The American Spectator

p> Jed Babbin replies: br> Mr. Zimmerman: That analogy has always been with us. But we need to stay above it. The troubles we face are all susceptible of being overcome if we’re smart and tough. /p>

Mr. Reigle: Defeatist? Anyone who knows me or has read my columns for the past five or six years (or longer) would know that I’m anything but. And the issue isn’t the Samarra bombing that brings me to this point. I’ve been saying, for nearly a year, that the president hasn’t been doing the job of wartime leadership. He needs to be doing what Churchill, FDR and Lincoln did before him. What is victory? The president has said only that victory is to end tyranny and establish democracy. Which puts the control of the endgame to those terrorist states — and radical Islamists — who won’t and will never accept the idea of democracy. Victory means disposing of the threat, and that means ending the regimes in Syria, Iran and other nations. And ending the Saudis’ support for terrorism.

This is, at its base, an ideological war. We have been fighting the war with bullets and bombs. We need to fight that war, too, but we have to engage the radical Islamists as we engaged the Soviets. Peter Pace, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, understands this. He has said, again and again, that the information war is as important as the kinetic war. In this, he understands this war much better than the president.