See the Superpower Run

Patrick J. Buchanan
January 18, 2007, 9:00 am

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No sooner had Sens.

Hagel and Biden announced their resolution
expressing the sense of the Senate that the Bush surge
of 21,500 troops to Iraq was not in the national
interest than the stampede was on. By day`s end, Sens.
Dodd,

Clinton, Bayh, Levin and Obama and ex-Sen. John
Edwards had all made or issued statements calling for
reversing course or getting out.

You can`t run a war by committee, said

Vice President Cheney.

True.

George Washington did not request a vote of
confidence from the Continental Congress before

crossing the Delaware, and

Douglas MacArthur did not consult Capitol Hill
before landing at Inchon.

But Congress is not trying to run a war. Congress is
trying to get out of Iraq and get on record opposing the
"surge." Congress is running after popular
opinion.

And if the surge does not succeed in six months in
quelling the sectarian violence in Baghdad, there will
be no more troops, and the Americans will start down the
road to Kuwait. And, unlike 2003, there will be no
embedded and exhilarated journalists riding with them.

To the older generation, the American way of
abandonment is familiar. JFK`s

New Frontiersmen marched us, flags flying, into
Vietnam. But, as the body count rose to 200 a week, the

"Best and Brightest" suddenly discovered this
was a "civil war," "Nixon`s war" and the
Saigon regime was "corrupt and dictatorial." So,
with a clean conscience, they

cut off funds and

averted their gaze as Pol Pot`s holocaust ensued.

Our

Vietnamese friends who did not make it out on the
choppers, or survive the hellish crossing of the South
China Sea by raft, wound up shot in the street or sent
to "re-education camps."

Nouri al-Maliki can see what is coming.

As Condi flies about the Middle East in a security
bubble, telling the press he is living on

"borrowed time," and Bush tells PBS of his
revulsion at the botched hanging of Saddam Hussein,
Maliki is showing the same signs of independence he
demonstrated when he

refused Bush`s invitation to dine with him and the king
of Jordan. Give me the guns and equipment and go
home, he seems to be saying to the White House.

Put me down on Maliki`s side. It is he who is taking
the real risk here—with his life. It is he who is likely
to learn what Kissinger meant when he observed that in
this world, while it is often dangerous to be an enemy
of the United States, to be a friend is fatal.

Will the surge work? Can it work? Certainly, adding
thousands of the toughest cops in America to the LAPD
would reduce gang violence in South Central. So, it may
work for a time.

Yet in the long run it is hard to see how the surge
succeeds. We are four years into this war, and the
bloodletting in Baghdad is rising. Our presence has
never been more resented. In America, the war has
already been lost. Even Bush admits that staying the
course means "slow failure." And a rapid
withdrawal, as urged by the Baker-Hamilton commission,
means "expedited failure."

Even should the surge succeed for a time, it may only
push the inevitable into another year.

And consider what it is we are asking Maliki to do.

We want him to use Sunni and Kurdish brigades of the
Iraqi Army, in concert with the U.S. Army, to smash the
Mahdi Army of Moqtada al-Sadr, the most popular Shia
leader in the country and the principal political
support of Maliki. We are asking Maliki to turn on his
ruthless Shia patron and bet his future on an America
whose people want all U.S. troops home, the earlier the
better.

For Maliki to implement fully the U.S. conditions
would make him a mortal enemy of Moqtada and millions of
Shia, and possibly result in his assassination. Whatever
legacy Bush faces, he is not staring down a gun barrel
at that.

The truth: There is only one U.S. policy guaranteed
to work if we are resolved to keep Iraq in the U.S.
camp. That is to send an army of 500,000 to 750,000 U.S.
troops into Iraq for an indefinite period, to pacify
Baghdad, retake and hold Anbar and secure the borders
against jihadis. Even that kind of commitment, beyond
the present capacity of the U.S. Army and Marines, would
not secure America`s position, once the inevitable
withdrawal began.

It is over. What we need to face now are the
consequence of the folly of Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and
Rice in launching this unnecessary and unprovoked war,
the folly of the

neocon snake oil salesmen who bamboozled the media
into believing in this insane crusade to bring democracy
to Baghdad in the belly of Bradley fighting vehicles and
the folly of the Democratic establishment in handing
Bush a blank check for war out of

political fear of being called unpatriotic.