Basically, the war is not a failure. Indeed, we're doing quite well despite the continuing chorus of panic across all fronts:
"My centre is giving way. My right is in retreat. Situation excellent. I shall attack!”
If only our political leaders and opinion-formers displayed even a hint of the defiant resilience that carried Marshal Foch to victory at the Battle of the Marne. But these days timorous defeatism is on the march. In Britain setbacks in the Afghan war are greeted as harbingers of inevitable defeat. In America, large swaths of the political class continues to insist Iraq is a lost cause. The consensus in much of the West is that the War on Terror is unwinnable.
And yet the evidence is now overwhelming that on all fronts, despite inevitable losses from time to time, it is we who are advancing and the enemy who is in retreat. The current mood on both sides of the Atlantic, in fact, represents a kind of curious inversion of the great French soldier's dictum: “Success against the Taleban. Enemy giving way in Iraq. Al-Qaeda on the run. Situation dire. Let's retreat!”
Since it is remarkable how pervasive this pessimism is, it's worth recapping what has been achieved in the past few years.
And Baker does this quite well.
But in regard to Iraq, I argue that 2003-2006 was not a failure that the surge reversed. We went through a number of phases in the Iraq War against a variety of enemies. The surge represents a change in strategy for only the most recent of the threats we had to face. It took us way too long to adapt to that new threat, but we did adapt.
And the late adaptation by our leadership does not erase the fact that we succeeded against earlier enemies. Our strategy has, in the big picture, been the correct one--we've worked to stand up Iraqis to fight the insurgents and terrorists inside Iraq.
