I am especially disappointed that conservatives are growing tired. I expect liberals to retreat when the going gets tough. Conservatives have largely been the strongest supporters of this long war--even under President Obama--yet too many are now embracing the stupidity of believing "it takes two to make war." It just takes one for war. Indeed, for those who want war, that's the ideal form since it means the other side doesn't fight back. Even President Obama believes this, given his reliance on drone strikes and the template he hopes our intervention in the Libyan Civil War will be for future wars.
This is a good article on many related war on terror issues, but I'd like to note one part:
In great part, the president, his Predators, and the raid on Abbottabad loom large because Republicans have become so small. The world that George W. Bush gave them they cannot handle. The second Iraq war is probably the single greatest catalyst behind the Great Arab Revolt. In much the way that former national security advisers Brent Scowcroft and Zbigniew Brzezinski, twin beacons of American “realism,” predicted, the war shocked the region. What had been seen as immovable autocracies became fragile regimes fearful and contemptuous of all the talk of democracy that poured forth from Westernized Arab expatriates, disenchanted youth, and Islamists. The Iraq war provocatively and irrepressibly introduced the discussion of popular government into the region: “democracy through the barrel of a gun,” as antiwar Westerners and Arabs put it. For those Westerners who had eyes to see, knew Arabic, and kept an open mind, the conversation was deafening. All that was needed was a spark. The self-immolating Tunisian Mohamed Bouazizi provided it.
Those who condemn the Arab Spring as just giving jihadis a chance to seize power in elections neglect the fact that jihadis had the potential of seizing power against weakened autocrats who gave their people only two choices--live with the autocrat or turn to the violent jihadis. Indeed, as autocrats tried to exploit Islamist thinking to support their regimes, they primed the people to turn to the jihadis. So we had a choice of supporting autocrats who had to make policies constrained by the jihadi thinking that the autocrats supported (but tried to control) or see actual jihadis take power and go full Islamist on us. How's that for your foreign policy "realism?"
As our president is happy to remind you now that he seeks reelection, hope and change take time. We need to teach Moslems how to elect good men and not be so focused on who the next man in the presidential palace is. Oh sure, we should work hard to keep the thugs from being elected--we did that in post-World War II Italy to keep the communists out of power. But repeated free elections are the long-term key. Which is why I hoped we'd be in Iraq for the long term. It will be a real victory if there is a real transition of power after an election that sees Maliki step down peacefully. And it will be a real defeat for changing the Middle East to deprive Islamofascism of support if that doesn't happen.
The success of the surge in Iraq set the stage for a wider victory in the wider Moslem world. I could see even before the surge kicked in that Bush had set the stage for making that spark set off a conflagration in the autocratic Arab world that could prevent us from needing to wage endless (and perhaps a total) war to keep jihadis from killing us and to prevent such a long war from wrecking our civil liberties as every terror attack--whether successful or failed--leads us to ratchet up our defenses at home.
If we can't support the tempest tost--the real 99% who need our support--who would live under neither mullah nor autocrat, who will?
We can pretend the war is over and that we can look inward. We've recently had proof of President Obama's desire to buy with American concessions "space" from our foes until after the election, but this is something I've long feared is our president's real foreign policy. But enemies understand that if they are the only side that fights, that it is pretty ideal for them. They may hope that our president's aversion to fight until at least after the election is a welcome opportunity to hit us as hard as they can.
We can't afford to be tired when our enemies still want to kill us. We must press on every front--whether on battlefields or in society--if we don't want to return to large-scale wars to fight the jihadi and their friends. If you fear the effects of a long war, it will only be longer if we let up the pressure before we can really win this war on terror and instead let our enemies recover from the very real defeats we've inflicted on them over the past decade.
UPDATE: The Islamists hardly welcome the Arab Spring:
Saudi Arabia's top religious official has blamed Muslim sinfulness for instability in the Middle East, where pro-democracy unrest has toppled four heads of state.
"The schism, instability, the malfunctioning of security and the breakdown of unity that Islamic countries are facing these days is a result of the sins of the public and their transgressions," Grand Mufti Sheikh Abdulaziz Al al-Sheikh was quoted as saying by al-Watan newspaper.
The Islamists may exploit the Arab Spring to win, but that isn't because the unrest favors them. If refomrers lose it will only be because we fail to help the reformers win the battles on the unlevel playing field they face.
