VDH on General Petraeus and his mission:

Several governments have defeated Islamic insurgencies, but usually only after about ten years, and adopting policies of summary executions and carpet bombing or shelling.

Algerians in the 1990s finally stopped the so-called Islamic Salvation Army. The Russians decimated Chechnyan separatists. Syria’s Hafez al-Assad brutally exterminated several groups loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, most infamously by the thousands at the town of Hama.

But so far, no recent military has succeeded in defeating a radical Muslim terrorist insurgency, while subject to a constitutional government and an absolutely free media…

Should Gen. Petraeus and Amb. Crocker stabilize Iraq, it will demonstrate that the United States, under the most impossible of conditions, can still defeat Islamic terrorism while fostering constitutional reform that improves the security of the region and the world at large — and due so irrespective of a hostile world media and partisan politicking at home.

But if they cannot? The ultimate irony: The seventh-century terrorists win — and those who habitually demonized American military operations will themselves lose as well.

We shall see if our military’s being “sheltered in the strong arms of science” is enough today, given our self-imposed restraints. If not, what then?

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