John McCain

Up until recently I have had no preference for any presidential candidate in the upcoming 2008 election. However, things are becoming a bit clearer for me now that the Democrats are pushing for a resolution to condemn Bush’s plan for a troop surge in Iraq. A plan that is designed to match the surge in violence between the Sunnis and Shiites in Baghdad.

Senator Chuck Hagel, who has rose to prominence simply because he is a Republican that criticizes the Bush Administration, has become locked in a fierce debate with fellow Republican Senator John McCain. The disagreement between the two is centered around a resolution proposed by McCain to support the troop surge.

Hagel’s stance, which dictates that we should not get involved in a civil war between Sunnis and Shiites, makes sense if you don’t really care about the fate of the Iraqi people. Since the US is in the middle of transferring full sovereignty to the Iraqi government it can be argued that we have a moral responsibility to do something about this terrible violence. On Saturday a truck bomb killed about 130 civilians. The attack devastated a popular market in a Shiite Baghdad neighborhood. Since the bombing was aimed at civilians it is quite clear that the objective of this attack was to incite the Shiites into retaliating and further escalating the violence.

Yet Hagel wants US troops redeployed to the borders of Iraq and remove them from the cities where they are most needed to combat this sort of atrocity. He has also demanded that there be consequences for the Iraqi government if they don’t meet benchmarks laid out by McCain’s proposal. While I agree that the Iraqi political leadership could do more to stem the violence, the withdrawal of support for their fledgling government would be fatal. Hagel is actually trying to destabilize the Iraqi government and that leads me to believe that he is not particularly interested in helping them. Typically, when fighting a common enemy, you support your allies and attack your enemy. Hagel is actually doing the reverse.

Citing the Iraq Study Group Report, he wants to turn to Iran and Syria for help.

Iran had a leading role in inciting the failed Shiite rebellion against Saddam in 1991 and ever since they have continued to exert their influence among Iraqi Shiites. The Mahdi Army, which fought many battles with US troops and is behind much of the escalation in sectarian violence, has been trained and armed by Iran. While the political arm of the Mahdi army has participated in the electoral process - its leader, Muqtada al-Sadr has shown more loyalty to Iran than his own country. When Sadr visited Tehran early last year he declared that he would defend Iran if it is attacked. This is a very disturbing statement coming from a man that has spent much of the last couple of years fighting his own countrymen. During this time Iran has continued their intrigue on many other levels. Agents of the Iranian government are believed to be distributing sophisticated IED devices that were made in Iran to Iraqi insurgents. In addition, terrorists that recently conducted an attack on Americans dressed in US uniforms are believed to have been trained in Iran.

Syria has a long history of supporting terrorism in neighboring countries and has become a safe haven for Saddam Hussein loyalists who finance and organize the Iraqi insurgency. Although relations between Syria and Saddam’s regime had been quite icy in the past, they began to work together in the last years of Saddam’s reign. In 2005 Congress determined that Syria helped funnel $3 billion dollars in money and weapons to Saddam Hussein during the period of the scandal-plagued UN Oil-for-Food program.

Despite these facts, Hagel still thinks that we can work with these countries. He said, “There is going to be no peace in Iraq, there will be no peace in the Middle East unless all the regional partners are brought in to a framework of a political agreement.” What kind of concessions would the Iraqis have to give in order to win the support of Syria and Iran? Syria will not support a Shiite led government that is friendly towards to the US and Iran will not accept anything less than a Shiite theocracy that is hostile to the US. Inviting further influence by regimes that are behind the violence in Iraq is a folly worse than giving the Sudetenland to Hitler. Instead of looking for easy solutions that don’t work, critics of the Bush Administration should start looking for answers that do. Abandoning Iraq to anarchy is not a strategy. Its amazing that they can foist their lack of strategy as a concrete plan, while Bush’s strategy has resulted in the defeat of a terrible regime and the formation of Iraq’s first truly representative democracy in its history.

Senator McCain has spent a great deal of time criticizing our policy in Iraq, but he has also remained committed to defeating our enemies. Instead of running a safe campaign that sells out our troops, McCain is remaining true to his convictions.

Politicians like Hagel who voted to authorize the use of force against Iraq didn’t do so because they believed it was the right thing to do, they voted for the resolution because they felt that it was the popular thing to do. They can blame Bush or the CIA or whoever they want, but the truth is that they never seriously considered what they were getting themselves into. That is why they lack the conviction to follow through with the commitment that they made to the Iraqi people.

I prefer a candidate that is more concerned about the best interests of the American and Iraqi people, not his own self-interest.