We are at war and need to defeat heinous enemies. I've been frustrated since the summer of 2003 on this point. I can only assume the administration has consistently felt it could win the war in Iraq before war weariness set in, so why waste effort on a public defense of the war? Victory would seal approval.
Well, now we know why we've needed to bolster public support of the war these past years. I'm convinced that support remains as strong as it is because of private efforts carried on over the Internet to defend the war. Lord knows where we'd be without these efforts.
Victor Davis Hanson puts it well:
We can quibble and fight about tactics on the ground, manpower numbers, strategic postures toward Iran and Syria, the need to prod the Iraqis, but our problem is more existential. Either stabilizing Iraq now is felt critical to the United States and the West or it isn’t. If the Left is right that it isn’t, then we should flee; if they are wrong, and I think they are, then we must start using our vast cultural and media resources to explain what is at stake — in a strategic and humanitarian sense — and precisely what it is costing America and why it in the long run is worth it, and how we have adjusted to counter our enemies who in the last four years have not won in Iraq or anywhere else either.
By our relative inaction on these critical informational fronts, we are only raising the bar impossibly high for General Petraeus when he reports back to Congress in the autumn. For election-minded Republican senators and representatives (whose defection alone can end the war) the barometer of success unfortunately may be soon not be improvement in six months, but only an impossible demand for absolute victory in 2007.
So more explanation, less assertion; more debate with, rather than dismissal of, critics. And the final irony? The more brutal honesty, the less euphemism and generalities, the more Americans will accept the challenge.
It is not too late for the administration to defend this war. The New York Times may dismiss any effort as a lame duck's folly, but the NYT editorial board isn't the target audience. The American public is.
Americans want to win and we need to be told how we will win and why we must win. Start talking, Mr. President.
