What is Victory?
(Sunday, 11 February 2007) Written by Jed Babbin
I am honored that N.Z. has asked me to join the new Victory Caucus, and doubly so to begin the debate.

Just what do we mean when we say we seek victory?  What is the war? With whom are we at war?  It’s essential that we answer this clearly because many – such as former National Security Agency director Lt. Gen. William Odom – are convinced that we have been defeated in Iraq.  Odom wrote, in Sunday’s Washington Post, that the recent National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq is, “…a declaration of defeat.” We neither defeated nor on the path to victory because we don’t know what it is.  If you don’t know where you’re going, any road will get you there.

Since his first address to Congress after 9-11, President Bush hasn’t given us a definition of victory that is even close to the mark.  The president’s formulation -- that victory is achieved when there is a stable Iraq, capable of defending, governing and sustaining itself, and will be our ally in the larger war – is the neocon definition, and it is precisely wrong.

As I wrote nearly a year ago in The American Spectator, the nascent Iraqi democracy is neither the center of gravity in this war nor is its success or failure determinative of victory or defeat.  In Iraq, we are fighting Iraqi insurgents and proxies of our central enemies.  No one ever won a war by fighting the enemy’s proxy.  They won it by taking the battle to the enemy and defeating him at his center of gravity.  We didn’t invade Afghanistan and Iraq because they weren’t democracies.  If the lack of democracy were a casus belli we’d be at war with about three-fourths of the world. We counterattacked the Taliban because with malice aforethought they provided the base from which Usama bin Laden organized an attack that killed three thousand Americans and then refused to turn him over to us when we gave them the choice between doing so and war.  In Iraq we sincerely believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed a threat to Americans and attacked only after the UN failed, as it always does, to deal with such a threat. Someone may remember that if Saddam had complied with about seventeen UN resolutions, the war would have been avoided entirely.

Writing then, I defined those such as myself as Endgame Conservatives.  We recognize that Islamofascist terror is not a significant threat to us without the sponsorship of nations.  We mean to win this war by ending state sponsorship of terrorism by whatever combination of means – military, economic, diplomatic, covert – that may be necessary.  We mean to defeat the radical Islamist ideology (for that is what it is, not a religion) as we defeated the Soviet communist ideology.  The ideological war is one we aren’t even fighting.  We fought communism – in part – by arguing relentlessly that American freedoms were objectively superior to Soviet enslavement.  We can defeat the Islamofascist ideology by using these same tools. American exceptionalism is a fact we should stop apologizing for.

We Endgame Cons are unwilling to allow the prosecution of this war against the terrorist nations to be delayed for however long it takes for Iraqis to sort themselves out.  We are impatient with Mr. Bush’s neo-Wilsonianism because it allows the enemy and its apologists to control the pace and direction of the war.  Endgame conservatives don’t want to be caught in the web of failed nostrums of Vietnam, either.  We won’t wait for Islam to be reformed or to win the hearts and minds of the mullahs in Tehran.  We don’t consider Islam unreformable: but we understand that it is unreformable by non-Muslims.  And we understand that the only way to spur Muslims to accomplish that reformation is to break the hold radical Islam has over a growing number of nations.

Like Vietnam, the war in Iraq – and elsewhere -- is not only a counterinsurgency. First, it is a war against nations that has to be fought on the kinetic battlefield with bullets and bombs. Second, it is an ideological war that can’t be won with soft words and euphemisms.  And third - in Iraq, the Philippines, and much of the horn of Africa - it is a war against the ascendancy of tribes and cultures that are hostile to freedom.

Endgame Conservatives understand the principal lesson of Vietnam: if you fail to prosecute a war in a manner calculated to produce victory decisively, you will lose it inevitably.  Iraq, by the president’s formulation, is a self-imposed quagmire. The president apparently believes that unless and until we establish democracy there we cannot prosecute the war against the other national sponsors of terrorism.  We are now at the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, almost five years since 9-11.  If we had prosecuted this war as we did World War 2, we would not be facing a pre-nuclear Iran, Syria’s Bashar Assad would be only a bad memory and Saudi Arabia would have been forced to cease its support of terrorism.  And Iraq would be a much more peaceful place, as would Lebanon, Israel and a dozen other nations.

Mr. Bush’s democratization strategy, naïve and Wilsonian, has put us on defense strategically.  His original formulation – that nations are either with us or against us – has been whittled away to a confrontation-cum-engagement strategy that enables Iran to offer cooperation in Iraq while buying time to build nuclear weapons.  It enables Syria to remain a helpful partner to Iraqi insurgents.

In Iraq, we are on the defensive and convincing ourselves that we have been defeated when we have not. Yet.  It’s time to extricate ourselves from the nation-building quagmire.  Let’s press on with this war through the endgame and defeat the enemy decisively on both the military and ideological fronts.  Not a single American life should be spent on nation building.

Victory means ending – by force if necessary – state sponsorship of terrorism. Nothing more, nothing less.  Over to you, ladies and gents.

 

 
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