Reverse Flypaper

Yet another in the endless series of bombings in Iraq, this one a timed attack on the Interior Ministry, added to the news of the passing of this sad milestone: 1,500 US soldiers now dead. The Interim Prime Minister has extended the state of emergency in the country, and attacks have not abated since the Jan. 31 elections. Insurgents have been successful in recent days of blowing up gas pipelines, including one that links the Kurdish city of Kirkuk to the interior of the country. 125 is now the death count from Monday's car bombing in Hillah, south of Baghdad.

US representatives have acknowledged that we're not going to be able to leave the country for a long time. Security is an issue with us there, one could only imagine what would happen if we left. But this mentality, that we cannot leave Iraq to its own fragile system of policing, begs the question: was this the idea all along? In 2003 Andrew Sullivan and several neocons suggested the "flypaper strategy," offering the notion that our insistence on invading Iraq was an attempt to bring all the terrorists in the region into one place, where we could capture and kill them easier than if they were scattered across the globe. While this always seemed to me a tautological idea (as if there are a finite number of terrorists), one has to now ask whether or not the reverse was true.

Clearly the low-level but persistent nature of the insurgency bogs us down in Iraq in the extended near-term. The focus has at the very least strained, and at worst severely hampered our efforts around the world. Recividism is at an ebbing point, the Marines cannot recruit their target numbers, and we are forcing National Guard troops to maintain their stays overseas far beyond reasonability. Clearly the insurgents knew they could not defeat the US military in a fair fight. Baghdad fell so quickly because, like a toreador faced with a hard-charging bull, the Iraqi fighters fled, leading the military into the country where the battle could be waged on their terms. That has to be acknowledged by all sides. Every single "turning point" battle, like Najaf, Falluja, Ramadi, and more, has been characterized by a "surprisingly easy" takeover of the city. The insurgents are not idiots; they run from a conventional battle, preferring to pester and needle the US forces through IEDs and clandestine mortar attacks.

I'm desperate to see Iraq maintain some semblance of order, as should every American. I'm encouraged by the wealth of political pressure put on Syria to leave Lebanon, and Palestine to engage Israel. I've said in earlier posts that these developments have as much to do with historical events in the region (Arafat's death, Hariri's assassination) as US engagement to spread democracy in the Middle East. We should continue the pressure and extend it to our nominal allies, Egypt and Saudi Arabia (whose moves toward democratic reforms one hopes are more than lip service). But I'm concerned we've committed ourselves to a perpetual on-the-ground presence from which we will not be able to extricate ourselves, to the detriment of our overall international strategy.

This is a looking-ahead post. Progressives like myself have been committed to the promotion of democracy for decades. Bush's triangulation on the topic is kind of a political masterstroke, pigeonholing Democrats as the party against freedom, but that's only because the Dems have gone along with it (at least most of them). I'm just musing here, but this reverse flypaper (along with the dissolution of the moral high ground typically assigned to the US after Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib) is extremely dangerous for our security and our foreign policy, and while we celebrate events on the ground in the region, we have to be mindful of the consequences of our actions, and take steps to rebut them (although I don't know what that could be at this point, the flypaper is really damn sticky after nearly two years).