Posted by
On the Right on Saturday, June 07, 2008 11:19:37 PM
The Iran Challenge
Obama's "responsible, phased redeployment of our troops from Iraq"
would also redound to Iran's strategic benefit. The policy would erase
the security and political gains the United States and its Iraqi allies
have made in the last year and a half. It would lead to more violence,
not less, and to a weaker Iraqi government, not a stronger one. It
would breathe new life into the radicals--many sponsored by the Iranian
regime--who seek a failed state in Iraq. And Tehran would quickly move
to fill any power vacuum that the Americans left behind in Iraq.
Why on earth, then, would the supreme leader of Iran, seeing the
U.S. president knocking on his door--a supplicant--and U.S. troops
retreating from Iraq, be moved to negotiate with the United States? By
what strategic calculus would he determine that that would be the time
to give up his chips?
Ah, but we have entered the Obama zone, where conditions are not
conditions, where Ahmadinejad is and is not really the leader of Iran,
where the Iranian Revolutionary Guards isn't a terrorist group one year
but is the next, where Iran is simultaneously a "tiny" and a "grave"
threat, and where the absence of American combat troops in Iraq
actually increases U.S. influence in the Middle East.