The real “open ended” commitment

Imagine this: a shadowy nation famous for its split personality is stealthily expanding its already robust military operational capabilities in the Middle East and Central Asia. Its decades-old propaganda apparatus continues to influence debate in the Western media establishment it so successfully penetrated years ago. It is carefully constructing a collaborative of anti-US nations in South and Central America. It had challenged the US in wars of proxy, most recently during the Israeli-Hezbollah war last summer. It has exhibited the bizarre duality of simultaneously supporting two seemingly contradictory causes in War on Terrorism.

That country is, well, let’s hold off on that a minute.

While Iraq supposedly hangs across America’s neck like an albatross, there is paranoid rumor-mongering that even our success in Afghanistan is doomed to failure, the best example of such being that the Taliban can now fight through the winter because they’re now equipped with proper warm clothes and winter footwear! (hat tip to the peccant Western media mentioned above).
Yet Bush maintains course, and provides all kinds of fodder to keep his domestic enemies mired in inconsequential red herring debate. Take for example the ridiculous notion that the authorization of a small troop surge is Bush’s last chance for success. That will keep detractors and the media abuzz for several more weeks! Troop levels? Well that’s any good general’s guess, but this question is akin to asking how many firefighters it will take — to stop arsonists.

Irrelevant debate about troop levels aside, the media’s perception of the war depends almost entirely on body counts and the number of daily insurgent attacks–attacks themselves that are often executed purely for propaganda purposes. It’s a self feeding narrative that can easily burn up the first 15 minutes at the top of the hour in every news broadcast. And it’s definitely not the real story about the war, even though the we’re starting to see reports of direct Iranian involvement on Iraqi soil. This sort of meddling has likely been happening since much earlier in the American occupation, but yet even Iran is not the biggest story of the war.

Know the name of the country yet?

The administration’s stubborness on Iraq is not, as almost every Democrat and some Republicans stupidly believe, the result of myopic disdain of public opinion, outright incompetence, or a refusal to consider a political solution to end the conflict.  As if some sort of political solution has never been considered.  How long is the War going to last? What is the holdup? Good questions. Even normally hawkish folks are asking–why is the war taking so long? There has got to be some other reason that the Bush Administration is not telling us, they say.

The War on Terrorism is global, the threats real, and the priorities of the multi-theater conflicts must be met. But Bush’s intransigence is necessitated by the nature of an even larger struggle, one that predates 9/11, the first Iraq War, and even the rise of modern terrorism and Iranian fundamentalism. Our simultaneous overt wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are resident in the framework of a much older and enigmatic conflict– a contemporaneous cold war with Russia.

This could explain so much in the world. Like Russia’s condemnation of the removal of Saddam Hussein in 2003, and Moscow’s refusal to sanction Iran with anything stronger than a frozen checking account. Or delivering additional weapons systems (and untold numbers of military advisers) to Syria and Iran. Or building additional nuclear reactors for a country that clearly states it will peel off some of the nasty bits for later consumption against many innocent souls in the West. Or the Neo-Marxist Book Club in Venezuala, Ecuador, Cuba, Bolivia, and Iran. Or the nuanced collusion between the post-marxist left and militant Islamism, a combined voice that, although far from ubiquitous on American soil, gets a suspiciously sympathetic soapbox in the American media.

There, it’s been said. A resurgent Russia, still smarting when we flipped Egypt after the Yom Kippur War (maybe James Baker WAS onto something with Syria), is knocking on the door of all of its current and former client states and is pressing hard. Really hard. Hard enough that it’s starting to get difficult for Bush to shield this aspect of the conflict from concerned Americans much longer. The stakes Bush had described for failure in Iraq are serious enough, for so many important reasons. But if he’s going to leave office in two years with a positive legacy, he’s going to have to expose the wormhole between the real wars and the shadow war and at least summarize the true nature of the strategic situation for the American people. And explain that–regardless of what he meant by denying an “open ended” commitment for Baghdad–he’s not just trying to win Iraq, he’s trying to win a real open-ended struggle that has lasted more than sixty years.