Quitting the War on Terror

getting out of Iraq is now partly in the hands of Democrats who control. . .Congress. History will be. . . unforgiving if [Democrats'] agitation for withdrawal results in a pell-mell retreat that causes lasting damage.

-- David Ignatius,
Washington Post


Iraq has divided America between those who still hope for victory, and those who believe the war is lost. But there is another important dividing line: that between those who see Iraq as a battlefield in the War on Terror, and those who either think Iraq has little to do with al-Qaeda in northwest Pakistan, or that terrorism is nothing more than a police problem. If one believes 9.11 initiated a war against Muslim extremism, then defeating both al-Qaeda in Iraq and the Shiite extremists backed by Iran there makes sense.

Iraq is at the heart of the Arab Muslim world, with large oil reserves. If Islamic extremism defeats us in Iraq, we can expect Muslim terror to move to the West, as well as through the Islamic world. That's the view of observers closest to al-Qaeda's plans and capabilities (see here and here). And, as this blog has noted, Iran shares al-Qaeda’s objective of driving Western moderation and democracy from the Islamic world, replacing Western ideas with Islamic law.

Democracies find war distasteful, but this democracy has to counter the threat Islamic extremism brought home to America on 9.11. Losing Iraq in 2008 will be like losing France in 1940. It will make the rest of the war against Islamic extremists much harder. Iraq is more like France in April 1940, less like Vietnam in April 1975. Vietnam was a civil war, and when our side lost, the West was able to limit the loss to Indochina. Al-Qaeda’s and Iran’s winning in Iraq will reverberate throughout today's world, the way the fall of France reverberated throughout the world of 1940.

If the stakes are so high, why would we give up on Iraq before we are defeated? Of course, if you think we’ve already lost, then it's just about sending as many boats to Dunkirk as possible. But we haven’t lost. We are still making gains in Baghdad. To quit now is criminal.