If the Baker commission is the K-Mart version of the Congress of Vienna, its influence may prove no less pernicious. Baker is the dean emeritus of a reactionary school of diplomats--inaccurately labeled "realists"--whose support of the shah of Iran, the Saudi royal family, Anwar Sadat, then Hosni Mubarak, and, not least, Saddam Hussein delivered short-term stability that proved illusory in the long run. It was the "realist" elevation of stability above all other strategic factors--echoing Prince Metternich--that gave us not only the radical regime in Iran, but, ultimately, al Qaeda and 9/11.

The leading modern practitioner of this profoundly reactionary approach to international relations was, of course, Henry Kissinger, whose doctoral thesis championed the diplomats and heads of state who redivided Europe into reform-school states after Napoleon's defeat. A classic revisionist, Kissinger ignored the wisdom of 19th century observers who recognized that the oppression sponsored by the Congress of Vienna created only a mockery of peace. The century of Biedermeier sensibilities and Victorian manners was, in fact, punctuated by a long series of failed--and often grisly--revolutions that radicalized those who found the status quo unbearable. The Staats ordnung of the day created the cult of political assassinations that haunts us still. Metternich and his peers induced the social forced labor that gave birth to Marx and all the utopian extremists who came afterward. From the lesser figures, such as Kropotkin or Bakunin, down to Lenin and Hitler, the political distortions of the "orderly" 19th century led to the unprecedented bloodbaths of the 20th century.

The Kissinger school amplified our Cold War support for authoritarian and even dictatorial regimes, deforming the Middle East as Metternich, Talleyrand, Nesselrode, Castlereagh, Wellington, and their lesser contemporaries crippled Europe. For his part, Baker argued--wrongly--that Saddam Hussein should be spared in the wake of Desert Storm; tried to persuade the Soviet Union to remain whole after its comprehensive collapse; and pretended against the increasingly gory evidence that Yugoslavia could be preserved as a unified state. He tolerated Saddam's savage suppression of a Shia revolt we incited, and only grudgingly--and belatedly--acquiesced in our protection of Kurdish refugees.

One of the many tragedies of our experience in Iraq is that the incompetence of the Bush administration's occupation policy has obscured the necessity of igniting change in the Middle East. Removing Saddam Hussein from power was both an intelligent act and a moral one. But the aftermath was so badly botched that many in Washington now long--as did those powdered cynics in Vienna--for the status quo antebellum. They would renew our commitment to Saudi Arabia and other autocracies, while quietly selling out the Lebanese, the Kurds, and the region's moderates in order to get us out of Iraq. We would return to a version of the old order and might gain a brief respite from our troubles in the region. But the greater effects of a renewed stability-über-alles doctrine would play into the recruitment schemes of the most radical Islamist elements in the region, while instigating human rights violations on a breathtaking scale. We would throw away any hope of a better future for a brief timeout today.

Stability at any price isn't the answer. Stability imposed from above empowered Khomeini and bin Laden as surely as it did the 19th century revolutionaries and nihilists who became the 20th century's nationalists, demagogues, and mass murderers. Terror is an inevitable by-product of all grand clampdowns.

The statesmen of the Congress of Vienna sought to turn back history's tide, and their philosophical heirs on the Baker panel are trying to do the same. Democrat or Republican, superficially liberal or conservative, the Iraq Study Group is deeply reactionary. Its recommendations, which will be couched in terms of "sensible" Realpolitik, envision an impossible restoration of a peaceful Middle East that never existed. No matter the politically correct language in which it may be couched, the group's fundamental recommendation will be to return to a foreign policy in which the quest for stability trumps freedom, ignores human rights, frustrates the will of ordinary people, and violates elementary decency. By resisting change, the study group will only make the changes that do come to the Middle East even more explosive and anti-American.

The Middle East problem was difficult enough when the Bush administration stood for a benevolent revolution in possibilities against a range of reactionary enemies, from al Qaeda and Shia militias to various Baathist regimes and the apocalyptic nihilists ruling Iran. For all of the administration's practical ineptitude, its recognition that the Middle East could not continue in its current state was correct. Now we verge on a new clash of civilizations that will oppose our reactionaries to their reactionaries. It is a formula not for stability and peace, but for brutal conflict and spectacular terrorism.

The 19th century was far bloodier within Europe than historical glosses pretend, yet the political order the Congress of Vienna sought to preserve in amber did last, more or less, until 1914, when the inevitable explosion came on a massive scale. But history marches double time today, and any attempt to effect a restoration of rigid, top-down order in the Middle East will fail far more rapidly than did the Concert of Europe. Yesterday's solutions--Jim Baker's solutions--didn't work yesterday. They certainly won't work today.

Since the end of the Cold War, every one of our military engagements has come in response to failing states and flawed borders: Desert Storm, Somalia, Haiti, the Balkans, Afghanistan, Iraq . . . we send our men and women in uniform to defend a world designed in Berlin and Versailles according to the macabre political philosophy of Metternich. The greatest democracy in history has been conned by its own political elite into fighting for the carto graphic legacy of dead czars, kings, kaisers, and emperors.

The Iraq Study Group's members will assure each other of their conscientiousness, while carefully guarding their legacies for future biographers and historians. And the group's recommendations will suggest, in one form or another, a return to the ancien régime.

Of course, the salient difference between the Congress of Vienna and the Iraq Study Group is obvious: The diplomats of the former had just achieved a military victory, while the members of the latter seek to avert a strategic defeat. The freedom of action that the Baker commission might imagine for itself is illusory.

There are no good solutions to Iraq, but some "solutions" are markedly worse than others. Any formula that attempts to extend the lives of dictatorships and oligarchies at the expense of already restive populations will end in disaster--even should it promise us the illusion of a "decent interval."

Ralph Peters is a retired military intelligence officer, columnist, and the author of 21 books, including the recent Never Quit the Fight.

Hat tip: David R.

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Every regional expert or even those with a passing interest in the Middle East knew the likely outcome of the removal of Saddam's tyranny. This region would return to its historical pattern of internecine violence between the Sunni's and the Shiites. This greater conflict would be further factionalized among various tribes, regions, and even families. It is this fractiousness, compounded by Islam, that has kept the whole region poverty stricken and ungovernable for centuries, if not millennia. Unless we wish to become a colonial power, and maintain Iraq as an occupied colony indefinitely, we need to define clear, obtainable objectives, and extricate ourselves once those objectives have been met. It is my belief that those objectives were known, and clearly identified at the beginning of this conflict, however I suspect that diplomacy and rhetoric have overtaken the original goals, and we are now suffering classic "mission creep".

In the debate prior to the conflict the Neo-Cons (myself included) were advocating the greater use of American military force in the world, to solve problems that had proven intractable to both diplomatic, political, and economic pressures. The events of September 11th 2001 served as a graphic, bloody, illustration of the point that problems cannot be left to fester indefinitely, simply because the necessary actions to alleviate them were unpalatable. It is through this juncture that Iraq is inextricably linked with Terrorism and the War on Terror. A number of States in the middle east were sponsors of Islamic terror, in its various forms, guises, and pseudonyms. While Saddam was harboring a number of well known international terrorists in Baghdad, he was presenting oversize checks for $25,000 in ceremonies to the families of suicide bombers from Israel and the territories. His regime supplied weapons, refuge, and training to virtually all of the alphabet soup of Islamic terror groups dating back to the inception of his regime. In this, he was like his nearby states of Iran, Syria, Libya, Oman, Afghanistan, Pakistan, Sudan, Lebanon, as well as arguably Egypt and Saudi Arabia (although the support from those two states tended to be less direct and take the form of gifts from influential individuals rather than official state sponsorship).

Since at least the 1970's the United States had been attempting to use various means to halt this state sponsorship of terror groups, and curtail the promulgation of the Anti-Western Jihadist movement. Both Democrat and Republican administrations from Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, through Reagan, Bush, and Clinton, most methods had been exhausted. The US had tried to establish better cooperation with friendly governments, economic sanctions, foreign aid to buy them off, or even pitting opposing movements against one another and supplying both sides with armaments. Following the end of the Cold War, there was a belief that perhaps it would be best to just keep the US out of the region as much as possible, since our presence seemed to be a catalyst around which the Islamists could organize and focus their animus. We treated the problem as a "police/criminal" issue and used only prosecutorial powers to pursue immediate, specific, identifiable threats. These were handled individually as criminal conspiracies, rather than as part of a global ideological conflict. However, the long period of abandoning the field allowed for the development and deployment of those organizations which brought us 9/11/01.

The Bush administration was faced with the dilemma which had bedeviled each administration since the early 1970's, only they faced it with such inescapable clarity, that a new direction had to be taken. The Neo-Cons pointed out that post WWII terror groups had proven unable to function without some level of state sponsorship, or at the very least, state approval. The leftist terror groups of the 60's and early 70's (Red Brigade, Baader Meinhoff, Carlos the Jackal, etc.) had largely ceased to exist as soon as the communist sponsorship of the Soviet's, East German's, and Bulgarians had dried up. It was argued that likewise, Islamic terror groups thrived because they were the agents of a proxy war against the West and Western Civilization by the Islamic States.

The Iranian takeover of the US embassy, and Jimmy Carters timid, ineffective responses, emboldened the Muslim world to believe that the United States was a "paper tiger". They felt they were again in a position to challenge the Great Powers of the Western (Judeo/Christian) world. Enjoying a newfound petroleum wealth, the Islamic world was rejuvenating it's long war against the Judeo-Christian world (how little has changed can be easily noted in Joshua London's "Victory at Tripoli", recounting the Jefferson and Madison administrations' ineffective struggles with these same regions, then called the "Barbary Pirate States"). It was felt that the only way to deal a crippling blow to "Islamic Terror" was to create a hostile operational environment for them, as had happened for the older groups when their supporting states collapsed.

George Bush referred to this in a speech as "getting rid of the rats by draining the swamp". If the US wanted these Islamic states to stop helping the terrorists, it would have to convince them that it was actually perilous to them to keep it up. Since these states were usually despotism's, where a single individual, his family, and friends ran the country, it would not be possible to pressure them in the ordinary sense. Economic sanctions, diplomatic embarrassment, or trade embargo's would have little impact, since the controlling powers did not depend on the well being or approval of their constituents to remain in power. Even in the worst of times a despot can live a lavish life in splendor, regardless of the suffering of his people. Therefore, the only way to convince them to stop sponsoring terror and spreading the ideology that underlies the terrorist activities, was to directly threaten the despots and their families.

We needed to make an example of one of them. We needed to prove that we were willing and able to personally remove any one of them from power, as well as put an end to their dynasty. We picked Saddam.

The reasons for picking Saddam are apparent. He was in violation of a number of UN Security Council resolutions, any one of which technically gave us Causus Belli. In addition, we had been enforcing a "No Fly Zone" since Gulf 1, and so we had extensive knowledge of the theater of operations as well as his air defense systems, since he kept shooting at our planes for nine years. Further, he was not very popular even amongst the Arab leaders, so we expected diplomatic resistance to be half-hearted at best. Saddam was the low hanging fruit. Despite any allegations of WMD's, the need to free the Iraqi people from Tyranny, or some pabulum about "spreading democracy", the real reason for the Iraq invasion could not be openly stated, it had to be implied; "Muslim despots beware, either you shape up and turn your back on the terrorists, or Uncle Sam will come and depose you, impoverish you, hunt down your family, and arrest your friends. We aren't playing your game anymore". Any other protestations were mere "Public Relations".

The Islamic world got the message loud and clear, even if the American electorate did not. This is why the diplomatic circles have been so upset about "regime change." They pulled out all the stops and deployed every means at their disposal to prevent the US from doing this. They knew that if the US proved capable of doing this, the jig was up. They bought off every diplomat they could find with cash. They offered irresistible oil deals to every country willing to throw up diplomatic roadblocks. They contributed money to domestic politicians campaigns in various countries. They offered exclusive stories and special access to media outlets in exchange for the opportunity to push stories negative to the US campaign. They offered lucrative building and business contracts to influential businesses in countries that would be reluctant to lose these contracts with any regime change in Iraq.

They did everything they could to prevent our action, yet we acted anyway. We showed them we were willing and able to act decisively and unilaterally to unseat any one of them, if we so chose. They were crushed. We had delivered our message, and achieved our primary objective after almost a year to finally catch Saddam.

Then we went on to swallow our own Public Relations line, and "expanded" the mission to include unobtainable goals.

Our current reason for remaining in Iraq, if the Administration's spokespeople are to be believed, is to establish a stable, democratic government in Iraq. Students of the region's culture and history have long agreed that this is unlikely to be an attainable goal. It is beyond the scope of this article to discuss the nature of democracy and its relationship to economic and cultural institutions that must be pre-established for the success of a democracy, but this may be summarized in the statement that we can't do it for them; they must establish a stable, representative government on their own.

As Colin Powell aptly put it, we broke Saddam's Iraq. However, to achieve our true objective, we don't have to buy it. This is a false dichotomy, foisted upon us by those who sought to preclude our taking any action, by requiring we also take on an unwinable action as in indivisible part of the first action. Our objective was achievable when we captured Saddam, and our interests probably would have been best served had we turned him over to the Kuwaitis for trial and execution. A withdrawal from the country following that would have led to complaints and recrimination, but it is hard to stir up hatred with so much crying about, "You left too soon", "we wanted you to stay", or possibly "please come back, it was so much better when you were here".

We will soon be approaching a juncture where we will have a second opportunity to make our point, and score a propaganda victory across the Muslim world, as well as extricate ourselves from the fruitless exercise of "nation building."

At some point in the near future Saddam Hussein will be found guilty of Genocide, Crimes Against Humanity, and a host of other offenses. We should begin a rapid withdrawal from the vast majority of Iraq as soon as he is put to death. The purpose of this withdrawal is far greater than just "taking an excuse to pull out". Across the Arab world, there was a tacit, though unhappy, understanding that this conflict was about vendetta. This is something that makes sense to the Arab mind. Saddam was stupid, he intentionally antagonized a great power. You can only do this for so long before that power will make you answer for your actions with your life. The current intelligence analysis that Iraq is serving as a catalyst for Jihad, and serves as a recruiting tool for Jihad around the world is true only to the extent that they believe the US is acting as a colonial power, having seized Iraq for the purpose of controlling the territory and it's oil. If, however, the US draws down its presence, largely removing ourselves from Iraq following Hussein's death, the other argument in the Islamic world will be proven true and hold sway, namely that the US went into Iraq to kill Saddam, and end his dynasty. It will show we have no interest in conquest, but rather that we are a very dangerous power, not to be idly taunted or baited. The Jihadi's do understand there are times when Christendom is too powerful to be defeated.

There is a valid argument to be made that our withdrawal following Saddam's demise would leave Iraq in a state of civil war, and possibly allow it to be taken over by Iran. These are both distinct possibilities, however I suspect that this will occur whenever we pull out, be that two years from now, or 20 years from now. I also suspect that either of those eventualities would in the end play into our hands and achieve long term benefits to our interests, but that is the subject of another essay.

It is sufficient to note that we need not "buy" all of Iraq's problems. If the US were to begin a major withdrawal following Saddam's execution, both our international friends and enemies would no longer have use of the argument that we are attempting to become a colonial power, or that we are acting for selfish interests. We would demonstrate that we have virtually no interest in what the Iraqi people choose to do with themselves, their territory, or their oil wealth. Should a regime come to power in Iraq that continues to behave in a manner we find unacceptable, by sponsoring terror or taunting us in other arena's, we can reinforce our message by militarily decapitating that regime as well. We should not shy away from "repeated visitations,",as they will serve to reinforce the message that the US is not to be trifled with. At some point, a Darwinian process will take hold throughout the world, and regimes will realize that the most certain way to lose power is to antagonize the U.S. hegemon. When we have convinced them to fear us and leave us alone, we will have achieved our objective, and at that point it will be "Mission Accomplished."

By David Roth

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