creates these cute little cubby holes for us to place the world’s bad guys in.  So Iran can’t be backing Muqtada al-Sadr, because they’re already tied in with the ISCI/Badr/Da’wa lot.  Let’s ignore the fact that Iran is clearly grooming al-Sadr in Qom for Mujtahid status, and on the fast-track, no less.  It requires both sides–both the Pentagon and the anti-war Left–to assume a monolithic Iranian policy on Iraqi interloping.  So we get stories such as these, where every single example of Iranian influence in the region becomes groundbreaking news, even though Iran has been woven into the nation’s Shi’a community for decades and decades.  Of course Iran has special operatives–similar to their own Basijis–placed strategically in Iraq.  The foundation was probably laid out during the Iran-Iraq War, so yeah, tell us something we didn’t know. 

The direction of the message and the tone coming from the Pentagon is wrongheaded, by my estimation.  Iraq and Iran share a border, they share a culture and they share mutual interests.  We will not sever those relations, nor should we hope to.  What we can do, however, is try to pressure Iran to cull this behavior, and pick a strategy that meets everyone’s security needs.  Call it a devil’s bargain, or whatever, but it could go a long way towards helping us stabilize the country.  Iran does pull Sadr’s strings, and his behavior will ebb and flow with their dictates.  If it doesn’t, well, let’s just say that we can speculate on what might happen to terrorist insurgents who go astray from the Islamic Republic’s leash.    

More at memeorandum     

Tell Me if This Sounds Like a Good Idea

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

Representatives from Arab states getting assassinated, taken hostage, or, constantly being deployed and withdrawn in diplomatic Kabuki fashion?  That’s what I fear would happen, were the Arab states to build embassies in Iraq right now.  Secretary Rice seems to disagree:

“What Iraq now needs most and what I will push for in Kuwait is greater support from its neighbors,” Rice said. “That includes establishing embassies in Baghdad and exchanging ambassadors.”

Iraq’s Sunni Arab neighbors, notably Saudi Arabia, have so far resisted U.S. pressure to open embassies in Baghdad, which Washington argues would bolster the Shi’ite-led government of Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki and help counter the influence of neighboring Shi’ite Iran.

Rice said Iraq should be “fully reincorporated” into the Arab world by its neighbors, who have been suspicious of Maliki’s government and its ties with Iran.

Iraq is an Arab nation while Iran’s roots are Persian. Both countries, however, have majority Shi’ite populations.

“What they need to do is confirm and work for Iraq’s Arab identity,” she said. “That in and of itself will begin to shield (Iraq) from influences of Iran that are nefarious influences,” Rice said at a news conference.

She also said Iraq’s Arab neighbors could help encourage the Sunni minority to participate more fully in the political process in Iraq and to offer Baghdad much-needed debt relief, which has been slow in coming.

I agree with all of this, in theory.  But I continue to be astounded by the lack of cultural sensitivity that comes from State on these issues of cultural diplomacy.  While I think a stronger Arab investment in Iraq would be great, we should take into consideration the fact that Sunnis oppress Shias all over the Middle East, and the perception that Iraqi Sunnis and the GCC states are in bed with the United States is already quite pervasive.  These embassies and their respective ambassadors would likely become immediate targets.

Now, if the GCC states really want to weaken Iran’s position in the region, they could find a way to lower gas and oil prices (especially the former) and make the market more competitive.  I doubt we’ll see that happen anytime soon.

Casualty Politics

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

I’ll never quite understand it, but we see it again an again from the far Left.  If we’re going to quantify the successes and failures of war based on deaths, than no American war effort was ever truly worth the cost.  Perhaps this is the position held by some on the Left, but it certainly isn’t a consistently viable message with the American public.

Heads I Win, Tails You Lose

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

Robert Spencer writes in Human Events on Muqtada al-Sadr’s academic endeavours in Iran:

Two notable alumni of Qom’s centers of Islamic learning are the Ayatollah Khomeini, who spent ten years there, and Hassan Nasrallah, the leader of the Lebanese jihad terrorist group Hizballah. Al-Sadr, while he is son of one Grand Ayatollah and son-in-law of another, is a seminary dropout and hardly a scholar of Islam. Now it appears that he has gone to Qom to resume his Islamic studies and eventually to emerge as an Ayatollah himself. An Ayatollah al-Sadr would have enough stature to be able to sideline al-Sistani, and would well-positioned – especially given his illustrious pedigree – to become the leader of Shi’ite Iraq after al-Sistani’s death, or even to shunt him aside before his death. And if al-Sadr was involved (as many have charged) in the April 2003 murder of a rival, the prominent Iraqi Imam Abdul Majid al-Khoei, he may not hesitate to accelerate al-Sistani’s passing – once he has the requisite religious credentials.

That won’t be for another five years at the earliest. However, the fact that al-Sadr has gone to study at Qom indicates that he has every intention of remaining a player on the Iraqi political scene for the foreseeable future – and at age 35, he could be on that scene for decades to come. His overall agenda he made clear inthe Al-Jazeera interview: “Another important goal is to make society religious, rather than secular. People keep talking about an ‘Islamic government’ and so on. What is more important is to make society, not just the government, Islamic.”

Is Muqtada al-Sadr studying in Qom in order to position himself to become the Khomeini of a theocratic, Shi’ite Iraq? It’s a possibility that cannot be dismissed – and one that, if it comes to pass, would establish a Shi’ite Arab client state of Iran, inalterably hostile to the United States, in the heart of the Middle East.

I’ve addressed this point, and I think it’s a great one for Spencer to raise (although I think Khomeini sowed his wild oats in Najaf before he headed for Qom, which is still interesting when one considers the disagreement over Islam and government between the two schools).  As I’ve argued in the past, it makes absolute sense for Iran to support both the ISCI/Badr faction and al-Sadr.  For them, it’s a situation of “heads I win, tails you lose.”  Support the elected government, assist them in stabilizing the country, and hopefully, get the Americans out in expedient fashion.

There’s really no reason for Tehran to invest too heavily in the Mahdi Army, much less the political extension of said army.  Iran already has an extensive Shi’a network tied into the Iraqi government; so financing their opposition only serves as insurance (we could get truly Machiavellian here, and assume that Iran perhaps facilitated the Basra battle as a mock “proving ground” for the Iraqi security forces; thus enabling America to consider a quicker withdrawal). 

But al-Sadr the man is far more important than his organization.  He is a binding popular figure in Iraq, and by removing him from the current fray, Iran could be setting him up as the heir to Ayatollah al-Sistani in Iraq.  In other words, Maliki makes for an excellent short-term strategy, whereas al-Sadr better suits their long-term vision for the region.

Andy McCarthy Scares Me

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Via The Corner:

The only solution to stability in Iraq and the region is and has always been regime change in Iran.  We can avoid acknowledging that fact, but we cannot change it.  We can quake in the face of the Left’s war-mongering allegations, but that won’t alter the reality that Iran is already at war with us.  General Petraeus’s clear-eyed testimony this week underscores it. 

None of that means we necessarily have to invade Iran, much less occupy and turn it into our latest Wilsonian laboratory.  But it does mean we need to stop kidding ourselves about changing this leopard’s spots and have an unambiguous, unapologetic U.S. policy of regime change in which, at every turn and in every way, we regard this America-hating, American-killing government as the incorrigible enemy that it is.  And for starters, we need to make the mullahs understand that their own territory is not immune from retaliation for the murders of our men and women fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Now, there’s some sense in what McCarthy is saying here.  The Islamic Republic’s identity is tied very much to the policy of resisting the West, and the United States is the face of that culture (but if we want to be technical and say we’re at war, well, who started that war?).  However, we would be grossly mistaken if we assumed that Iran is like Iraq.  This is a country that has had a degree of enfranchisement that was unheard of in Iraq under Hussein.  It’s a pluralistic society that is very proud of its national identity (just ask anti-mullah ex pats, who jump on Azeri and Arab minority groups when they complain about mistreatment in Iran). 

The country is young, it’s male and it’s frustrated.  While maintaining the possibility of force remains essential, talking so brazenly about regime change makes little sense.  Attacks would likely alienate a population that is warming up to greater ties with the West.  Attack them, and you risk losing an entire generation of young Iranians. 

I think there are three issues we must resolve with Iran: 1. Terrorism 2. Iraq and 3. Nuclear proliferation.  We need these matters addressed for our own national security, and for the security of the entire world.  But our bag of carrots is not entirely empty, not yet anyway.  Iran has always been reliant on foreign powers for their security, their energy and at certain times, even their economy.  President Ahmadinejad–in addition to the advancements he has made in nuclear energy–has been attempting to diversify Iran’s energy resources through hydro and wind power.  There has been a rural flight in Iran over the past 25 years, so the cities need to be capable of sustaining growing energy needs.  The U.S. should (and has) offer to facilitate these energy needs on Iranian soil, perhaps by establishing joint-venture facilities on Iranian soil that allows them to increase their own domestic energy production.  While we’re at it, we could work to establish Qualifying Industrial Zones (QIZ), similar to the model we have in Jordan, which could open up the republic to American markets, and vice versa.

President Ahmadinejad is currently pushing an ill-conceived privatization scheme; one that really amounts to a utility and land grab for his friends and cronies in the IRGC.  We could assist the Iranian government in cleaning up what is a horribly corrupt and inefficient state system of regulated economy.  Assist them with these things, and perhaps help them warm up to the WTO (a carrot that has also been offered to them). 

Anyway, these are just possibilities.  I realize there are roadblocks on both sides preventing them from happening, but my point is that regime change doesn’t need to be our chief policy.  The grand irony in having the United States right next door is that it gives Iran a golden opportunity to offer something to the Americans, a position they rarely find themselves in.  We should exploit this perception, and use it to prevent a further hardening of relations between our two countries.           

Fisking The Grey Lady

Posted by Kevin Sullivan under Uncategorized

Not as dirty as it sounds.