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July 3, 2007
Why We're Losing
Posted by Dave Blount at July 3, 2007 8:42 AM
It appears we are slowly losing our defensive war with terrorist Islam. Ralph Peters explains why: we aren't fighting to win.
Both Shiite and Sunni Muslims are at war with us. We struck a serious blow against Sunni terrorists by destroying al-Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan. But the Shiite terrorists' more threatening safe haven in Iran goes unmolested:
Aware that Tehran's commandos were active in Iraq, supplying weapons, training and direct supervision of attacks that targeted Americans, we did nothing. An Iranian diplomatic passport turned out to be a better form of body armor than anything our troops wear.
Patience isn't a virtue when a hostile government's killing your soldiers. Our timidity only encouraged Iran, which has paid no serious penalties.
Peters doesn't want to invade Iran…
But selective strikes against the infrastructure of the Revolutionary Guards (and the Quds Force in particular), as well as against Tehran's security services, are the minimum needed to get the regime's attention. […] Sanctions? Diplomacy? Tell it to the troops in Walter Reed. Or in Arlington. […] If military action isn't a perfect answer, appeasement is never the answer. Give in to terrorists' demands, and you'll only get more demands.
But on the home front, instead of calls to respond to Iran's escalating provocations, we get demands that foreign terrorists be granted all the rights of American citizens. Clearly this is not going to help us win, but it's as if no one really wants to win. The Republican administration seems satisfied to maintain a doomed holding action for as long as it can, whereas Democrats, insanely but undeniably, want us to lose.
Peters thinks our leaders just don't grasp that the war is serious:
They live in perfect safety and don't really care if you or your children die, as long as you vote for them.
If roadside bombs were going off on Capitol Hill, we'd punish Iran ferociously and stop treating captured terrorists like white-collar crooks. But as long as the IEDs only kill and cripple our soldiers and Marines, neither political party gives a damn.
The enemy has already crashed a jet into the Pentagon — more than the Nazis or Imperial Japanese ever managed. What will it take to wake Washington up to the fact that this fight is for real, and that we had better stop pussyfooting and play to win? As Iran scrambles to develop nuclear weapons technology, we may soon find out.
On a tip from Byron.
