On Winning and Losing

In response to Republican Senator Richard Lugar's call for a draw down of troops in Iraq, Andy McCarthy of the National Review had this to say:

Lugar, the great Republican Foreign Policy Doyen, is saying the United States of America has lost a war against rag-tag terrorist cells — including those of al Qaeda, which killed nearly 3000 Americans on one day and has said, repeatedly, that Iraq is the battle for all the marbles ... the battle they were sure they would win because America runs away whenever the heat gets turned up high enough.

And, knowing that, he would have us to run away anyhow.

God help us.

In a follow up post, he lamented:

We will rue the day we leave Iraq without routing radical Islam.

McCarthy's posts do a wonderful job of summing up, in a concise and easily digestible form, everything that is wrong with the prevailing conservative approach to both the Iraq war and terrorism generally.

To McCarthy, if we start withdrawing our forces from Iraq, it will mean "the United States of America has lost a war against rag-tag terrorist cells." But does that make any sense? I don't think anyone--including the rag-tag terrorists themselves--doubts that we have the resources to stay in Iraq indefinitely if we want to. If bees sting a bear enough times to make it walk away, the bees haven't defeated the bear. They've just convinced it that the honey isn't worth it. Should the bear really stick around until it has "routed" the bees? Is that even possible?

There is an enormous difference between failing to accomplish (unrealistic) goals that you've set for yourself and losing. The reason we'd be leaving Iraq is not because we "lost," but because we determined that our continued presence in that country was not likely to accomplish anything constructive (and is actually undermining our national interests). It's simple cost-benefit analysis. It is unacceptable to continue wasting lives and money in a counterproductive effort.

And even if we leave, the country will be run by a Shia-led government that we installed. So who exactly would we be surrendering to?

McCarthy says that "we will rue the day we leave Iraq without routing radical Islam." But what does that even mean? How exactly are we supposed to "rout" an ideology? If we "surge" a few thousand more troops, will "radical Islam" surrender? And is there any reason at all to believe that we can kill all the radical Islamists in Iraq, much less do so without creating legions of new ones? Our very presence in Iraq has served as the rallying cry for a whole new generation of jihadists, who are popping up all over the globe and continue to flock to Iraq for valuable on the job training.

In McCarthy's view, the only acceptable policy is to keep fighting in Iraq until we've defeated the terrorists. But that's a Sisyphean task, a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. And, of course, the only reason foreign terrorists are even in Iraq is because we are. There's no reason to believe that these foreign jihadists would stick around (or that Iraqis would let them stick around) if we were to leave.

The bottom line is that we can't allow ourselves to be drawn into a perpetual, self-sustaining battle just because some guys in a cave in Pakistan will taunt us if we change course. The only way we really "lose" here is if we resolve to continue pursuing unattainable goals.