With regard to Iraq, I think we have progressed far enough that President Obama won't fail to complete the victory. As much as his most rabid Left base wants him to lose the war, losing at this point would too obviously represent snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. Iraq will become an even bigger asset in the war on jihadi terrorism.
I worry that we'll over-commit forces to Afghanistan and risk defeat there pursuing objectives that I think go beyond what we should aim for--preventing Afghanistan from becoming a sanctuary for al Qaeda or other jihadis who want to strike us. We don't need to turn Afghanistan into Iraq, a country on the path to democracy and rule of law. We need to end Pakistan's role as a sanctuary for the jihadis. And I know that our Left will turn on this war despite calling it the uniquely "good war." They'll be against the only war they have to protest.
With regard to North Korea, I'm worried that we'll start shoveling money at North Korea and save them from imploding. Maybe Japan and South Korea will keep us from giving up too much and trusting Pyongyang too much. Which is why I'm grateful we aren't talking to North Korea on our own. Otherwise it might be 1994 Agreed Framework all over again. Maybe North Korea is close enough to dying that the momentum will carry them to destruction.
The Iran front will stall as we try to talk to Iran's mullahs. But the mullahs won't talk to us about anything substantive. In time, we'll learn our lesson again. Hopefully, we'll be in a position to strike Iran's nuclear infrastructure while protecting ourselves from Iran's nuclear arsenal with a defense in depth that will ward off Iran's attempts to launch their missiles before we destroy them. Heck, maybe the Iranian people will overthrow the regime before Tehran goes nuclear.
What I most worry about is the attitude toward our jihadi enemies in general and the regimes that support the jihadis. Will the Obama administration really understand we are at war with a belief system that has no objectives other than our destruction?
There are no concessions we can make that will buy off hate-filled terrorists. What they want-- what they must have for their own self-respect, in a world where they suffer the humiliation of being visibly centuries behind the West in so many ways-- is our being brought down in humiliation, including self-humiliation.
Even killing us will not be enough, just as killing Jews was not enough for the Nazis, who first had to subject them to soul-scarring humiliations and dehumanization in their death camps.
This kind of hatred may not be familiar to most Americans but what happened on 9/11 should give us a clue-- and a warning.
The people who flew those planes into the World Trade Center buildings could not have been bought off by any concessions, not even the hundreds of billions of dollars we are spending in bailout money today.
They want our soul-- and if they are willing to die and we are not, they will get it.
We can't talk to them and reason with them. We can't arrest them and rehabilitate them. We must kill them. And by killing the jihadis give the wider Moslem world the space they need to kill the jihadi ideology that seduces way too many of their people.
Does Obama understand this basic fact about the war? I just don't know.
The war will go on whether he understands this or not. Our enemies hate us. If we ease off on fighting them, they'll use the gap to come after us harder and kill more of us.
Hopefully it won't take a 9/11 2.0 to remind us if this fact again.
