Fantasy Is Not A Strategy

Tigerhawk looks at the latest fantasy approach to dealing with the Middle East: If the US withdraws, Saudi Arabia steps up and fights a proxy war with Iran. Simultaneously, the Saudis flood the oil markets to drive prices down to the point that Iran collapses economically. Lovely ideas. Tigerhawk throws cold water on the ideas by pointing out the fallacies in the reasoning.

First, the last thing we want is the Saudis funding more Sunni Islamic proxy warriors. We thought that was a great idea in Afghanistan in the 1980s — and it may have been worth it even in retrospect, if you believe Afghanistan brought down the Soviet Union a decade or two earlier than it would have fallen otherwise — but the blowback is the war we have now. The only thing worse than a wealthy, corrupt, monarchial Saudi Arabia spending all its excess money on yachts and mosques in Pakistan is the same country arming and training mujahideen. What will they do when Iran is sufficiently contained? Find somebody else to blow up, that's what. The problem of unemployed soldiers is a famous one in history, and Americans (particularly, I'm sorry to say, on the right) seem oblivious to it. Americans are blind to this problem because we are just about the only people on earth who both willingly go to war and delight in returning home to an ordinary life when the war is over. For most soldiers in most places through most of history, there is no better ordinary life to return to.

Second, this is another version of "offshore balancing" in the Persian Gulf, the failed approach that led us to support Saddam Hussein against Iran in a barbaric war, triggered the "tanker war", brought us into Saudi Arabia when Saddam counterbalanced his way into Kuwait in 1990, and led to the twelve year "warm war" against Iraq between 1991 and 2003, during which we enriched the worst people in the region with sanctions, flew 10,000 sorties a year against Iraq, bombed it far more often than Democrats are willing to admit, and still could not bring Saddam Hussein to heel. In all of these ways, offshore balancing — the failed strategy of favoring stability over freedom in the region — led to September 11. Whatever the other failures of the Bush administration's foreign policy, this insight remains true. We must not allow our stress over Iraq to push us back into offshore balancing, which is where I fear James Baker is going to lead our president….

Read it, it is well worth taking the time. The problem with the Baker group is that it appears to be heading right back to the failed policies that brought us to where we are right now. Those policies did not work then, they will not work now. But this proposal does show one thing when you think about it: If the Bush administration was as tight with the Saudis as the left tries to paint it, why hasn't an oil war already started? A 50% drop in crude prices would effectively kneecap both the Iranians and (T)Hugo Chavez, wouldn't it?