We asked this the other day, and Christopher Hitchens answers:

When Jeanette Rankin was speaking so powerfully on Capitol Hill against U.S. entry into World War I, or Sen. W.E. Borah and Charles Lindbergh were making the same earnest case about the remoteness from American concern of the tussles in Central and Eastern Europe in 1936 and 1940, it was possible to believe in the difference between “over here” and “over there.”

There is not now—as we have good reason to know from the London Underground to the Palestinian diaspora murdered in Amman to the no-go suburbs of France—any such distinction. Has the ludicrous and sinister President Jacques Chirac yet designed his “exit strategy” from the outskirts of Paris? Even Rep. Murtha glimpses his own double-standard futility, however dimly, when he calls for U.S. forces to be based just “over the horizon” in case of need. And what horizon, my dear congressman, might that be?

The atom bomb, observed Albert Einstein, “altered everything except the way we think.” A globe-spanning war, declared and prosecuted against all Americans, all apostates, all Christians, all secularists, all Jews, all Hindus, and most Shiites, is not to be fought by first ceding Iraq and then seeing what happens “over the horizon.”

Steyn answers it too:

In war, there are usually only two exit strategies: victory or defeat. The latter’s easier. Just say, whoa, we’re the world’s pre-eminent power but we can’t handle an unprecedently low level of casualties, so if you don’t mind we’d just as soon get off at the next stop.

Demonstrating the will to lose as clearly as America did in Vietnam wasn’t such a smart move, but since the media can’t seem to get beyond this ancient jungle war it may be worth underlining the principal difference: Osama is not Ho Chi Minh, and al-Qa’eda are not the Viet Cong. If you exit, they’ll follow. And Americans will die – in foreign embassies, barracks, warships, as they did through the Nineties, and eventually on the streets of US cities, too.

We have said that we think the war in Iraq was won, and now we are in the process of winning the peace there. We agree with Iraq the Model that doing so is not a very long time in the distance, and that a consequence of Iraq getting on its feet will be a drawdown in US forces. But it should be a glorious, celebrated drawdown, a stick in the eye of the enemy. The enemy must be humiliated at every opportunity, not whined about.

We foresee that a substantial part of the next phase of this war is, as the new treasurer of Australia said, a clear policy in the West that sharia is unacceptable and anyone who wants to live under sharia should find an Islamic country to live in. Further, those who seek to impose their law and customs on the United States by violent or seditious means are going to wind up dead or imprisoned, and their governments punished. We don’t think this takes “understanding,” only firmness. It is impossible for us to see daily carping and whining on display in the MSM as anything other than an invitation to hit us again by an enemy who understands that we are in a war of wills.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, November 22nd, 2005 at 7:06 pm and is filed under Democrats, General, Left of Left, MSM, Religion, War. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.