Two excellent columns today, each addressing a different part of the GWOT.
First, Mark Steyn (column link here). This is from yesterday's Chicago Sun-Times and addresses last week's attacks in London.
Thursday, al-Qaida hit three London Underground trains and one bus. Had they broadened their attentions from the Central Zone, had they attempted to blow up 30 trains across the furthest reaches of the Tube map, from Uxbridge to Upminster, who can doubt that they too would have been successful? In other words, the scale of the carnage was constrained only by the murderers' ambition and their manpower.
He's absolutely right. The terrorists will inflict as much destruction as they can. If the damage is lessened, it's not for lack of desire, only lack of resources and imagination.
The choice for Britons now is whether they wish to be Australians post-Bali or Spaniards post-Madrid. That shouldn't be a tough call. But it's easy to stand before a news camera and sonorously declare that "the British people will never surrender to terrorism.'' In reality, unless it's clear a threat is primal, most democratic peoples and their political leaders prefer to regard bad news as a peripheral nuisance which can be negotiated away to the fringe of their concerns.
His assessment isn't limited to the British. All of the pre-7/7 pontifications coming from the left side of the Senate aisle were based in the "peripheral nuisance" mindset.
This is the beginning of a long existential struggle. It's hard not to be moved by the sight of Londoners calmly going about their business as usual in the face of terrorism. But, if the political class goes about business as usual, that's not a stiff upper lip but a suicide cult. The question now is will the British return to the fantasy agenda of Bob Geldof [elderly rocker Sir Bob Geldof's pathetic call for a million anti-globalist ninnies to descend on the G-8 summit and tie up the police with their pitiful narcissist preening] or avenge their dead?
Steyn uses "existential" in the sense of "for our very existence." And that's exactly the struggle we're in.
The second column is by Victor Davis Hanson, a military historian and a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. He writes in today's National Review Online (link here). The thrust of his analysis is that there were four, not two, wars in Iraq:
War I (January 17 to March 3, 1991), "The Gulf War." It began when Saddam invaded Kuwait and ended when we called off our troops, leaving Saddam in power.
War I was a response to years of appeasement of Iraq, American mixed signals during the Iran-Iraq War, and clumsy diplomacy. All may have given Saddam the message that his invasion of Kuwait was outside the realm of American interest.
War II (March 1991 to March 2003), "A rather different 13-year Second Iraqi War." It involved the No-Fly Zone and its related bombing runs, and "[a] U.N. trade embargo, coupled with the scandalous Oil-for-Food program, starved thousands of Iraqi civilians. Saddam, with foreign help, siphoned off cash and food for his own Baathist cronies."
War II was a response to the failure to remove Saddam in War I.
War III (March 20 to April 9, 2003), "Gulf War II." It began with the bombing of Baghdad and ended with the toppling of Saddam's statue. Its purpose, unlike Wars I and II, was the removal of Saddam and his Baathist regime, with replacement by a consensual government.
War III was a response to the failure to remove Saddam in War II.
War IV. (April 2003 to present), "The Occupation." It began immediately after the end of the conventional fighting and continues today. War IV was waged by a loose alliance of Wahhabi fundamentalists, foreign jihadists, and former Baathists against the American efforts to fashion an indigenous Iraqi democratic government.
War IV was an effort to ensure there would not be another Saddam and thus more wars like I-III.
Lessons:
If we are victorious in War IV, Iraq will be analogous to a Germany, Japan, or Panama and pose no further problem. If we fail, it will be similar to Vietnam or Lebanon. In our defeat we will give up, go home, and probably not return.
Just as there was no third war with Germany or second war with Vietnam, there will probably be no fifth war with Iraq. We have finally learned our lesson: Victory or defeat and a change of circumstances — not breathing spells with dictators, U.N. resolutions, realpolitik truces, no-fly zones, or cruise missiles — finally end most wars.... If War IV is now the costliest for the U.S. and the most controversial of the series, it is because it is for all the marbles and offers a lasting and humane solution — and every enemy of the United States in the Middle East seems to grasp that far better than we do.
Hanson and Steyn understand and can articulate the stakes in the GWOT. Their analyses resonate with the gut instinct of Red-State America. We must win, because we cannot afford the consequences of failure in this war. The terrorists are playing for keeps. Globally. And the Coalition of the Willing (we need a better name--Coalition of the Avengers?) is all that's standing in their way. We need to pull out all the stops, quit all the PC posturing, and fight as if our existence depends on it. Because it does.
Update:
OkieOnTheLam (HT: Hugh Hewitt) has an excellent post (link here) answering Hugh's question about what it would take to get the Far Left behind the War on Terror. Anything less, and I can't see Ted Kennedy giving up his partisan diatribes attacking the Bush Administration. Party politics means too much to him and his ilk.
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