The enemy will not go away

Victor Davis Hanson:

The threat from radical Islamic terrorists will not vanish when President Bush leaves office, or if funds for the Iraq war are cut off in 2008.

A frequent charge is that we are bringing terrorists to Iraq. That is true in the sense that war always brings the enemy out to the battlefield. But it's also false, since it ignores why killers like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the late al-Qaida chief in Iraq), Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas (Palestinian terrorists of the 1980s), and Abdul Rahman Yasin (involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing) were already in Saddam's Iraq when we arrived.

Moreover, the unpopular war in Iraq did not create radical Islamists and their madrassas throughout the Middle East that today brainwash young radicals and pressure the region's monarchies, theocracies and autocracies to provide money for training and weaponry. All that radicalism had been going on for decades - as we saw during the quarter-century of terrorism that led up to 9/11. And rioting, assassination and death threats over artistic expression in Europe have nothing to do with Iraq.

Right now, most al-Qaida terrorists are being trained and equipped in the Pakistani wild lands of Waziristan to help the Taliban reclaim Afghanistan and spread jihad worldwide. These killers pay no attention to the fact that our efforts in Afghanistan are widely multilateral. They don't care that our presence there is sanctioned by NATO, or involves the United Nations, or only came as a reaction to 9/11.

These radical Islamists gain strength not because we "took our eye off Afghanistan" by being in Iraq, but because Pakistan's strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can't or won't do anything about al-Qaida's bases in his country. And neither Bush nor Nancy Pelosi quite knows how to pressure such an unpredictable nuclear military dictatorship.

The Iraq war has certainly sharpened our relationship with Iran, but, of course, it's also not the cause of our tensions with Tehran. For decades, the Iranian government has subsidized Hezbollah, which during the 1980s and 1990s murdered Americans from Saudi Arabia to Beirut. It was not the current Iranian lunatic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but an earlier more "moderate" president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who remarked, in 2001, that "one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel."

So Iraq is only one recent theater, albeit a controversial one, in an ongoing global struggle. This larger conflict arose not from the Iraqi invasion of 2003, but from earlier radical Muslim rage at the modern globalized world, the profits and dislocations from Middle East oil, and Islamic terrorism that ranges worldwide from Afghanistan to Thailand.

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Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.

They can order a retreat, but they cannot make the enemy stop fighting without defeating him. What the Democrats will do is assure that we will face more enemies in the future who will use insurgency warfare. It is clear that the Democrat party is not up to the task of defeating this type of warfare and in fact cowers from it. One of the most important things we can do in Iraq is defeat the myth that this type of warfare cannot be beaten. In fact it rarely wins, but it seems to always win when Democrats are in charge.

When it comes to counterinsurgency warfare the Democrats have a willful ignorance that is difficult to penetrate. Even as our current surge is show effect they ignore it in their pursuit of defeat. In doing so they condemn this country to future wars by weak adversaries. If a Democrat is elected on 2008 expect the al Qaeda wars to continue against us and new wars with people like Hugo Chavez in Venezuela or one of his proxies. Their conduct on Iraq will have invited those wars.