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The Committed Win the War Geoff Metcalf "The first quality that is needed is audacity."
— Winston Churchill Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid says, "this war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything." Reid's petty partisan screed is way more than just flat wrong . . . it is myopic, ill-conceived, and, as GOP presidential wannabe/former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney said that Reid's comments encouraged "violent jihadists to parade to their believers around the world that they beat America, and that's not what happened." But you damnbetcha that is what will happen. If the bad guys win this one, it won't be because of the administration that couldn't shoot straight or the U.S. military. This is a "Tet" deja vu moment. As I have written before, The U.S. won every battle in Vietnam and after the bloody Tet offensive in 1968, the North Vietnamese generals "thought" they had lost the war. The Tet offensive was a major tactical defeat for the North Vietnamese and Viet Cong.
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However, once Walter Cronkite suggested otherwise, his words metastasized like a cancer and American civilian morale went in the toilet and eventually contributed to our withdrawal/defeat. Tet was a turning point our contemporary enemies hope to replicate and Reid, Pelosi et al are well on the way to helping U.S. foreign policy snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Reid says he had told President Bush he thought the war could not be won through military force, although the U.S. "could still pursue political, economic and diplomatic means to bring peace to Iraq." If Harry really thinks political, economic, and diplomatic efforts can achieve jack without a big stick, his pathology for partisan rancor has overwhelmed any pretense of reason. Meanwhile, while pusillanimous partisan hacks seek to play politics, the enemy is busy (and cheering for Reid, Pelosi, and the anti-war usual suspects).
Al-Qaida reportedly is reaching out from its base in Pakistan to turn militant Islamist groups in the Middle East and Africa into franchises. The stated objective is to intensify attacks. Yeah, the multiple dysfunctional bad guys are getting organized and ganging up on us. In technical terms, it is called "a force multiplier."
Last year Ayman al-Zawahiri, bin Laden's No. 2, announced a merger with Algeria's Salafist Group for Call and Combat. Officials anticipate an analogous merger between al-Qaida and the Libyan Islamic Fighting Group. Similarly there are moves in Lebanon, Syria and East Africa to unite assorted militant groups. Meanwhile our elected dysfunctionals continue to pick at scabs rather than mimic the enemy and unite behind common objectives, instead of cheap shoting their way to the '08 elections; we could neuter the terrorists and actually win the war on terrorism the anti-Bush crowd now has chosen to ignore.
It is beyond time to go sling blade on the terrorist bad guys. The effort by al-Qaida to reach out to other radical Islamist groups, comes in the wake of the rebuilding of al-Qaida's core in the badlands of Pakistan, near the Afghan border. Al-Qaida was significantly hurt by U.S.-led military action after its 2001 attacks on the U.S. However we didn't finish the job. The core al-Qaida infrastructure appears to have morphed around some 20 senior figures in the assorted training camps in the boonies. "A.Q. central" has sophisticated target planners and expertise in poisons and explosives probably unavailable to local groups. So, "cry havoc and let slip the dogs of war" for crying out loud.
Find those 20 senior figures and kill them. Carpet bomb their area of operation and reduce it to a smoldering pile of debris. While we're at it, defoliate their poppy fields and cripple their primary source of income. No sane person will refute the war has not gone as well as anticipated. We could/would/should have notwithstanding, the empirical cruel reality is we are in a fight and anything short of victory is anathema. If we bail on Iraq, or even say we are going to do so at some mythical fixed date, before a strategic victory, the enemy wins. They will become emboldened, and they will not stop after merely relishing the taste of victory. We were told from the jump the war on terrorism would be long. Like most wars, the war on terrorism is not an event . . . it is a process. The process is conducted in phases, and guess what . . . stuff happens. John Stuart Mill once observed, "War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things: the decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks nothing worth a war, is worse . . ." Ultimately, the most committed wins, and to date commitment to victory isn't our long suit. Anything we do or don't do that encourages further aggression is unacceptable. We cannot and should not reward the enemy with political, economic and diplomatic efforts. General Colin Powell has 13 rules (http://www.geoffmetcalf.com/414.html). Three of the 13 are "Don't let adverse facts stand in the way of a good decision. Don't take counsel of your fears or naysayers. Perpetual optimism is a force multiplier." The most committed wins!
Editor's note:
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