Fighting with One Hand Tied Behind Our Backs

Michael Ledeen has some Terror War observations that will sound familiar to MoltenThinkers:

It is more likely that the president knows we are at war with Iran, but has chosen — wrongly, in my opinion (but then I wasn’t elected either) — to delay our response. That could be due to any number of reasons, ranging from a belief that he had to give the Europeans every chance to force the Iranians to abandon their nuclear project, to purely domestic calculations that he lacks sufficient political capital to directly challenge the mullahs. But whatever his reasoning, it reinforces the original failure of strategic vision that has characterized the Iraqi and Afghan enterprises from the beginning. Once you see that Iraq and Afghanistan are battlefields in a larger war, you must figure out how to win that war, and not the one that was drawn up on the Power Points before the start of Operation Iraqi Freedom, based on the false assumption that we would fight a series of limited wars, one country at a time.

At a minimum, the real war is a regional war, and most likely a world war. That becomes obvious as soon as you see that Iran, sometimes in tandem with Syria and with covert help from Saudi Arabia, is waging war on us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and sponsoring terrorist assaults against us and our allies from Lebanon to Iraq, Afghanistan and Palestine, with their preferred instrument, Hezbollah, as the organizing army. But our national debate, with the exception of rare men like Senator Santorum, is limited to Iraq and Afghanistan alone, and thus our war plan is wrongly limited to Iraq and Afghanistan alone. If we expand our vision to the Middle East, current “hot topics” dissolve, because they are only urgent in answer to the wrong question. Instead of asking, “How do we win in Iraq and Afghanistan (and these are foolishly treated as if they were separate issues)?” we must instead ask, “How do we win the real war, the war against the terror masters?”

Iraq and Afghanistan are part of that war, but only a part of it. And we cannot win in Iraq and Afghanistan so long as the terror masters in Tehran and Damascus have a free shot at us and our democratic partners in Iraq, Lebanon, Afghanistan, and Israel, which is the current situation.

The debate over the appropriate number of American troops in Iraq is a typical example of how our failure of strategic vision distorts our ability to win the war. So long as the terror masters’ killers can freely cross the borders from Syria, Saudi Arabia, Jordan, and Iran in order to deliver money, weapons, expertise, and manpower, it is hard to imagine that any conceivable number of American soldiers could defeat them.

Lacking a regional strategy, our military is essentially fighting a holding action in Iraq and Afghanistan, and there is clearly a premium on avoiding casualties. Some critics have noticed that we have created large bases, complete with astonishing creature comforts including air conditioned tents and Starbucks cafes. The soldiers on those bases are rarely in the field; they wait until they get good intelligence about enemy movements, and then go after them. But that is not the proper way to fight this sort of war, and probably not even the best way to hold down casualties.

We didn't stop at the Rhine in 1944. We shouldn't stop at the Iraqi border now.