By Tony Blankley
June 25, 2008
It has been fa****onable -- indeed, de rigueur in political and media
circles -- to view contemptuously President Bush's assertion that we
are fighting the terrorists in Iraq so we wouldn't have to fight them
here. Even conservative commentators have tended to tiptoe around the
proposition. We are all far too sophisticated to believe such
simplicities. Nor will any self-respecting public chatterer even raise
the little matter of America not being hit by terrorism on our soil
for the almost seven years since Sept. 11.
And yet the undeniable facts certainly would justify a debate -- if
not yet a consensus of agreement -- on President Bush's assertions.
Regarding killing Islamist terrorists in Iraq rather than New York
City, consider the numbers: According to USA Today in September 2007,
more than 19,000 insurgents had been killed by coalition forces since
2003. The number obviously has gone up in the nine months since then
(these were midsurge numbers), but I don't have reliable updated
numbers.
Of course, most of those 19,000 killed insurgents were not foreign
terrorists, but local Iraqis moved to action by our occupation.
However, according to studies by the Center for Strategic and
International Studies and by the Defense Intelligence Agency, foreign-
born jihadists in Iraq are believed to number between 4 and10 percent
of the total insurgent strength. So it is reasonable to assume that we
have killed -- as of nine months ago -- between 800 and 1,900 non-
Iraqi terrorists who otherwise would have been plying their trade
elsewhere. It only took a couple of dozen to commit the atrocities of
Sept. 11.
Moreover, we know specifically that Al-Qaida in Iraq has been
decimated recently. According to the British newspaper The Times in
February: "Al-Qaeda in Iraq faces an 'extraordinary crisis'. ... The
terrorist group's security structure suffered 'total collapse'."
And last month, Strategy Page re****ted: "Al Qaeda web sites are making
a lot of noise about 'why we (al-Qaida) lost in Iraq'. Western
intelligence agencies are fascinated by the statistics being posted in
several Arab language sites. Not the kind of stuff you read about in
the Western media. According to al Qaeda, their collapse in Iraq was
steep and catastrophic. ... If you can read Arabic, you can easily
find these pro-terrorism sites, and see for yourself how al Qaeda is
trying to explain its own destruction (in Iraq) to its remaining
sup****ters."
Now, it is doubtlessly true that our invasion of Iraq (and
Afghanistan) helped al-Qaida's recruitment. I have been told that by
U.S. government experts I trust. But that is an old fact. What Osama
bin Laden famously said about recruitment is also true: People follow
the strong horse. And the new fact is that as we are winning in Iraq,
as we are killing al-Qaida fighters and other Islamist terrorists
there by the truckload (along with other insurgent opponents of the
Iraqi government we sup****t with our blood and wealth), we are proving
to be the strong horse after all and can expect to see a reduced
attraction for young men to join the Islamist terrorist ranks.
Fighting and winning always impress. Even merely fighting and
persisting impress. Shortly after the fall of Soviet Communism, I had
dinner with a then-recently former senior Red army general. He told me
that the Soviets were astounded and impressed by the fact that we were
prepared to fight and lose 50,000 men in Vietnam, when the Soviets
never thought we even had a strategic interest there. They thus
calculated that they'd better be careful with the United States. What
might we do, they thought, if our interests really were threatened?
The full effects of the vigorous martial response of President Bush to
the attacks of Sept. 11 will not be known for decades. But if history
is any indicator, military courage, persistence and a capacity to kill
the enemy in large numbers usually work to the benefit of such
nations.
On Sept. 10, 2001, many Islamists thought America and the West were
decadent, cowardly and ripe for the pickings. (Hitler thought the same
thing about us.) On the basis of President Bush's political courage --
and supremely on the physical courage, moral strength and
heartbreaking sacrifice of all our fighting uniformed men and women
(and un-uniformed intelligence operatives) -- America's willingness
and capacity to fight to protect ourselves cannot be doubted around
the world. This may prove to be the most im****tant global political
fact of the first decade of the 21st century -- with implications even
beyond our struggle with radical Islam.
It is time to reconsider whether President Bush or Barack Obama was
right on whether to fight. Obama has had a good political run on the
early and inconclusive evidence. As victory starts to emerge in Iraq,
more persuasive data begin to fall on President Bush's side of the
argument. This is a debate worth having before November.
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