Aside from the old rehash over disbanding the Iraqi army or tardiness in forming a government, three observations can be made about this “readjustment” in belief. First, the nature of the lapses after March 2003 is still the subject of legitimate debate; second, our mistakes are no more severe than in most prior wars; and third, they are not fatal to our cause.
The idea that we have been incompetent in waging war in Iraq or in the Long War overall is ludicrous. So mind-bogglingly wrong that I have difficulty comprehending how the charge can be made. Hanson explains:
The fact is that we are close to seeing a democratically elected government emerge, backed by an increasingly competent army, pitted against a minority of a minority in Zaraqawi’s Wahhabi jihadists.
While we worry about our own losses, both human and financial, al Qaeda knows that thousands of its terrorists are dead, with its leadership dismantled or in hiding — and most of the globe turning against it. For all our depression at home, we can still win two wars — the removal of Saddam Hussein and the destruction of jihadists that followed him — and leave a legitimate government that is the antithesis of both autocracy and theocracy.
Syria is out of Lebanon — but only as long as democracy is in Iraq. Libya and Pakistan have come clean about nuclear trafficking — but only as long as the U.S. is serious about reform in the Middle East.
And the Palestinians are squabbling among themselves, as democracy is proving not so easy to distort after all — a sort of Western Trojan Horse that they are not so sure they should have brought inside their walls. When has Hamas ever acted as if it has a "sort of" charter to "sort of" destroy Israel? We worry that Iran is undermining Iraq. The mullahs are terrified that the democracy across the border may undermine them — as if voting and freedom could trump their beheadings and stonings.
Ever since 9/11 we have been in a long, multifaceted, and much-misunderstood war against jihadists and their autocratic enablers from Manhattan to Kabul, from Baghdad to the Hindu Kush, from London and Madrid to Bali and the Philippines. For now, Iraq has become the nexus of that struggle, in the heart of the ancient caliphate, rather than the front once again in Washington and New York. Whose vision of the future wins depends on who keeps his nerve — or to paraphrase the Duke of Wellington at Waterloo, “Hard pounding, gentlemen; but we will see who can pound the longest.”
Are we as a nation so blind to history that we can't even see victory when we are achieving it?
Keep pounding them, people. When their "street" rises up over badly drawn cartoons, can anybody really argue that we can change our policies to satisfy them? We are at war with fanatics who must die before we can let down our guard.
And we are winning. How that is unclear to some people is beyond me.
