southchild

Last week we advised “To hell with Iran and Syria” with respect to the upcoming recommendations of the august Iraq Study Group. The report is now available, and our opinions are unchanged.

Paul at powerlineblog.com has read the executive summary of the Iraq Study Group report and has this to say about it.

According to the summary, the ISG is making two recommendations. First, it’s recommending that the U.S. actively engage Iraq’s neighbors — the only two it names are Syria and Iran — without preconditions in order to induce them to help stabilize the situation in Iraq. The report states that the U.S. has “discentives and incentives” available with which to influence these countries. The only such incentive or disincentive mentioned in the summary is “dealing directly with the Arab-Israeli conflict.”

Thus, the ISG report lives up to its advanced billing. The best the “wise men” can come up with is to have our worst enemies try to help us stabilize Iraq. And, apparently, the primary inducement will be to pressure Israel into creating a Palestinian state (as if Iran really cares about that). It’s difficult to say which is more pronounced, the craven nature of this recommendation or its lack of realism.

Yawn. How original and utterly useless. James Baker should stick to golf and Senior-citizen discount Wednesdays at the Safeway.

Paul says he’ll withhold final judgement until he reads the entire report. We think this is a report that only a cut-and-run Democrat, or Jimmy Carter, could love.

UPDATE:
OK, we’ll be fair and admit that at least the report says an immediate withdrawal from Iraq would be a disaster, and it opposes any plan to partition the country. Tony Snow is characterizing the report as “devastating” to Democrats since it doesn’t call for an immediate exit. We think that’s a bit much, Tony. Obviously, we need to train more Iraqi’s, the Iraqi government needs to get a grip, etc. Nothing is really new there; however, we ridicule and scoff at the notion of “talking” to Iran and Syria.

Screw Iran and Syria.

Until the B2’s are within range of Iran’s nuclear facilities and the special forces are en route, the only thing we should say to Iran is, “Just wait and we’ll talk. We’ll give you 15 minutes notice before your nuclear facilities join Iraq’s in the desert dust.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, December 6th, 2006 at 5:00 pm and is filed under General, politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.