Fixing an Unholy Mess

With so little time before the presidential election and so much chaos in the world, I figured I better get hold of professor Richard Dekmejian at USC. Dekmejian, who teaches classes on terrorism and leadership, was the one who kept me sane during all the saber rattling that preceded the war in Iraq.

The war struck me as ill-conceived and dreadfully naive from Day 1, and I kept shining that thin beam into a dark sky. But highly regarded pundits, Congress and much of the country barely noticed, because they were too busy eating freedom fries and washing them down with George W. Bush Kool-Aid.

Was I that out of touch with reality? I wondered at the time.

Not at all, Dekmejian would assure me. “Everything I know about Iraq,” he had said, “tells me there will be near-term and long-term crisis after Saddam is defeated.”

In startling detail, Dekmejian anticipated the current disaster.

“I don’t even want to say, ‘I told you so,’ ” he told me the other day. “It was so simple.”

He was so prescient, I couldn’t think of a better person than Dekmejian to advise us on how to get out of this mess.

I should warn you that his advice comes from scholarship, not divinity. So President Bush might have no interest. The president was described recently by a former Republican Cabinet member as having a “Messianic idea of what he thinks God has told him to do.”

I don’t know about you, but I was scared out of my shoes when I read that in the New York Times.

Dekmejian, though he hears no voices in his head, did lay out a three-point plan for Iraq:

* Set a date for U.S. withdrawal.

* Promise not to maintain a U.S. military presence in Iraq.

* Hand over power to an international coalition.

Tall orders, yes. But Dekmejian doesn’t see any other way, and he doesn’t think either candidate is leveling with us about how dire the situation is.

“My suspicion is that Kerry is looking in this direction, but isn’t prepared to admit it because he’s already being accused of being a softy,” Dekmejian said. “I suspect many of Kerry’s supporters want a share of the Bush goal of establishing an American protectorate with basing rights.

“It won’t work.”

Sure about that?

“Absolutely. Iraq and its neighbors will not permit the U.S. to control the Iraqi government and its oil wells and establish a system of military bases to project control over the region.”

The insurgency will never end, in other words, and our soldiers will be sitting ducks indefinitely. The continuing U.S. presence will serve as a bugle call to endless waves of Islamic fundamentalists, God’s faithful servants on the other side.

“To reduce the threat of terrorism,” Dekmejian said, “you have to resolve some very basic issues.”

Again, he has a plan.

First, promote Israel’s acceptance of a Palestinian state. Second, use the new credibility to “encourage authoritarian Arab governments to democratize.” Third, create an energy plan that isn’t paid for by Hummer and Enron, so we don’t keep crawling into bed with Middle Eastern despots.

Or we can just leave the whole thing in the hands of the man upstairs and his messenger here on Earth. But it’s hard to believe that God passed on bad intelligence on weapons of mass destruction.

And you’d think He would have ratted out Osama by now.