Complete Victory

Bush offers a strategy beyond "staying the course" in Iraq.

Editorial - Thursday, December 1, 2005 - The Wall Street Journal (Opinion Journal)

Our reading of history is that the American people will accept casualties in a war, even heavy casualties, as long as they think their leaders have a strategy to win. So we were glad to see President Bush yesterday begin what the White House says will be a consistent effort to counter the defeatism toward Iraq that has lately taken over so many American politicians and elites.

/snip/

The speech had Mr. Bush's familiar, albeit even more forceful, pledge "that we will never accept anything less than complete victory." (The Middies loved that line.) And it also laid out the stakes for Americans if we did withdraw too soon and leave Iraq a mess. "If we were not fighting and destroying this enemy in Iraq," he said, "they would be plotting and killing Americans across the world and within our own borders."

I am still flabbergasted by the number of Americans who cannot see why we are fighting in Iraq. Nuclear bombs are a reality. Access to nuclear bombs by the Islamofascists is coming if we do not do something. The only something that matters is to establish a powerful army and train them to defeat the Islamofascists. That army needs to be in the heart of the middle east and not hunkered down defensively here in America.

In the fist blush of the war Bush said that one reason we were fighting in Iraq was so that we would not fight them here in America. The democrats screeched that such a position was intolerable. They then said that Bush had not anticipated that Iraq would be a magnet for the Islamofascists. Both postitions are so blatantly stupid that I could not believe anyone would say them publicly, if for no other reason than that they are mutually contradictory. However many people accepted both positions, (we shouldn't plan to be a magnet in Iraq, and we had not expected to be a magnet in Iraq) as reasonable. As I said, I am flabbergasted.

I propose a toast to "complete victory".