Can we achieve victory in our current conflict? Although our president won't use the term "victory," we at least owe it to our troops to remember what it means and to keep charging forward. Victor Davis Hanson illustrates:
Victory has usually been defined throughout the ages as forcing the enemy to accept certain political objectives. “Forcing” usually meant killing, capturing, or wounding men at arms. In today’s polite and politically correct society we seem to have forgotten that nasty but eternal truth in the confusing struggle to defeat radical Islamic terrorism.
Humans have been fighting wars since before Moses was a corporal - and
always will - because it's basic human nature for one group to want
something they don't have, or want to eradicate people they don't like.
And while we would prefer that wars could be executed with technology,
non-lethal ammunition, and negotiations, the truth is that war will
always be decided by soldiers and Marines with guns.
In the case of our current conflict,
the U.S. military is defending against (albeit with either one or sometimes both hands
tied behind our backs) a supremacist movement that wants to
kill/convert/subjugate those who don't practice their form of Islam.
And
why should this struggle be so "confusing?" Our enemies have done us
the favor of identifying
themselves. All we have left to do is acknowledge their declarations of
war and return the favor. We aren't fighting Muslims as many have
wrongly suggested, otherwise we would have long
since bombed U.S. mosques and Islamic centers. We are fighting
jihadists. It's just that simple.
What stopped the imperial German army from absorbing France in World
War I and eventually made the Kaiser abdicate was the destruction of a
once magnificent army on the Western front — superb soldiers and
expertise that could not easily be replaced. Saddam Hussein left Kuwait
in 1991 when he realized that the U.S. military was destroying his very
army. Even the North Vietnamese agreed to a peace settlement in 1973,
given their past horrific losses on the ground and the promise that
American air power could continue indefinitely inflicting its damage on
the North.
When an enemy finally gives up, it is for
a combination of reasons — material losses, economic hardship, loss of
territory, erosion of civilian morale, fright, mental exhaustion,
internal strife. But we forget that central to a concession of defeat
is often the loss of the nation’s soldiers — or even the threat of such
deaths.
Our enemies know they have no chance on the battlefield, which is
precisely why we are fighting terrorists in Afghanistan and
Iraq, and not fighting Iran and Saudi Arabia in a conventional war. But while we are beating them on the battlefield, little damage has been done to our enemies on other fronts. When your enemy is committed to an ideology that treasures death more than life, then "material losses, economic hardship," etc. will have far less effect than it would on say, Germans. But this is no reason to throw in the towel. The more mujahideen we kill, the more suicide bombers blow themselves up, the more resources our enemy expends, the less they have.
And as we kill the jihadists on one hand, on the other we are helping the non-jihadist Muslims wherever our troops operate. Our enemy can't maintain their populations in a perpetual dark ages, surrounded with death and destruction, while the U.S. is constructing roads, schools, and dams. Sooner or later people will realize that the jihad means death while cooperation means prosperity.
Victory is most easily obtained by ending the enemy’s ability to
resist — and by offering him an alternative future that might appear
better than the past. We may not like to think all of that entails
killing those who wish to kill us, but it does, always has, and
tragically always will — until the nature of man himself changes.
All that remains is for us to maintain our resolve and to show our enemies that we will not compromise with supremacists.
CPAC's lack of foreign policy discussion