Iraq is a good place to kill jihadists
Whether he likes it or not, the War on Terror and it’s War in iraq spin-off are what will shape President George W. Bush’s legacy. Not Social Security reform (important as that is), nor tax cuts (welcomed as they were). The wars, their human and monetary costs and their strategic consequences and opportunities are what the President must focus on.
Last night’s speech by Bush was good, but he must repeat it over and over. He must convince the public that the war in Iraq isn’t a pointless meatgrinder that serves no other purpose than saving the President’s face.
The war in Iraq started out as preventative one after the Muslim terrorist attacks on America on 9/11 had shown our vulnerability. It was, and remains, critically important that nuclear and biological weapons don’t end up in the hands of our most rabid enemy, expansionist radical Muslims.
After we swiftly destroyed Saddam Hussein’s regime in march and April 2003, Iraq slowly turned into a battlefield in the larger War on Terror. As we help Iraqis build a better society, Muslim terrorists from all across the world pour into Iraq to attack our troops, our allies, international contractors, and, above all, the non-Jihadist segments of Iraq’s population.
This is a bloody and frustrating part of the War on Terror. The lives of many good men and women are lost, billions spent on killing, destroying, building an rebuilding. Iraqi’s have been slow in organizing their own defenses, partly because of our own mistakes.
But more important is the fact that we are now engaging the jihadists that in the 1990’s set out to destroy America. We are now in their backyard, killing them. We’ve taken the fight to their turf.
It should not be impossible for us to reach a political settlement with most of Iraq’s Sunni-community, thereby taking it out of the fight, and depriving the Jihadists of much of their local support - such as it is - in Iraq.
That would be amount to a huge set back for Osama wing of the Muslim community.
It could be that even a mostly unified Iraq, with close to full participation in the political process, will remain a popular rallying cry for Sunni extremists around the world. But even if that turns out to be the case, it’s far better that they attack us in Iraq than in the streets of New York or Sioux Falls.
As the President said:
America has done difficult work before. From our desperate fight for independence to the darkest days of a Civil War, to the hard-fought battles against tyranny in the 20th century, there were many chances to lose our heart, our nerve, or our way. But Americans have always held firm, because we have always believed in certain truths. We know that if evil is not confronted, it gains in strength and audacity, and returns to strike us again. We know that when the work is hard, the proper response is not retreat, it is courage. And we know that this great ideal of human freedom entrusted to us in a special way, and that the ideal of liberty is worth defending.
We’re going to win this war.
