OPINION:
I was ruminating about Colin Powell’s Pottery Barn rule with my friend Joe M. the other day. Joe M. isn’t your average Joe. He is a retired Army Special Forces colonel, a Green Beret, an outfit in which he served with distinction.
Joe is entirely skeptical about the supposed rule that “if you break it, you bought it,” as it applies to nations. I agree entirely.
Powell, secretary of state and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, first stated his “rule” in 2002, before we invaded Iraq. What he meant was that if we overthrew Saddam Hussein’s regime, we were responsible for rebuilding the Iraqi nation. The same “rule” held for Afghanistan if we removed the Taliban, which we were attempting to do and failed.
Powell’s advice was conclusive in the mind of President George W. Bush. We undertook to rebuild Iraq and Afghanistan in the midst of the wars we fought there, and we failed with terrible results.
Before Iraq and Afghanistan, we had considerable luck in nation-building. After World War II, we rebuilt Germany and Japan, and we provided $13 billion in 1945 dollars (about $236 billion in 2026 dollars) to rebuild much of Europe under the Marshall Plan. The Axis Powers and Iraq and Afghanistan have huge differences.
First, Germany and Japan had their governments and their governments’ ideologies decisively defeated. They had no choice but to accept it. Iran has not been defeated, nor has its ideology.
Second, neither of those countries was Islamic. The ideology of Islam is as powerful in Afghanistan and Iraq — and Iran — as it was in 2001. It is Islamism that is the biggest problem that besets the Middle East and the rest of the world.
As Secretary of State Marco Rubio has said, “Radical Islam has shown that their desire is not simply to occupy one part of the world. … It seeks to expand and control more territories and more people. … That’s a clear and imminent threat to the world and the broader West but especially to the United States, who they identify as the chief source of evil on the planet.”
Mr. Rubio’s formulation is not new. In his book “Clash of Civilizations,” Samuel Huntington prophesied that the post-World War II wars would be among the West, Islam and China. These are wars of religion and ideology.
We have not fought the ideological war against Islamists and, thus, they are winning. Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld and British Prime Minister Tony Blair understood at the time that we needed to fight that war. Presidents Bush and Trump did not and do not.
The need to fight an ideological war is not new. I first wrote about it in 2006 after learning it from Marine Gen. Peter Pace, then chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The Israelis and we are attempting to break Iran’s will and its industrial and military capacities by bombing it relentlessly. As he has said plainly, regime change is not one of Mr. Trump’s objectives. Nevertheless, what do we owe postwar Iran, whether or not the ayatollahs’ regime is overthrown?
We owe them precisely nothing.
It was not we who killed hundreds of Americans over the past five decades. It was not we who sponsored terrorism around the world. It was not we who were a revolutionary government aimed at spreading that Islamic Revolution throughout the world. It is not we who believe in one of the most radical strains of Islam, and it is not we who would use nuclear weapons to cause the return of the Twelfth Imam, who, as Iran’s ideology calls for, would create an idyllic Islamic world.
Powell’s Pottery Barn rule belongs on the ash heap of history. We must not engage in nation-building in Iran. If we do, then we will fail and endanger our national security.
Mr. Trump, as this column has said several times, has only truly ugly choices. He has chosen to negotiate with the ayatollahs’ regime, which can lead only to its rearming with nuclear weapons, whether it gets them from another nation or develops them itself. That, as he has said, we cannot tolerate.
Mr. Trump has said the regime has already changed, but it has not. The choice is between the overthrow of the ayatollahs’ regime and, sooner rather than later, a nuclear-armed Iran.
• Jed Babbin is a national security and foreign affairs columnist for The Washington Times and a contributing editor for The American Spectator.
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