My question is, now that America may increase our Army by perhaps 100,000 troops, will anti-war critics conclude that the enemy has just "provoked" us into creating more American soldiers who will now seek them out and kill them? I mean, really, if not for the jihadis, those 100,000 Americans would have stayed at home and never enlisted. So the fact that more Americans will be in uniform fighting jihadis surely means that the jihadi efforts are counter-productive, and in fact a sign they are losing.
I mean, if the logic works both ways.
But the question answers itself.
When there are more enemy, the anti-war side says we are losing. And just as true, when there are more American troops in the field, they also think we are also losing.
But in truth, whether we add numbers or the enemy adds numbers, this says nothing about winning or losing. We may add more troops to our end strength because we need more troops to push for victory:
In any war, national efforts will increase as time goes on. Each side will put more resources into the fight and the level of fighting will escalate. So by the end, each side is much stronger than at the beginning of the war yet only one side has won. American, British, and Russian strength increased much more than Germany's strength in World War II. German strength, while absolutely greater in 1944 than in 1940, was relatively weaker compared to their enemies.
The fascists we fight today are dying hard. Harder in Iraq than I thought would be the case. But as I've noted, it never occurred to me that we'd let Syria and Iran bolster the Sunnis inside Iraq with impunity. All the focus on errors and whether we should have shot museum looters in April 2003 or whether we should have had 4th ID invade from Turkey miss the point that we have let our enemies support the insurgents and terrorists in Iraq without them paying a price.
So as the enemy fights on, we must escalate our effort to win. As the enemy fights and possibly inflicts higher losses on us even at home with a serious terrorist strike, we could see yet another outcome of a prolonged war--the escalation of our war objectives as the price we pay increases. Should the enemy hit one of our cities with a high-casualty strike, we will want the enemy to suffer even higher losses to consider our efforts worth it.
The enemy is clearly stronger than they were in April 2003. I'm not sure we can say they are stronger than they were a year ago or two years ago. The enemy kills civilians but they haven't gotten better in their ability to fight. They are atomized and rarely operate in even platoon strength. The Iraqi military is clearly stronger than April 2003 and stronger than two years and one year ago. The fighting has expanded but the enemy is not winning. They've merely increased the stakes of the fighting and imperiled themselves if we (Iraq and/or America) decide to use the power at our disposal to destroy our enemies.
And we have the power to inflict whatever losses on the enemy that we need to inflict. And this is true whether we speak of Iraq or the broader war on jihadi terrorists.
We don't have the choice of just halting the fight. Our enemies have never accepted that option. We must win this war.
