Defeating defeatism

Thomas Sowell:

If victory in Iraq was oversold at the outset, there are now signs that defeat is likewise being oversold today.

One of the earliest signs of this was that Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid has said that he could not wait for General David Petraeus' September report on conditions in Iraq but tried to get an immediate Congressional mandate to pull the troops out.

Having waited for years, why could he not wait until September for the report by the general who is actually on the ground in Iraq every day? Why was it necessary for politicians in Washington to declare the troop surge a failure from 8,000 miles away?

The most obvious answer is that Senator Reid feared that the surge would turn out not to be a failure -- and the Democrats had bet everything, including their chances in the 2008 elections, on an American defeat in Iraq.

Senator Reid had to pre-empt defeat before General Petraeus could report progress. The Majority Leader's failure to get the Senate to do that suggests that not enough others were convinced that declaring failure now was the right political strategy.

An optimist might even hope that some of the Senators thought it was wrong for the country.

Another revealing sign is that the solid front of the mainstream media in filtering out any positive news from Iraq and focussing only on American casualties -- in the name of "honoring the troops" -- is now starting to show cracks.

One of the most revealing cracks has appeared in, of all places, the New York Times, which has throughout the war used its news columns as well as its editorial pages to undermine the war in Iraq and paint the situation as hopeless.

But an op-ed piece in the July 30 New York Times by two scholars at the liberal Brookings Institution -- Michael E. O'Hanlon and Kenneth M. Pollack -- now paints a very different picture, based on their actual investigation on the ground in Iraq after the American troop surge under General Petraeus.

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Victory is not inevitable, any more than victory was inevitable when American and British troops landed at Normandy in 1945. General Eisenhower even kept in his pocket a written statement taking full responsibility in the event of failure.

But victory is not even defined the same way in Iraq as it was in World War II. American troops do not need to stay in Iraq until the last vestige of terrorism has been wiped out.

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There are many important aspects to winning the fight in Iraq, but one of the least talked about is that of showing that insurgencies can be defeated. Much of the anti war movement operates under the false assumption that we cannot defeat the enemy in this type of warfare. Right now one of their biggest fears is that we will discredit that assumption. That is behind much of the movement to preempt victory by ordering a retreat. But the long term benefit for this country is that demonstrating the ability to defeat insurgencies means we will have to fight fewer of them in the future. If the anti war left prevails, we will face more such insurgencies and they will continue to push for retreat.