Blogs For Victory

Is it right over to where Britain is, today, or a rediscovery of the will to fight?

Britain has lost the stomach for a fight

Last week Gordon Brown announced a date for Britain’s withdrawal from Iraq. Most troops will be back in time for a spring general election. The prime minister posed with soldiers and expressed his sorrow over yet more fatal casualties in Afghanistan. He did not dwell on Britain’s humiliation in Basra, nor mention that this is the most inglorious withdrawal since Sir Anthony Eden ordered the boys back from Suez.

The fundamental cause of the British failure was political. Tony Blair wanted to join the United States in its toppling of Saddam Hussein because if Britain does not back America it is hard to know what our role in the world is: certainly not a seat at the top table. But, for all his persuasiveness, Blair could not hold public opinion over the medium term and so he cut troop numbers fast and sought to avoid casualties. As a result, British forces lost control of Basra and left the population at the mercy of fundamentalist thugs and warring militias, in particular Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army…

…If a fair-minded account of the Iraq war is written, credit should go to President Bush for rejecting two years ago the report by the bipartisan Iraq Study Group that called for force reductions. He defied conventional wisdom and ordered a troop surge instead. It has been an extraordinary success and, unlike Britain, the Americans will not withdraw in defeat. During debates in Washington, British forces’ ignominious withdrawal to barracks was cited to argue that the United States could not contemplate being humbled in a similar way. In the end Bush was not a quitter. Blair “cut and ran”.

Britain’s shaming was completed in March 2008 when Iraqi forces, backed by the US, moved decisively against the Mahdi Army, inflicting huge casualties and removing them from Basra. Operation Charge of the Knights was supervised by Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister, exasperated that Iraq’s second city was controlled not by Britain but by an Iranian-backed Shi’ite militia.

Trust in the British had fallen so low that neither the Iraqi nor the US government was willing to give us much notice of the operation. General Mohammed Jawad Humeidi remarked that his forces battled for a week before receiving British support. He rubbed salt in the wound by noting that for five years the Mahdi Army had “ruled Basra without being punished or held to account”, and had during that time controlled ports, oil, electricity and government agencies, whose funds bought them weapons…

…The extent of Britain’s fiasco has been masked by the media’s relief that we are at last leaving Iraq. Those who have been urging Britain to quit are not in a strong position to criticise the government’s lack of staying power. Reporting of Basra has mainly focused on British casualties and the prospect for withdrawal. The British media and public have shown scant regard for our failure to protect Iraqis, so the British nation, not just its government, has attracted distrust. We should reflect on what sort of country we have become. We may enjoy patronising Americans but they demonstrate a fibre that we now lack.

The United States will have drawn its conclusions about our reliability in future and British policy-makers, too, will need to recognise that we lack the troops, wealth and stomach for anything more than the briefest conflict…

You must never, ever lose a war. And in war, as America’s greatest general pointed out, there is no substitute for victory. You have to clearly win – if you don’t, then you’ve lost. Britain wasn’t forced to surrender. Britain’s casualties were not high. Britain’s resources are entirely intact. Britain’s military, man for man and in equipment, is vastly superior to any force any middle eastern nation can bring against it, let alone what ragged terrorists can bring to the field. But all of that doesn’t matter – Britain didn’t win, and is now withdrawing in shame from a victory won by Americans, Iraqis and others who proved they have the stomach for a long fight. Nothing will ever repair Britain’s credibility save engaging in a future fight with the same sort of spirit which saw Britain through wars past.

This is what Democrats, with a few exceptions like Sen. Joe Lieberman, don’t get – it doesn’t matter, in the end, how you got into a fight. All that matters is that, in the end, you win it. Call President Bush the most wickedly stupid man who ever lived, and it won’t matter in the least – the rest of the world will be concerning itself not with how Daily Kos and Democratic Underground view President Bush, but whether or not America wins. The Obama plan for Iraq, fortunately never enacted, would have handed us a crushing defeat – no matter how you slice it, if we had left Iraq at the end of March, it would have been viewed as an American defeat, and the whole world would make its global security arrangements on the assumption that America lacked the stomach for a long fight. The results would have been disasterous – and not just in an emboldened terrorism attempting to strike at the United States anew, but with Russia, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Iran and Syria seeking to profit off our weakness, and potential allies like India and Poland seeking the best deal they could with their antagonists.

And now in comes President Obama with a Democrat majority in Congress – and not only that, but a strong majority of Americans, including very many who didn’t vote for him, willing to give him his chance. In short, Obama and his Democrats have wide discretion in setting American military policy. For at least a year, they can pretty much do as they please. Obama has pledged to win in Afghanistan, and in that effort he has my rock-ribbed support – but the enemy will shortly test Obama’s mettle to see if he’s made of the same stuff as President Bush. In short, they will want to find out if he can stick it out in a long fight.

We can look for the terrorists to attempt some sort of spectacular, high casualty attack on American troops and/or a series of bloody terrorist incidents around Afghanistan. The purpose will not be to defeat us militarily – that is out of their reach – but to see whether or not our new President will absorb the news of death and destruction and emerge just more convinced than ever that fighting it out to a victorious finish is the only way to go. Or will Obama seek to get out of the mess and keep our casualties low? If he follows the course the Brits did in Basra, then we’ll lose only few lives and it might even seem that things are working out ok – but a defeat it would be, and we’d be proffered that cup of defeat year after year by our enemies until we recovered – especially in our leadership – the sheer guts necessary to fight.

I hope Obama passes the test – and I hope our Democrats learn the lesson: when the guns go off, the only concern for any patriotic American must be victory. Victory regardless of how hard the fight is, or how high the cost in blood and treasure.