A useful battle among conservatives began last week when
National Review’s Rich Lowry fired a salvo at those he
calls “the ‘to hell with them’ hawks.” Lowry aims at the head of
the conservatives who grow more skeptical of the president’s
strategy. Lowry accuses them of writing off the reform of Islam, of
misunderstanding the lessons of Vietnam, and of failing to
understand that our goal in this war is to win the hearts and minds
of all Islam. Lowry has picked a good fight, and his challenge must
be met because the neo-Wilsonians such as he are profoundly wrong
about the nature of this war and how we must fight it to win in the
long haul. This is not an argument over who is braver or a more
stalwart supporter of the president. It’s about who understands
this war, what it will take for us to win, and when we will know if
and when we have. Who can most accurately define victory and thus
chart a path to it? It is not Lowry and the Bush-Wilsonians who
believe victory in this war can only be achieved by democratizing
the Middle East.
The nascent Iraqi democracy is neither the center of gravity in
this war nor a factor determinative of victory or defeat. Iraq is
but one key campaign in a larger war and if it becomes a democracy
that is a collateral accomplishment, nothing more. To say that
doesn’t make the sayer an isolationist or someone who wants to
abandon Iraq. We didn’t invade Afghanistan and Iraq because they
weren’t democracies. If the lack of democracy were a casus
belli we’d be at war with about two-thirds of the world. We
counterattacked the Taliban because with malice aforethought they
provided the base from which Osama bin Laden organized an attack
that killed three thousand Americans and then refused to turn him
over to us when we gave them the choice between doing so and war.
In Iraq we sincerely believed that the Saddam Hussein regime posed
a threat to Americans and attacked only after the UN failed, as it
always does, to deal with such a threat. The only goal of this war,
which Lowry and the others lost track of, is to end the threat of
radical Islam and the terrorism that is its chosen weapon against
us.
We mean to win this war by destroying the regimes that provide
terrorists with weapons, funds, people, and sanctuary. We mean to
defeat the radical Islamist ideology (for that is what it is, not a
religion) as we defeated the Soviet communist ideology. I and those
who agree with me aren’t “‘to hell with them’ hawks”: we are
Endgame Conservatives.
We understand that Islamic terrorism cannot threaten us
significantly without the support of nations. We are impatient with
Mr. Bush’s neo-Wilsonianism because it allows the enemy and its
apologists to control the pace and direction of the war. We are
unwilling to allow the prosecution of this war against the
terrorist nations to be delayed for however long it takes for
Iraqis to sort themselves out. It is impossible for them to do so
while neighboring nations — Syria, Iran, and Saudi Arabia —
actively interfere. Endgame conservatives don’t want to be caught
in the web of failed nostrums of Vietnam. We won’t wait for Islam
to be reformed or to win the hearts and minds of the mullahs in
Tehran. We don’t consider Islam unreformable; but we understand
that it is unreformable by non-Muslims. And we understand that the
only way to spur Muslims to accomplish that reformation is to break
the hold radical Islam has over a growing number of nations.
Lowry says that the global war on terror is most like a
counterinsurgency, and that it can only be won by persuading
radical Islamists to either lay down their arms or not take them up
at all. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the war we’re in,
and what our goals must be to defeat the enemy. Like Vietnam, this
war is not only a counterinsurgency. First, it is a war against
nations that has to be fought both diplomatically and on the
battlefields, both conventionally and otherwise. Second, it is an
ideological war that can’t be won with soft words and euphemisms.
And third — in Iraq, the Philippines, and much of the Horn of
Africa — it is both a counterinsurgency and war for ascendancy
among tribes and religious sects.
We don’t, like Lowry, completely mistake Vietnam. Lowry accuses
us of missing the point that we only began to win in Vietnam when
we “started to fashion a true counterinsurgency strategy focusing
on hearts and minds, on holding territory and on training
Vietnamese security forces.” Endgame conservatives understand the
principal lesson of Vietnam is something else entirely: if you fail
to prosecute a war in the manner that will produce victory
decisively, you will lose it inevitably. Iraq, by the President’s
and Lowry’s formulation, is a self-imposed quagmire. They believe
that unless and until we establish democracy there we cannot
prosecute the war against the other national sponsors of terrorism.
We are now at the third anniversary of the Iraq invasion, almost
five years since 9-11. If we had prosecuted this war as we did
World War II, we would not be facing a pre-nuclear Iran, Syria’s
Bashar Assad would be only a bad memory and Saudi Arabia would have
been forced to cease its support of terrorism. And Iraq would be a
much more peaceful place, closer to the goal Messrs. Bush and Lowry
seek.
The “hearts and minds” campaign in Vietnam was essentially
irrelevant to winning or losing. What lost the war was President
Johnson’s gradualist approach to fighting it. LBJ was a stringless
yo-yo. His stop-and-start, fight today, negotiate tomorrow and
fight again the next day strategy, if you can call it that, was a
disaster. When we pounded the North, we moved toward victory by
depriving the insurgents (and the regular North Vietnamese forces)
of the support on which they depended. When LBJ sputtered and
stuttered, we lost what we had gained and gave the enemy time to
recover and retake the offensive.
Lowry’s formulation is, at its core, colonialist. He writes,
“The project in Iraq is an attempt to shift the terms of the
competition to who can better deliver peace, prosperity and
representation.” How shall we compete for hearts and minds of the
Muslim world by offering Western democracy in a culture that, even
at its most benevolent, cannot separate church from state? The only
way would be to re-create the British Raj of colonial India. Would
Lowry commit the hundreds of thousands of troops and tens of
thousands of civilian bureaucrats to running a colonial government
in Iraq, Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia for the next hundred years? I
doubt it. And neither should anyone else interested in winning this
war. We cannot and should not abandon Iraq. There, we should stay
the course at least until the terrorist regimes that surround it
are removed and their interference in Iraq ended.
Lowry’s argument boils down to unquestioning support for the
President’s push to democratize the Middle East. He questions
whether “the ‘to hell with them’ hawks” can support a responsible
foreign policy and accuses them of wanting to put our civilization
into a “permanent posture of strategic defense.” No Endgame
conservative wants to cut and run, or thinks Iraq is lost. Nor do
we want to prevent America from ever engaging in another campaign.
What we want to do is prosecute this war decisively to its
conclusion, which Mr. Bush isn’t doing.
Mr. Bush’s democratization strategy, naive and Wilsonian, has
put us in the posture of strategic defense. His original
formulation — that nations are either with us or against us — has
been whittled away to a confrontation-cum-engagement strategy that
enables Iran to offer cooperation in Iraq while buying time to
build nuclear weapons. The President is in the process of putting
the UN in control of the Iran nuclear issue. This will result, in
all probability, in allowing Iran enough time to achieve nuclear
weapons. In Iraq, we are on the defensive because we haven’t taken
sufficient action to end the foreign interference that disrupts the
nation-building effort. It’s time to extricate ourselves from the
Wilsonian policy quagmire. Let’s press on with this war through the
endgame and defeat the enemy decisively on both the military and
ideological fronts. When that happens there will be time to
encourage the rise of democracy in the Middle East, and many more
of its peoples willing to undertake it.
TAS contributing editor Jed Babbin is the author
of Inside the Asylum: Why the UN and Old Europe Are
Worse Than You Think (Regnery, 2004).
