Blogs For Victory

From the Wall Street Journal:

… al Qaeda finds itself on the ideological backfoot, even in radical circles. As our Bret Stephens reported in March, Sayyed Imam, a founder of Egyptian Islamic Jihad and once a mentor to Ayman al Zawahiri, has written an influential manifesto sternly denouncing his former comrades for their methods and theology. This was enough to prompt a 215-page rebuttal from Zawahiri, who seems to have time on his hands. Lawrence Wright in the New Yorker and Peter Bergen and Paul Cruickshank in the New Republic have recently written about similar jihadist defections.

But the U.S. offensives in Afghanistan and especially Iraq deserve most of the credit. The destruction of the Taliban denied al Qaeda one sanctuary, and the U.S. seems to have picked up the pace of Predator strikes in Pakistan – or at least their success rate. This has damaged al Qaeda’s freedom of movement and command-and-control.

As for Iraq, Zawahiri himself last month repeated his claim that the country “is now the most important arena in which our Muslim nation is waging the battle against the forces of the Crusader-Zionist campaign.” So it’s all the more significant that on this crucial battleground, al Qaeda has been decimated by the surge of U.S. forces into Baghdad. The surge, in turn, gave confidence to the Sunni tribes that this was a fight they could win. For Zawahiri, losing the battles you say you need to win is not a way to collect new recruits…

…One irony here is that Barack Obama is promising a rapid withdrawal from Iraq on grounds that we can’t defeat al Qaeda unless we focus on Afghanistan. He opposed the Iraq surge on similar grounds. Yet it is the surge, and the destruction of al Qaeda in Iraq, that has helped to demoralize al Qaeda around the world. Nothing would more embolden Zawahiri now than a U.S. retreat from Iraq, which al Qaeda would see as the U.S. version of the Soviet defeat in Afghanistan.

It is far too soon to declare victory over al Qaeda. Still, Mr. Hayden’s upbeat assessment is encouraging, and it suggests that President Bush’s strategy of taking the battle to the terrorists is making America safer.

After the buildings came down I, like the rest of you, was in a state of shock for a while. After the shock wore off a little bit came the desire to wreck vengeance upon those who did this. But that wore off, too. After shock and rage had played themselves out over a few days, one began to think about what to do. A cruel foe had reached out from across the seas and killed thousands of Americans at trifling cost to himself. Even if we went on an extended bombing run against terrorist targets around the globe, the plain fact of the matter is that the enemy could trade punches with us like that indefinitely and we’d always come out the loser in the exchange – bomb the heck out of a terrorist training camp and you might kill a score or two terrorists…but the other score is already enroute to the US, where they will killed hundreds, if not thousands. It became clear to me that a fundamental change had to be effected, some how, in the way things were done.

One of the first thing which occurs to a person who starts to think about the people of the middle east is that they are, indeed, people. As I am also a people, I tried to imagine what I – translated into the highly conservative, Moslem society – might want out of life. I figured that I wanted to be mostly left alone, and if I had a wife and children then I would want very much to provide them the best life I could, with a mind towards my children having an overall better life than I experienced. “Left alone” and “life” became the most important parts of the equation because life is pretty miserable in most of the middle east, and the on thing the people there aren’t is “left alone”. They are pestered by Islamists. Pestered by secret police. Pestered by con artists who want their blood and treasure in order to enrich themselves. And, sure, they might hate with a white-hot passion the very concept of Israel, but for the guy in Cairo who has to bribe an official just to he can open up a small shop, or the guy in Riyadh who is being harrassaed by the “virtue police” because his wife’s ankle was seen in public…well, hating Israel takes a backseat to more day to day concerns. I developed a bet I was willing for us to make:

That given a free choice, the masses of the Arab/Moslem world would choose to live and build rather than kill and destroy.

Now, while I have been and will always be a strong supporter of President Bush, its not like he called me and asked my advice. I had no idea what he would do any faster than any other regular American. But when I saw his policies developing – not treating terrorism as a law enforcement issue; understanding that this was a twilight struggle in which military force would only be partially useful; that there is an evil ideology out there using Islam as a means to an end; that anyone who sponsors terrorism must be considered at least somewhat an enemy of the United States, even if they haven’t done anything to us; that pre-emptive strikes might be needed – I was in complete agreement, because I figured that President Bush and team were seeing the situation in much the same way I was. And then came Iraq.

Well, truth be told, them came the long song and dance about Iraq which delayed action for at least 9 months (one of the more amusing aspects of leftwing criticism is their stout insistence that we “rushed” into Iraq). I wanted us to go into Iraq – and I didn’t really care what particular reason we used because we had a perfectly good legal right – in both US and international law – to go into Iraq any time we wanted and overthrow the wicked Saddamite regime. I wish, very often, that we hadn’t used WMD as a main (but not the only reason, as our leftwing friends assert) reason, but only because our failure to find the large stocks of WMDs everyone in the world knows where there in 2002 has allowed the left to cast a cloud of doubt over the whole effort. Among the score of perfectly valid reasons for liberating Iraq – any one of which, by itself and even without 9/11 as an ice-breaker, as it were – the one I wanted was the bit about overthrowing Saddam and helping the Iraqi people towards a free future. From the war resolution:

Whereas Iraq persists in violating resolutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population thereby threatening international peace and security in the region, by refusing to release, repatriate, or account for non-Iraqi citizens wrongfully detained by Iraq, including an American serviceman, and by failing to return property wrongfully seized by Iraq from Kuwait…

…Whereas the Iraq Liberation Act (Public Law 105-338) expressed the sense of Congress that it should be the policy of the United States to support efforts to remove from power the current Iraqi regime and promote the emergence of a democratic government to replace that regime…(emphasis added)

I backed this and very much wanted this because I wanted the Iraqi people to have that free choice – to decide whether they wanted to live and build, or kill and destroy. It has taken a lot of fighting and some heartbreaking losses and setbacks, but we’ve now done it. The Iraqi people are, for the first time in their history, being allowed to freely choose what sort of lives they will have…and they are choosing to be free, and they are choosing to fight for this freedom. They want to live and they want to build – just like all other sane human beings in the world, Iraqis want to be pretty much left alone and allowed to live their lives. Only thusly could we show a different paradigm to the people of the Arab/Moslem world and defuse the strength of Islamist propaganda – and it should be noted here that this propaganda says that the only way Moslem people can regain power and prosperity is to kill at the bidding of Islamists. Iraq is demonstrating that power and prosperity can be secured without the Islamists – and, indeed, in partnership with the United States of America, even though America is a friend of Israel. The linked article notes how al-Qaeda is up against the wall – this didn’t happen “just because”; it happened because the US went into this with a desire to bring something better to the people of Iraq, and they are now responding heavily in our favor.

As I said before the liberation began, it is either do this deed and thereby change the middle east for better, or play around the edges of the issue and be faced with the inevitible WMD terrorist attack in the United States. We couldn’t fight them outside the middle east – outside their homeland, that is – with any prospect of success. Dangerous as it was – and it was an immense risk we took; those who argued that it couldn’t be done weren’t just being fools – it had to be tried. If we failed, then we failed and we’d have to just to the best we could to thwart the enemy….but if we won (and we have), then the whole dynamic would change in our favor, and we come into a position where we can end the use of terrorism as a means of political assertion.

Still a lot left to do in Iraq – but the only way we can lose it now (and give up all the gains we’ve made) is to elect a President who is so blind in his knee-jerk leftism that he won’t change his anti-war views to suit current condition…to elect, that is, an Obama pledged to defeat. Only thus can we lose.

HAT TIP: NRO’s The Corner

UPDATE: US deaths at a post-liberation low, Iraq oil production at a post-liberation high…which means our lefties will be back on the “blood for oil” meme, but what it really means is that we’re winning.