The War is Long Not From Our Choices

I grow weary of people who cite Washington's farewell address that warned against foreign entanglements as a reason to pull back from the world and limit our fight against jihadis.

As if there is no difference between a small, weak nation at the end of the 18th century clinging to the eastern coast reliant on trade under rules set--and changed--by Europeans, which meant we needed to avoid offending any of them lest any one throttle our trade or wage war on us; and the modern 21st century superpower America that set the rules of world trade and has an interest in defending that as well as being strong enough to encourage the vast majority of nations to be our allies or remain friendly, and to fight enemies with long reach from striking us from the middle of nowhere as they did on September 11, 2001.

We can surely decide when and where to fight and define how much each place is worth sacrificing to defend. And what we lose if we don't defend it. That is clearly up for debate.

But the fact that we are in an "endless" war against jihadis is totally because of our enemy's deep hatred and fanatical persistence. If we stop fighting, the war doesn't end in some conservative version of the "it takes two sides to fight a war" nonsense that the left loved to spout. No, if we stop fighting we just give enemies a clean shot at us until we decide to fight back--assuming we can after enduring whatever blow lands on us.

And given that the source of the conflict lies within the Islamic world, I don't know how we strike a military blow hard enough to solve that problem, which at its heart is a civil war within Islam over who defines Islam.

Our military actions are at best a holding action to shield America and our allies from being collateral damage in that civil war; and to shield our allies in the Moslem world to win that Islamic Civil War and drive a stake into the heart of the death-cult Islam that the jihadis want to define all of Islam as.