Posted by
Reeson on Sunday, January 14, 2007 2:14:08 PM
Mr. Kelly makes some good points about the differences in American attitudes between the World War II generation and the current societal views about the threat we face. Excerpts from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette:
By Jack Kelly, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
The debate over the new strategy for Iraq mostly has been between those who regard it as a "last chance" for victory, and those who think the war already is irretrievably lost. About this, two observations:
The first is that we have a much lower threshold for what constitutes defeat than our grandparents did. In the summer of 1942, the Japanese were planning to invade Australia, and German tanks were at the gates of Stalingrad and Cairo. But few then said we should throw in the towel.
We have yet to lose a battle in Iraq, and we obviously have many more resources on which we could draw. Yet for most in our elites, it is already too late.
Which leads me to my second observation. Our elites have become so insulated from reality that they imagine America can suffer defeat without inconvenience to themselves. Defeat would be an embarrassment to President Bush, but nothing more.
But the Islamofascists we're fighting now are just as nasty as the fascists our parents and grandparents fought in World War II. They currently are less dangerous than the Nazis were. But that will change if we are foolish enough to permit them to obtain nuclear weapons, or to seize control of the oil-producing regions of the Middle East. Both of these outcomes are likely if Islamic extremists of either stripe take over in Iraq.
President Bush confessed Wednesday night to having made mistakes in Iraq. We've made mistakes in every war we've ever fought. But in wars past, we corrected them. We didn't give up.
Our fundamental problem is that the government of Iraq is corrupt and incompetent. The people of Iraq showed great courage by voting despite threats of violence from al-Qaida. But mostly they voted for spineless sectarian creeps like the current prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki.
Because of the mistakes we've made, it will take longer and cost more to win. But we definitely can still win if we stop repeating those mistakes.
It sounded Wednesday night as if President Bush is at long last prepared to light a fire under Mr. Maliki. That's vital, because the troop surge (which would roughly double the number of U.S. troops in Baghdad, where about 80 percent of the violence is taking place) cannot succeed if Mr. Maliki retains veto power over their employment.
If the president is prepared to lean on Mr. Maliki, I think there is a reasonable chance the new strategy will succeed. But if it doesn't work, we should keep trying until we find something that does. Because the only cost we cannot bear is the cost of an Islamofascist victory.
(Jack Kelly is national security writer for the Post-Gazette and The Blade of Toledo, Ohio (jkelly@post-gazette.com, 412-263-1476). )