From Munich to Tehran and Damascus
The Baker-Hamilton Commission's instincts and prescriptions are eerily similar to those of Neville Chamberlain. The commission evidently believes that the United States can achieve peace in our time by flying our secretary of State to Tehran and Damascus and signing this generation's version of the Munich Agreement with respect to Iraq.
The report and its principal recommendations require an exercise in willful ignorance of the nature of the Iranian and Syrian regimes, their clearly stated ideological aims, and their ongoing war against the United States. It outlines a policy of appeasement, predicated on American weakness. It fails to outline a clear policy of victory predicated on taking specific and urgent steps to add to American strength.
A Churchill -- Not a Chamberlain -- Policy
To win in Iraq and around the world against a growing alliance among terrorists, dictatorships, and a fanatical wing of Islam, the United States requires fundamental change in its military doctrine, training and structures, its intelligence capabilities and the integration of civilian and military activities. The instruments of American power simply do not work at the speed and detail needed to defeat the kind of enemies we are encountering in Iraq and elsewhere. The American bureaucracies would rather claim the problem is too hard and leave, because being forced to change this deeply will be very painful and very controversial. We have to learn to win -- again.
Yes, the dangers are greater, the enemy is more determined, and victory in Iraq has turned out to be substantially harder than we had expected in 2003. Yes, we need to change to win. But the Baker-Hamilton Commission report that prescribes a "new way forward" is the wrong prescription in the wrong direction.
Because it fails to define the scale of an emerging Third World War against an alliance of dictatorships and the terrorist forces of militant Islam -- with Iran at the epicenter of this threat -- the report does not outline how difficult the challenge is and how big the effort will have to be.
Because it fails to define victory in this larger war as our goal, the report does not help to mobilize the energy, resources and intensity needed to win.
And because it puts insufficient emphasis on setting clear metrics of achievement for the bureaucracies of the U.S. government, the Baker-Hamilton Commission report does nothing to bolster support for replacing leaders, bureaucrats, and bureaucracies as needed to achieve these goals.
The release of the report confirms a Washington establishment desire to avoid conflict and confrontation by "doing a deal." In the 1930s, that model was called appeasement, not realism, and it led to a disaster. Today, we need a Churchill not a Chamberlain policy for the Middle East.
Newt Gingrich
