Hawks or Owls?

That's the question:

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.

Might help if the Bush Administration clearly articulated our war aims. Over and over again. Until victory.