Say Anything Blog

Charles Krauthammer gives the “Afghanistan is more important than Iraq” talking point Democrats espouse a good smacking around:

The Senate and the House have both passed bills for ending the Iraq war, or at least liquidating the American involvement in it. The resolutions, approved by the barest majorities, were underpinned by one unmistakable theme: wrong war, wrong place, distracting us from the real war that is elsewhere.

Where? In Afghanistan. The emphasis on Afghanistan echoed across the Democratic side of the aisle in Congress from Rep. Sheila Jackson-Lee to former admiral and Rep. Joe Sestak. It is a staple of the three leading Democratic candidates for the presidency, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama and John Edwards. It is the refrain of their last presidential candidate, John Kerry, and of their current party leader, Howard Dean, who complains that “we don’t have enough troops in Afghanistan. That’s where the real war on terror is.”

Of all the arguments for pulling out of Iraq, the greater importance of Afghanistan is the least serious.

And not just because this argument assumes that the world’s one superpower, which spends more on defense every year than the rest of the world combined, does not have the capacity to fight an insurgency in Iraq as well as in Afghanistan. But because it assumes that Afghanistan is strategically more important than Iraq.

Thought experiment: Bring in a completely neutral observer—a Martian—and point out to him that the United States is involved in two hot wars against radical Islamic insurgents. One is in Afghanistan, a geographically marginal backwater with no resources and no industrial or technological infrastructure. The other is in Iraq, one of the three principal Arab states, with untold oil wealth, an educated population, an advanced military and technological infrastructure that, though suffering decay in the later years of Saddam Hussein’s rule, could easily be revived if it falls into the right (i.e., wrong) hands. Add to that the fact that its strategic location would give its rulers inordinate influence over the entire Persian Gulf region, including Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and the Gulf states. Then ask your Martian: Which is the more important battle? He would not even understand why you are asking the question. . . .

The Democratic insistence on the primacy of Afghanistan makes no strategic sense. Instead, it reflects a sensibility. They would rather support the Afghan war because its origins are cleaner, the casus belli clearer, the moral texture of the enterprise more comfortable. Afghanistan is a war of righteous revenge and restitution, law enforcement on the grandest of scales. As senator and presidential candidate Joe Biden put it, “If there was a totally just war since World War II, it is the war in Afghanistan.”

If our resources are so stretched that we have to choose one front, the Martian would choose Iraq. But that is because, unlike a majority of Democratic senators, he did not vote four years earlier to authorize the war in Iraq, a vote for which many have a guilty conscience to be soothed retroactively by pulling out and fighting the “totally just war.”

Read the whole thing.

I think the Dems’ myopic focus on Afghanistan goes hand-in-hand with their seeming belief that Osama bin Laden is the apex and linchpin of Islamic terrorism.  They call our war on terror a failure because bin Laden isn’t in captivity, but they just don’t get it.  Bin Laden has been marginalized.  He may or may not even be alive, and if he is alive he’s living in a cave somewhere reduced to doing little more than sending out communications on tape.

Is he still an important target as an inspiring figure for Islamic jihad?  Absolutely, but even if we managed to take him out today jihadism wouldn’t go away.  Bin Laden would be held up as a martyr by his cronies, and then some new figurehead would step in and take his place and the struggle would continue.  Because we aren’t going to defeat Islamic terrorism by chopping off its head.  We’re going to defeat Islamic terrorism by addressing the tyranny and oppression that are its root causes.

Which is exactly what we’ve been doing in both Iraq and Afghanistan.