Plan C

DallasMorningViews | Tod Robberson:

“Amazing how people can look at the same set of factors, accept that the same set of requirements need to be met, and come up with entirely different conclusions about how to address it. The Council on Foreign Relations has issued a special report on disengagement from Iraq. The first half of it reads almost exactly like our Plan B, but the conclusion is that all U.S. troops must leave Iraq because even a dramatically reduced force, placed in outlying border areas, would still be viewed as an occupation force. ”

Ed Cognoski responds:

The Council on Foreign Relations probably has it right. The major grievance Osama bin Laden held against the United States in the 1990s was that we left behind military forces in Saudi Arabia after the first Gulf War. The United States believed it was there to keep the peace. Osama considered it a casus belli. Ironically, what the United States believed it was preventing became all the more certain exactly because of the United States' actions.

Today, the United States is even more deeply entrenched in Muslim lands. The United States seems to be blindly following the model it has used from Germany to Japan to Korea to Bosnia. Leave troops behind to keep the peace. But there is a huge difference between those cases and this one. In those historic examples, there was a continuing threat that the people in the occupied lands feared more than the United States. For Germany, it was Russia. For Japan, it was China. For South Korea, it was North Korea. For Bosnia, it was Serbia. Who do the Muslims in the Middle East fear? Infidels. Jews and Christians, mostly. The United States is not perceived as a welcome counterbalance to an external threat. The United States is the threat. Our presence is not a stabilizing force. It is destabilizing and always will be so. The sooner we realize that, the sooner we can craft a new, effective foreign policy to replace the disastrous Bush foreign policy.