Iraq Is Hopeless, But Not Afghanistan .... It's too late for Jim Baker

[RedEarth]

Hirsh: Iraq Is Hopeless, But Not Afghanistan
It's too late for Jim Baker, Nancy Pelosi or anyone else to put this Humpty Dumpty back together again. But if Iraq is hopeless, there’s still time for Afghanistan.
WEB-EXCLUSIVE COMMENTARY
By Michael Hirsh
Newsweek
Updated: 1:45 p.m. CT Nov 14, 2006
Nov. 14, 2006 - This is a tale of two headlines. One comes from the marble hallways of self-satisfied Washington, where a newly humbled George W. Bush is recommending drapes to a newly cocky Nancy Pelosi, and the town anxiously waits for the sage Jim Baker to fix the mess made by the Bush family’s black sheep, who also happens to be president of the United States. The headline is: "Will Bush Talk to Iran and Syria about Iraq?" Apparently that's a big part of the Baker plan, judging from the long, convivial dinner he had the other week with Iran's ambassador to the U.N., Javad Zarif, which according to an informed source was all about Iraq.

The other headline is from Baghdad, where at least 100 people are dying each day from out-of-control sectarian hatred. "National Catastrophe," the headline reads. That's the description given today by the head of the Iraqi parliament's education committee to the latest outrage in downtown Baghdad, which is coming to resemble Mogadishu. Masked gunman wearing Iraqi police commando uniforms abducted up to 150 staff members of a government research institute, deepening the reign of terror that has led a good part of Iraq's educated elite to flee the country. This is when states fail of course: when everyone with a brain runs away.

The U.S. response to Iraq reminds me of those TV ads about the comically slow suitor who, after his girlfriend asks him if he loves her, waits long minutes until she has stalked out of the restaurant before answering "yes" to the empty chair across the table. Bush and Tony Blair are now arguing about whether to talk to Iran and Syria? Two or three years ago it might have made a difference, before the Sunni insurgency that was supplied and supported from outside the country spiraled into sectarian warfare. Back then, had you engaged Syria fully, you might have stopped the cross-border depots and training centers that kept a flow of jihadis and weapons to Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, one of the chief authors of the sectarian hatred, and the other original insurgent leaders. Back then, had you dealt with Iran as it must be—as a major regional power—you might have been able to curb the Shiite militias and their death squads, which were just getting started. But now? The sectarian killing has its own dynamic. What's happening is an internal Iraqi affair, and Iran and Syria have become, for the most part, bystanders.

It is the story of this administration, of course: the inability to adjust prefixed ideas to reality, embodied in an incurious president who is unable to get on top of a problem because he doesn’t follow up on details. Four years ago U.S. officials disbanded the Iraqi army, then sat stunned in their Green Zone bubble while the looting raged and the incipient insurgents began to poke their heads out of the rubble. Slowly the Bush administration began to rebuild the army. Too late, it came to realize it needed Iraqi police as well. Indeed, as army training faltered, U.S. officials labeled 2006 "the year of the police." But again, it was a year or two too late. And now that the police have become tools of the empowered sectarian militias, the Bush team is talking about relying on the Iraqi army again.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/15717408/site/newsweek/