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GLOBAL VIEW By BRET STEPHENS DOW JONES REPRINTS This copy is for your personal, non-commercial use only. To order presentation-ready copies for distribution to your colleagues, clients or customers, use the Order Reprints tool at the bottom of any article or visit: www.djreprints.com. • See a sample reprint in PDF format. • Order a reprint of this article now. Honor Killing December 12, 2006; Page A19 Alexis de Tocqueville observed that in America morals count for a lot while honor counts for relatively little. Reading the lamentable report of the Iraq Study Group, it shows. The operative word in the ISG report is "should," which is what grammarians call a defective verb. The report easily contains more than 100 shoulds, varying tonally from hectoring to plaintive to nitpicking. The report's ninth recommendation, for instance, stresses that "Iran should be asked to assume its responsibility to participate in the Support Group" while the 23rd says "the President should restate that the United States does not seek to control Iraq's oil." Only rarely do the ISG authors employ different language, such as when they say "there must be a renewed and sustained commitment by the United States to a comprehensive Arab-Israeli peace." Like an editorial in the New York Times, this is an exercise in homiletics, not persuasion. [J B] By contrast, the word "honor" appears just once: "We also honor the many Iraqis who have sacrificed on behalf of their country," write ISG co-chairmen James Baker and Lee Hamilton, who also put in a kind word for our Coalition allies. But honor isn't simply a sentimental verb. It is a decisive principle of action in all foreign policy, never more so than in the honor-obsessed Middle East. It is not about good intentions, wisdom or virtue, but about appearances and perception: "Honor acts solely for the public eye," wrote Tocqueville. In practice, it means standing by one's friends and defying one's enemies, whatever the price. During the 1973 Yom Kippur War Richard Nixon ordered the military resupply of Israel in its hour of need not because he was sympathetic to Jews -- he wasn't -- but because he understood that the U.S. could not be seen to let a client down. Nine months later, he was accorded a ticker-tape parade through the streets of Cairo. How does the ISG report meet the test of honor? Mainly by failing it. The report is chiefly notable for declaring in its first sentence that "the situation in Iraq is grave and deteriorating." This statement of fact is being celebrated by sundry commentators as a bold and necessary act of speaking truth to power. This may be true in Washington, but what does it actually achieve in Iraq? The invaluable translation service Memri offers a clue in the form of a response to the ISG report on Islamist Web sites connected to the Iraqi insurgents: "Now that its wager on the Shi'ite government [of Iraq] has failed [to pay off]," goes the message, "the American administration [is striving] to foil . . . any attempt to [establish] . . . an Islamic State in the form of a Caliphate in Iraq . . . " Next there is the report's repeated calls for "national reconciliation," by which the authors mean that the Iraqi government "must send a clear signal to Sunnis that there is a place for them in national life." This is unobjectionable, insofar as it involves purely economic questions such as oil-revenue sharing, though this is itself highly controversial. Yet the recommendation becomes something else entirely when it demands that the Iraqi government accommodate the very people who have been at the forefront of the insurgency's mass-murder campaign. That isn't likely to appease the Sunnis, whose track record of the past 40 months offers scant hope that they are seriously prepared to behave as a responsible minority in a predominantly Shiite country. But it is likely to alienate the one constituency the U.S. cannot afford to lose -- the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and particularly President Jalal Talabani, who wasted no time denouncing the ISG report as "dangerous" and "an insult to the people of Iraq." Having thus emboldened terrorists and alienated friends, the report proceeds to the suggestion that the U.S. seek the cooperation of Syria and Iran, its two principal enemies in the region, on the theory that neither country wants chaos on its border. It's an interesting idea, given that sowing chaos on their borders is precisely what both countries have been doing in Iraq, and elsewhere, for years. But the larger question isn't whether Iran and Syria will cooperate in the "New Diplomatic Initiative" and "International Support Group" grandiosely envisaged by the report. It is what the announced willingness to parley says about America's long-term interests in, and intentions for, the region. The Bush administration overthrew the regime of Saddam Hussein largely as a way of "signaling" that it was no longer prepared to countenance a Middle East of terrorism-sponsoring regimes. Now the ISG announces that not only is the U.S. prepared to deal with those regimes, but that it will do the bidding of one of them, Syria, by again putting maximum pressure on Israel to abandon the Golan Heights. In this, at least, it does so on the plausible theory that unlike Iraq's Shiites our Israeli friends cannot betray us because they have nowhere else to turn. All this can variously be described as wishful or foolish or wrong, and President Bush seems to have received it with a beady eye. With luck, it will find its place on the shelf between Kofi Annan's plan for U.N. reform and Robert Pozen's Social Security reform proposals. What matters more than the fate of the ISG report, however, are the political symptoms it betrays. The report is surely right that there is "no magic formula to solve the problems of Iraq." Yet if the U.S. faces a terror problem today, it is not because it is an obnoxious hyperpower or a rapacious globalizer, but because of the deep suspicion that it is not too ashamed to betray its friends or cut a deal with its enemies -- in short, that it lacks a sense of honor. In this sense, the Iraq Study Group has already inflicted its damage, no matter where it goes from here.