HAPPY NEW YEAR!

The Plan....it was proposed earlier...is consistent with what others think, they being really smart and "on the scene' guys. Here's Michael Ledeen, again.

If you want to understand the failure of the Bush Administration to understand the real war, a couple of quotations tell you everything you need to know.

The United States is now holding, apparently for the first time, Iranians who it suspects of planning attacks. One senior administration official said, “This is going to be a tense but clarifying moment.”

The heart jumps for a moment, wondering if, at long last, this “clarifying moment” will catalyze some sort of American effort to directly challenge the clerical fascist regime in Tehran. But then the heart sinks, as the senior official explains: it’s not about us at all. It’s all about the Iraqis. I’ve put in the boldface for the visually challenged:

“It’s our position that the Iraqis have to seize this opportunity to sort out with the Iranians just what kind of behavior they are going to tolerate,” the official said…“They are going to have to confront the evidence that the Iranians are deeply involved in some of the acts of violence.”

How bad is that? I conjure up an image of Rice or Hadley on the phone to Maliki and Talabani, telling the Iraqis that we’ve captured senior Iranian military officials (one will get you five we’re talking here about officers from the Revolutionary Guards Corps), and it’s just made the New York Times, and so Maliki and Talabani had better figure out what to do.

And then I imagine a parent of an American soldier in Iraq shrieking at Rice and Hadley “what do you mean, they? The Iranians are killing our kids, how dare you run away from this?”

Those killer quotes from the Times show once again the failure of strategic vision that has plagued us from the beginning of the war. We can only win the war—the real war, the regional-or-maybe-even-global war—if we stop playing defense in Iraq and go after regime change in Damascus and Tehran. Everyone in the region, above all, the Iraqis, knows this. And everyone in the region is looking for evidence that we might be able to muster the will to win this thing

Here's a blogger from Baghdad, writing in the Wall Street Journal.

...What I'm trying to say here is that the military component we need at this particular stage should be different from the routine military operations that U.S. and Iraqi military had been conducting so far. ...the way forward requires maintaining the basic course of the political process and empowering (and cleaning) the current government and its head then the only way to do this is to relieve Mr. Maliki, his party and the rest of the Shia alliance from the dominance and influence of Sadr, and there are two ways to accomplish this: either persuade Mr. Maliki and his team and promise them great support and protection from Sadr's reach, or deal a lethal blow to Sadr and his militia in order to render him unable to inflict harm on Mr. Maliki and other members of the United Iraqi Alliance. ... it shouldn't be that difficult to figure out that the first way isn't working out right, what's needed now is to take the decision to try the second way and deal with the biggest threat to stability in Iraq in the way we should.
Together we succeeded in reducing the threat posed by al Qaeda when it was identified as the biggest threat to Iraq's stability and security. Now together we can do the same with Sadr and other thugs. We understand the question, and we have a diagnosis that seems sound; it's time to proceed with the treatment.

We're waiting for the President to decide. If you think the future of the world doesn't depend on this, consider this from Nial Ferguson, a Brit Professor of History...I've said this before, but not nearly so well...and mostly in the context of my own life, from 1933-45. Here's a bigger picture of our last century.

The hundred years after 1900 were without question the bloodiest century in modern history, far more violent in relative as well as absolute terms than any previous era. Significantly larger percentages of the world's population were killed in the two world wars that dominated the century than had been killed in any previous conflict of comparable geopolitical magnitude. Although wars between 'great powers' were more frequent in earlier centuries, the world wars were unparalleled in their severity (battle deaths per year) and concentration (battle deaths per nation-year). By any measure the Second World War was the greatest man-made catastrophe of all time. And yet, for all the attention they have attracted from historians, the world wars were only two of many twentieth-century conflicts. Death tolls quite probably passed the million mark in more than a dozen others.* Comparable fatalities were caused by the genocidal or 'politicidal' wars waged against civilian populations by the Young Turk regime during the First World War, the Soviet regime from the 1920s until the 1950s and the National Socialist regime in Germany between 1933 and 1945, to say nothing of the tyranny of Pol Pot in Cambodia. There was not a single year before, between, or after the world wars that did not see large-scale organized violence in one part of the world or another.

And the perspective from Hugh Hewitt.

It is against that backdrop that Iran's thrust for nukes must be understood. All of the carnage of the previous century was completed with the only uses of a WMD at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Project forward the same level of violence of the last century into the new one, but imagine even four or five of the aggressors or factions possessing WMD, and the picture of what is ahead in the next 93 years is bleak beyond description.

There is no persuasive reason to believe the world will be a better place over the next 100 years than it was in the past 100. Indeed, given the willingness of some to erase the past in order to better prepare to repeat it and the rise of a suicidal fanaticism among large numbers of industrial-age, educated people, there are many reasons to expect that their will be many people eager for the violence of the 21rst century to far outstrip that of the 20th.

Thus history compels the United States to deny WMD to those most likely to use them in wars or civil wars. Saddam was one such tyrant, and Iraq even in its chaos and its toll in American lives is much less dangerous to the world and the U.S. than Saddam's Iraq or the Iraq of his sons when they succeeded him.

While the "Descent of the West" may already have begun, I'm betting it won't be finished for a while....and that it might even be possible to reverse it.

Not likely, but possible.

And so tomorrow's another day; next year, another year, and for now Happy New Year Everyone....

We're off to see our Kansas grandchildren. For pix of the Glory of Isaiah's first Christmas, look here.