by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
NRO’s\u00a0The Corner<\/em><\/p>\n I\u00a0agree with many here that the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan\u00a0is positive news. And, yes, we should be thankful to President Obama that (for now) Generals Petraeus and McChrystal have at least 18 months and greater resources to secure the country before the promised withdrawals\u00a0(supposedly) begin.<\/p>\n But\u00a0the problem is that the commander-in-chief was clearly pained by the decision \u2014 sometimes fobbing off his dilemma on the prior administration, at other times trying to contextualize the war as a complex socio-legal problem rather than a struggle to force our enemy to accept our own political aims (i.e., a consensual government in Kabul that is inhospitable, rather than welcoming, to global terrorists).<\/p>\n And when a war leader visibly regrets the situation he has found himself in \u2014 rather than being determined to prevail in the struggle at hand \u2014 that hesitancy inevitably ripples through the ranks.\u00a0Think of\u00a0the British or French war effort between September 1939\u00a0and May 1940, or America in Vietnam between 1964 and 1969. Chamberlain was no Churchill, and LBJ, like it or not, was not a Nixon, at least when it came to trying to win in Vietnam.<\/p>\n In contrast, with\u00a0the ascension of the “Tiger,” Georges Clemenceau, as prime minister\u00a0in 1917,\u00a0his will to win (“la guerre jusqu’au bout”)\u00a0filtered throughout the French ranks and soon made an enormous difference in the trenches. Take away a win-at-all-costs Lincoln in the dark days of spring and summer 1864, and the Army of the Potomac, Grant or no Grant, would have lost its soul. During the Cold War, American forces, down to the level of private, were more enthused with a “tear down this wall” president than an earlier “free of that inordinate fear of communism” commander-in-chief.<\/p>\n So, yes, in the short term, troops will be sent. Two brilliant generals will have leeway. And we will\u00a0have a year and a half at the new troop levels. But no nation can \u2014 or should try to \u2014 win a war when the heart of the man at the top is not in the struggle.<\/p>\n \u00a92009 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson NRO’s\u00a0The Corner I\u00a0agree with many here that the decision to send more troops to Afghanistan\u00a0is positive news.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[631],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-xB","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":2238,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-war-in-afghanistan\/","url_meta":{"origin":2083,"position":0},"title":"The War in Afghanistan","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 6, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson NRO's\u00a0The Corner Two-Front Wars \u2014 Theirs and Ours Something is not quite right about the conventional wisdom about the Afghanistan war. For nearly eight years, yearly casualties in Afghanistan sometimes were less than a month's losses in the dire days in Iraq (e.g., 98 Americans killed\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2009"","block_context":{"text":"October 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/october-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6806,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/why-should-we-study-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":2083,"position":1},"title":"Why Should We Study War?","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 2, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"Military history tells the story of human nature at its great heights and terrible lows. by Bruce S. Thornton \/\/\u00a0Defining Ideas\u00a0 In the latter years of World War I, Winston Churchill met with the novelist and poet Siegfried Sassoon. Sassoon was a winner of the Military Cross\u2013\u2013he single-handedly routed 60\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bruce S. Thornton"","block_context":{"text":"Bruce S. Thornton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/our-contributors\/bruce-s-thornton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":6399,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/is-the-war-to-save-face-or-save-lives\/","url_meta":{"origin":2083,"position":2},"title":"Is The War to Save Face or Save Lives?","author":"victorhanson","date":"August 29, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson \/\/\u00a0PJ Media Click here to see the symposium of PJ columnists analyzing the pros and cons of an intervention in Syria. Most of the arguments pro and con for an intervention in Syria have already been made. I think the consensus is that while stopping Assad\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Syria"","block_context":{"text":"Syria","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/syria\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":621,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wars-paradoxes-ii-from-the-peloponnesian-war-to-leading-from-behind-2\/","url_meta":{"origin":2083,"position":3},"title":"War’s Paradoxes II: From the Peloponnesian War to ‘Leading From Behind’","author":"victorhanson","date":"February 10, 2013","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson PJ Media 1. Why Did Athens Lose the Peloponnesian War? It really did not in a way: Athens no more lost the war than Hitler did the Second World War between September 1939 and May 1941. 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Cohen Free Press. 320 pp. $25.00 In his influential 1957 study, The Soldier and the State, Samuel Huntington codified the main doctrines\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Reviews"","block_context":{"text":"Reviews","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/opinion\/reviews\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2083"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2085,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2083\/revisions\/2085"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2083"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2083"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2083"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}