The "Wall Street Journal" expands on what I posted earlier today. This War on Terrorism will be won or lost in Washington.
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Fickle Interventionists
The terrorists in Iraq are hoping to prevail in Washington.
Friday, October 31, 2003 12:01 a.m.
The polls show that most Americans understand the coming burden and still favor war; after 9/11 they realize the dangers of ignoring foreign threats. About U.S. elites there are greater doubts. Our liberal pundits and politicians are fickle interventionists; many of them signed on early to topple Saddam but have lately been offering caveats and cavils as D-Day approaches. Will they run for moral cover if the going gets tough, as they did in Vietnam?
So we wrote March 18 in describing the "largest risk" of war with Iraq. Seven months later, this question remains the largest imponderable in calculating the odds of American victory. Just as the going gets rough in Iraq, some of our elites are losing their nerve.
This of course is precisely the goal of the terrorists in Iraq who this week began their Ramadan offensive. Their car bombs and rocket attacks are destructive and terrifying but not a serious military threat. The guerrilla insurgency remains leaderless, with no great power support and largely confined to the Sunni Triangle surrounding Baghdad. The overwhelming majority of Iraqis continue to support the U.S. presence, and progress continues toward Iraqi self-rule. In short, Iraq is not in "chaos" or on the verge of a popular uprising, and this anti-guerrilla war is clearly winnable.
But the Baathist die-hards know that they do not have to win in Iraq; they merely have to prevail in Washington. So like the Tet offensive of 1968 and the Marine barracks bombing in Beirut in 1983, their terror campaign is intended to shake American resolve.
In this, we regret to report, they are having some success. A good portion of the Democratic Party and its intellectual cohort are already predicting American defeat. The Vietnam analogies are flying, with Donald Rumsfeld routinely compared to Robert McNamara and President Bush to LBJ. Conveniently, they stop the analogy short of Tet, a crushing military defeat for the Viet Cong that was spun into a political victory for Ho Chi Minh in the U.S.
Some of the voices from that era are sounding the same themes again. Rather than report on Saddam Hussein's torturers, they care only about Halliburton's contracts. Instead of focusing on how to win the war we are now engaged in, they want to refight the argument over how we got in. And rather than provide the means to win, they cry for a plan to get out.
Incredibly, every Democratic Presidential candidate save Dick Gephardt and Joe Lieberman has opposed Mr. Bush's $87 billion request to fight the war. Senators John Edwards and John Kerry voted against this money to finish the war they both voted to start. Wesley Clark not only opposes the money but this week blamed Mr. Bush for failing to stop September 11. Of all people, a decorated Vietnam veteran such as Mr. Clark must understand that his words are heard not just in Des Moines and Nashua but in the Baathist bunkers of Tikrit and Fallujah.
We are not saying that these voices want the U.S. to lose. But their criticism is so virulent and unconstructive that it is clear they won't let themselves believe that America could win. Chasing Howard Dean to the left, Mr. Kerry is all but saying that if he becomes President the U.S. will withdraw post-haste. In Sunday's Democratic debate, the Vietnam war and protest veteran also divorced what is happening in Iraq from the broader war on terror. "And this war on terror is far less of a military operation and far more of an intelligence-gathering, law enforcement operation," he said.
At least this comment gets to the heart of the matter. Mr. Kerry is endorsing the pre-9/11 consensus on how to fight terrorism. Try to disrupt the terrorists if you can, but be ready to endure their blows and send the police and prosecutors to get them after the fact. We tried that once, and the result was 3,000 dead civilians.
The Bush policy has been to take the battle to the terrorists and their state supporters. Iraq is now the central battlefield of that campaign. It is a fantasy to believe that if we are driven from Iraq because of flagging American resolve then the terrorists would leave us alone. They are sure to follow us here and kill more innocent civilians until we cease to pursue them anywhere and in any way. The Kerry strategy--now dominant among Democrats and liberal intellectuals--is a Maginot Line that guarantees our eventual defeat.
Certainly Mr. Bush's handling of the war is fair game for criticism. The President took a premature victory lap this spring and failed to anticipate the nature of the guerrilla uprising. After it began, Mr. Rumsfeld waited too long to admit it was a guerrilla war. We also wish the Secretary of State were doing more to convince Iran and Syria that the price of opposing the U.S. in Iraq will be high.
Most important, we are now paying for the U.S. failure to enlist more Iraqis as our allies long before the war. That error stretched U.S. forces too thin and denied our troops vital intelligence just as the insurgency was getting started. Even after the war, Baghdad regent Paul Bremer and his staff wanted to limit the training of an Iraqi Civil Defense Corps to 7,000 men and a mission of guard duty. But the Iraqis have done such an effective job of anti-insurgency that the goal now is to have 15,000 by the end of the year and 40,000 by next March. (This doesn't include 60,000 new police and thousands of new border and facilities guards.) This enlistment of Iraqis is essential before the U.S. can safely depart.
All of these, however, are questions about execution rather than the basic U.S. purpose in Iraq. That purpose is to drain the terror swamp at its Middle Eastern core by defeating the Baathists and terrorists and establishing a stable and free Iraq. The stakes are so large that perhaps even our fickle liberal elites will yet conclude that the U.S. can't afford to fail.
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