An Analysis of the Report of the Iraq Study Group

The report of the Iraq Study Group is the kind of mush that results when a group of people of disparate views and abilities strive to arrive at consensus rather than something akin to common sense. To be sure, the Iraq Study Group eschewed the really harebrained suggestions that have been floating around, like an immediate pullout of American troops or the partition of the Iraqi state. But the 79 recommendations contained within the report (which some are viewing as commandments) represent a mishmash of the obvious, the sensible, the unworkable, and just the plain evil.

The first seventeen recommendations outline a plan for a “diplomatic offensive” which the members of the Iraq Study Group have designed to solve the external causes of the Iraq War. There are a number of problems of this approach.

First it involves Iran and Syria suddenly acting in a less belligerent manner because the United States has asked them to. The problem is that these two states, especially the Islamic Republic of Iran, consider the United States as an enemy with which they are at war. Iran and Syria are actively supporting the terrorists within Iraq for the purpose of creating chaos and casualties in order to induce the United States and her allies to withdraw in defeat. Were that to happen, not only Iran and Syria, but groups such as Al Qaeda would feast on Iraq, carving it up, creating a humanitarian tragedy on the scale of a Rwanda or Cambodia and, in the end, creating a base for terrorist operations against the West. Iran and Syria have also sponsored terrorists in and around the State of Israel, including Hamas and Hezbollah.

Moreover Iran is led by a madman named Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the kind of tyrant rarely seen on the world stage since the death of Adolf Hitler. He has denied the Holocaust, while advocating a modern version for the State of Israel. He has threatened the West with destruction unless it submits to his own, peculiar brand of Islam. He is hell bent in a quest to acquire nuclear weapons for the purpose of achieving his goals. In short, he is not the sort of man to be reasoned with.