A FARAWAY COUNTRY OF WHICH WE KNOW LITTLE

From: The audacity of Obama (Niall Ferguson, National Post, February 20th, 2007)

Take a look at Obama's arguments for a speedy U.S. withdrawal. Speaking on the Senate floor on Jan. 30, he asserted that "redeployment remains our best leverage to pressure the Iraqi government to achieve ? political settlement between its warring factions." The key is "to give Iraqis their country back," since "no amount of American soldiers can solve the political differences at the heart of somebody else's civil war." He repeated these words when he announced that he was running for the presidency last weekend.

But Obama's claim that an American withdrawal would somehow "pressure the Sunni and Shia to come to the table and find peace" is a fraud. On the contrary, an American withdrawal is much more likely to lead to an escalation of the internecine conflict that is tearing Iraq apart. In a devastating paper for the Brookings Institution, Daniel L. Byman and Kenneth M. Pollack have pointed out that, given the vast potential for violence that exists in the Middle East, we ain't seen nothin' yet.

If the U.S. pulls out, as Obama recommends, Byman and Pollack predict "a humanitarian nightmare" in which we should expect "hundreds of thousands (conceivably even millions) of people to die". There could also be huge economic fallout, with oil prices surging above $100 a barrel as the war spilled over into neighbouring countries.

What is particularly objectionable is that Obama appears to have forgotten Colin Powell's Pottery Barn rule, as famously enunciated on the eve of the invasion of Iraq: "You break it, you own it." Far more than in Sudan, the United States has a burning moral responsibility to prevent Iraq from plunging into a bloodbath. When Obama refers to "someone else's civil w a r," you have to ask how he thinks this civil war got started.

It might be different if there were any informed voices arguing that a withdrawal from Iraq or Afghanistan would result in peace, but of course there are none. It might be different if the left was arguing the old isolationist view that liberating or protecting foreigners is not worth the death of one American soldier, but they aren’t. The only coherent explanation for the rising anti-war ethos is that it is based on a self-contempt so profound that it now views the death of one Iraqi at the hands of the U.S. as more morally offensive than a massive internecine slaughter of which we can all thoroughly wash our hands. We imagine that, in the morally confused universe of the left, this is all made blindingly compelling by the doctrine of self-determination.