A Recipe for Victory in the Middle East
By Patrick Poole, in The American Thinker:
This is just brilliant:
Bush’s March to the (Mediterranean) Sea
Last week, the Iraq Study Group told the President and the nation that we need to prepare for retreat from Iraq. In their numerous recommendations, there are none that are directed towards actually winning the present conflict, and the mainstream media has done a yeoman’s job of convincing the American public that the war in unwinnable. It seems clear from comments made by policymakers of all stripes in recent days that a retreat from Iraq is inevitable.
This retreat, of course, plays right into the hands of the very terrorists we went to Iraq and Afghanistan to defeat. Furthermore, it strengthens the hand of our avowed enemies in the Middle East (the list too numerous to mention here). If the Iraq Study Group’s recommendations are implemented and their cut-and-run plans are followed, when the terrorists are in control of Iraq and our standing in the Middle East reduced to nil, the long-term consequences will prove disastrous.
Permit me, if you will, to make a completely out-of-Left-field suggestion, one I doubt will ever be entertained inside the Beltway, will quickly be the laughingstock of military planners at the Pentagon, and will certainly be anathema to the Manhattan media establishment and the Democratic congressional majority. I would like to suggest that there is a way for us to leave Iraq honorably, take back the offensive in the War on Terror, and weaken our enemies such that it will take more than a decade for them to recover. If our leaving Iraq is inevitable, why not make our departure to the west through Damascus and Beirut - taking out the military supporting the terror-sponsoring Assad regime and cutting the military hardware supply line to Hezb’allah along the way?
[...]
Perhaps the biggest military obstacle we face in Iraq is the fact that our military has not equipped to fight the war they have been placed into - an unpredictable insurgency supported by several nation-state and terrorist actors in an area where they have many natural advantages. Despite that, our armed forces have performed and adapted to the constantly changing situation on the ground with remarkable skill, determination, creativity and bravery. What the American military has proved is that whenever they have faced the enemy head-on (Operation Phantom Fury in Fallujah and the operations since this summer in Ramadi are good examples) they win. It is fair to say that when our armed forces are allowed to fight from their strengths on their own terms, victory has been decisive.
Prior to 9/11, the leadership of al-Qaeda was convinced that if we were drawn into a direct military confrontation with the Taliban and the al-Qaeda “mujahedeen” in Afghanistan in a style reminiscent of their victory against the Soviets more than a decade previous, they would beat the American superpower as decisively as they had defeated the Soviet one. Ninety days after 9/11, however, it was proven in dramatic fashion that they were wrong. Al-Qaeda’s chief strategist, Abu Musab al-Suri, was enraged when he heard about the 9/11 attacks, because he knew that al-Qaeda had engaged in a war they could not win. He knew that the very element that secured victory for the mujahedeen against the Soviets - that the Soviets were not able to secure air supremacy due to American Stinger missiles - would not be true in a battle with the Americans. Fortunately for us, he was right.
The Rush to Baghdad in 2003 proved again that when the America military was allowed to fight playing to their strengths and on their own terms, our opponents were utterly outmatched. In a few weeks, we took on the largest army in the Middle East, and in the face of overwhelming American power, the smarter among the Iraqi forces simply dissolved into the population; those slightly less intelligent that tried to take on our military were quickly engaged and dispatched with stunning and decisive speed.
In both the 2001 Push to Kabul and the 2003 Rush to Baghdad, our enemies were simply overwhelmed and vastly outmatched by the American military. Such would be true with any army in the Middle East, save one - Israel. The paper armies of the Arab world are no match for American might. And the past has shown that swift and spectacular victories against the Arab armies (e.g. the Six Day War) can paralyze the forces of aggression in the Middle East and can actually lead to peace in the region (e.g. the Camp David Accords).
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Much like the Confederacy in 1862, America needs a plan that is based on winning the war in the future, rather than trying to avoid the military failures of the past. A change of vision for Iraq is clearly needed, but our leaders need to focus on what we must do to allow our military to win the War on Terror, not debate the easiest way for politicians to lose it. Just like the audacious strategy proposed by Stonewall Jackson, what we need is to harness the creative and lethal genius of the collective American military mind. It is out there somewhere.
Read the whole thing.
This is the real winning strategy, not only for now, but for the next ten years, during which we can put more long-range economic strategies in effect: Weaning ourselves off of Middle East terrorist oil.
It’s a long article, but well worth the read.
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