The predicates of victory
powerlineblog
In "Finish it or forget it," Victor Davis Hanson is on fire:
Why do we worry about finding all the exact ties between the so-called terrorists? Terrorists and jihadists do not have to leave a paper trail or scents over email and cell phones to grasp that they really do work in general concert: Bombing and killing before critical elections, ratcheting it up in Iraq as the transition to Iraqi rule nears, and using the same barbaric methods worldwide—whether cutting off Danny Pearl's head on tape, putting decapitated Israeli soldiers' heads on billboards in Lebanon, placing ball-bearings and rat poison in suicide bombs, burning and cutting apart bodies in Fallujah, or threatening to burn and eat Japanese captives. There is a pattern here of barbarism and we should accept it as the common tracer of the work of fundamentalists and Middle East terrorists.
If we are going to win this war, we should begin right now to notify Syria and Iran that their incessant support to terrorists in Iraq will soon be met with a systematic air campaign whose intensity will be predicated on their own behavior. We need not necessarily invade either country, but simply ever so incrementally begin to attrite their conventional military assets, the pulse of the bombing carefully calibrated to the flow of jihadists and material into Iraq from their soil. We need to publicly show the world the tangible proof—captured soldiers, supplies, IDs from slain warriors, communications intercepts—of Syrian and Iranian activity, and then begin to take out their instillations. Again, each time we struck back resolutely and unexpectedly in Afghanistan and Iraq we were successful; and each time we wavered, promised to be sober and restrained, our enemies simply harvested more Americans.
Yes, our enemies are right: the West Bank seems to be a part of the war as well. We are blamed in the Arab world for whatever we do in seeking reconciliation over the so-called Palestinian problem. The latest jubilation in the street that broke out on news of Americans dying and corpses being desecrated in Iraq follows a continuous litany of macabre anti-American outbursts, Saddam's bounties to suicide killers, the murder of American diplomats seeking to offer fellowships to Palestinians, Hamas' warnings to extend their bombing campaign against Americans, and, of course, the wild celebration on reports of thousands of dead Americans on September 11. All this is the DNA of a true belligerent of the United States at a time of war. Americans are sick and tired of this poll and that survey warning us that we are not liked on the West Bank. Instead of yet another opinion sampling indicating Palestinian anger at the United States, what Palestinians need to peruse are several polls that reveal Americans' growing disgust with their methods and barbarism...
As a start of our new determination, we should insist on a complete travel ban to the West Bank. We must declare all representatives of the Palestinian Authority personae non gratae in the United States—folk at the present time not welcome in the United States, including and especially diplomats, journalists, students, and academics. Only when such elites and grandees see that there are consequences to their cheap slurs and venom on campuses and American television will they ponder their present relationship with the United States. If we are at war, surely we do not wish normal relations with a people and their quasi leaders who cheer our deaths and threaten more.
Seeing the predicates of victory stated so baldly, and knowing how unlikely they are to come to pass, is more conducive to clarity of thought than of optimism.
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