It’s with trepidation that I wade in here before J-Pod has accepted the invitation, but I feel Michael Ledeen would want me to say this. Isn’t it kind of silly for the SECDEF to be saying, in public, that he thinks there’s a shred of possibility that Iran and Syria might be “helpful”? Please tell me he doesn’t really believe that, and that we are not really basing anything we decide to in the war on terror based on the hope that the state sponsors of terror might decide to be helpful.

The war on terror started as a project to wipe out the jihadists and the states that support them. Two of the top states supporting the still existing jihadists are Iran and Syria. Now we are talking about leaving Iraq based not on how degraded the terror network is but on on how stable Iraq is (which was not the mission) which in turn depends on how much help we get from two of the main state sponsors of terrorism, which continue to operate with what looks like relative impunity.

What am I missing here?