Today, Ralph Peters addresses the concerns of a friend of his who is now in Iraq. No, he doesn’t fear for his safety. He fears for the conclusion of our efforts in Iraq.
He badly wanted me to write another column before Election Day stressing that our troops are winning in Iraq.
This fight in Iraq is but a single battle in the overall war against fundamentalists who use terror as their primary weapon. The reason for using terror is to get their enemy to give up–quit fighting. They will then be free to do as they wish. And what they wish is to take over every government in the world and turn them all into Islamic cultures under sharia law. Any government they can cow is one they no longer have to deal with except in times of their choosing.
Peters is one of the best in analyzing strategic situations, and he sums this one up well:
Al Qaeda and its affiliates are rapidly using up the human capital they’ve accumulated over decades. The casualties in Iraq are overwhelmingly on the terrorist side. Extremist leaders have paid a particularly heavy price. But they won’t stop fighting because they can’t. The terrorists have to win in Iraq. They have to defeat America.
The astonishing thing is that so many of our fellow Americans don’t get it. The terrorists aren’t committing their shrinking reserves because the outcome’s a trivial matter. They recognize the magnitude of what we’re helping the Iraqi people achieve.
This is the big one. The fate of a civilization hangs in the balance. And all we hear from one presidential contender is that it’s the “wrong war, at the wrong time.”
We hear from the Kerry campaign that the military is stretched to its limit. In the next breath they will tell you Kerry will increase troop strength in Iraq.
The enemy have put all their eggs in the Iraqi basket. Dubya wants to destroy those eggs. Kerry has been clear he doesn’t.