KT McFarland Explains What's Different About War in the Middle East

In a nutshell, the 42 coordinated attacks in Iraq yesterday—which utilized armed gunmen, IEDs, suicide bombers and car bombings—were “not good,” according to Fox News National Security Analyst KT McFarland, who worked for Presidents Nixon, Ford, and Reagan.
 
“It does call into question the ability of the Iraqis to provide for their own security after we leave,” McFarland said. Though approximately 30,000 U.S. troops remain in the country, all are expected to depart by year’s end; unless, of course, the Iraqis ask them to stay. Though McFarland cautioned, “At a certain point, you’ve got to take the training wheels off the bike and see if they can ride it or not.”
 
She continued, “To me, Don, this calls into question this whole Bush-Obama policy of wars of intervention. What are we doing there?”
 
Rather than reply to his guest’s eloquent question, Imus insisted she not refer to him as “Don,” but as “The I-Man.” Or, he suggested, “You can call me what everybody else calls me: A-hole.”
 
Having established nothing, McFarland told Imus she thinks the violence could increase once the U.S. leaves Iraq. “At one extreme, it’s a multi-party civil war, with the Sunnis and Shiites, Al-Qaeda, the Iranian Shiites, all fighting an Iraqi government which can’t hold the peace,” she said. “It’s not unlike what I think will probably happen as we leave Afghanistan.”
 
Another one of her former bosses, Henry Kissinger, used to say of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1970s and 80s, “It was the one war you hoped never ended, and nobody won. Because it kept two adversaries at each other’s throats and busy in the region, and not with an opportunity to cause trouble.”
 
Despite its good intentions, McFarland does not believe the U.S. is leaving Iraq in better shape than when it arrived, which is dangerous on many levels. “When we went in, there was a strong man, Saddam Hussein, and you might not have liked that government, but it was a strong, unified government,” she said. Now, a significantly weakened Iraq allows Iran to be a regional power, whereas “it was a check against Iran before.”
 
Even though the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan did not begin on his watch, McFarland believes Obama’s continued meddling in both countries was to the detriment of U.S. foreign policy, because the Middle East considers war much differently than this country does.
 
“We think of war as something that ends with a peace agreement,” she said. “They think of war as something that’s the normal state of affairs, and peace is a temporary pause while you regroup to fight again.”
 
It’s not unlike the way things work at Imus in the Morning.
 
-Julie Kanfer