by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n
T<\/span>he threat from radical Islamic terrorists will not vanish when President Bush leaves office, or if funds for the Iraq war are cut off in 2008.<\/p>\n A frequent charge is that we are bringing terrorists to Iraq. That is true in the sense that war always brings\u00a0the enemy out to the battlefield. But it’s also false, since it ignores why killers like Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (the late al Qaeda chief in Iraq), Abu Nidal and Abu Abbas (Palestinian terrorists of the 1980s), and Abdul Rahman Yasin (involved in the 1993 World Trade Center bombing)\u00a0were already in Saddam’s Iraq when we arrived.<\/p>\n Moreover, the unpopular war in Iraq did not create radical Islamists and their madrassas throughout the Middle East that today brainwash young radicals and pressure\u00a0the region’s monarchies, theocracies and autocracies to provide money for training and weaponry. All that radicalism had been going on for decades \u2014 as we saw during the quarter-century of terrorism that led up to 9\/11. And rioting, assassination and death threats over artistic expression in Europe have nothing to do with Iraq.<\/p>\n Right now, most al Qaeda\u00a0terrorists are being trained and equipped in the Pakistani wild lands of Waziristan to help the Taliban reclaim Afghanistan and spread jihad worldwide. These killers pay no attention to the fact that our efforts in Afghanistan are widely multilateral. They don’t care that our presence there is sanctioned by NATO, or involves the United Nations, or only came as a reaction to 9\/11.<\/p>\n These radical Islamists gain strength not because we “took our eye off Afghanistan” by being in Iraq, but because Pakistan’s strongman, Gen. Pervez Musharraf, can’t or won’t do anything about al-Qaeda’s bases in his country. And neither Bush nor Nancy Pelosi quite knows how to pressure such an unpredictable nuclear military dictatorship.<\/p>\n The Iraq war has certainly sharpened our relationship with Iran, but, of course, it’s also not the cause of our tensions with Tehran. For decades, the Iranian government has subsidized Hezbollah, which during the 1980s and 1990s murdered Americans from Saudi Arabia to Beirut. It was not the current Iranian lunatic president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad but an earlier more “moderate” president, Akbar Hashemi Rafsanjani, who remarked, in 2001, that “one bomb is enough to destroy all Israel.”<\/p>\n S<\/span>o Iraq is only one recent theater, albeit a controversial one, in an ongoing global struggle. This larger conflict arose not from the Iraqi invasion of 2003, but from earlier radical Muslim rage at the modern globalized world, the profits and dislocations from Middle East oil, and Islamic terrorism that ranges worldwide from Afghanistan to Thailand.<\/p>\n Should a peace candidate win the American presidency in 2008, prompting the U.S. to pull out of Iraq before the democracy there is stabilized, in the short term we will save lives and money. But as the larger war continues after we withdraw, jihadists will still flock to the Sunni Triangle. Hamas and Hezbollah will still rocket Israel. Syria will still kill Lebanese reformers. Iran will still try to cheat its way to a nuclear bomb. Ayman al- Zawahiri will still broadcast his al Qaeda threats from safety in nuclear Pakistan.\u00a0The oil-rich, illegitimate Gulf sheikdoms will still make secret concessions and bribe increasingly confident terrorists to leave them alone. And jihadists will still try to sneak into the United States to kill us.<\/p>\n Critics of the present war can make the tactical argument that it is wiser to fight al Qaeda in Pakistan than in Iraq. Or that money spent in the frontline Iraqi offensive theater would be better invested on defense and security at home. Or that the human cost is simply too great and thus we should instead make diplomatic concessions to radical Islamists in lieu of military confrontation.<\/p>\n But, again, those are operational alternatives found in every war \u2014 as familiar as the old controversies over the French defensive Maginot Line of the 1930s or the American decision to defeat Germany first, Japan second. In the case of staying on in Iraq, at least, our long-term plan is to go on the offensive to confront radical Islamic terrorists on their own turf, and try to foster a democratic alternative to theocracy or autocracy.<\/p>\n That may be felt by the American public to be too expensive or too naive, but it is a direct strategy aimed at an enemy who seeks to terrorize the West and plans on being around well after 2008.<\/p>\n Depending on how we leave Iraq, this global war against radical Islamic terrorism will either wax or wane. But it will hardly end.<\/p>\n \u00a92007 Tribune Media Services<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services The threat from radical Islamic terrorists will not vanish when President Bush leaves office, or if funds for the Iraq war are cut off in 2008.<\/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":[759],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-X0","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":4194,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/terrorists-and-tyrants\/","url_meta":{"origin":3658,"position":0},"title":"Terrorists and Tyrants","author":"victorhanson","date":"November 28, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"Rethinking why we are at war in the Middle East by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services As American casualties mount in Iraq, politicians at home now fight over who said what and when about weapons of mass destruction and the need for going to war. One of the most\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "November 2005"","block_context":{"text":"November 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/november-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4240,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/an-american-debacle\/","url_meta":{"origin":3658,"position":1},"title":"An American “Debacle”?","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 14, 2005","format":false,"excerpt":"More unjustified negativity on the war in Iraq. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online In a recent\u00a0Los Angeles Times\u00a0op-ed entitled \u201cAmerican Debacle\u201d Zbigniew Brzezinski, former national-security adviser to President Carter, begins with: Some 60 years ago Arnold Toynbee concluded, in his monumental \u201cStudy of History,\u201d that the ultimate cause\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2005"","block_context":{"text":"October 2005","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2005\/october-2005\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":2990,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/phony-war-afghanistan-and-the-democrats\/","url_meta":{"origin":3658,"position":2},"title":"Phony War: Afghanistan and the Democrats","author":"victorhanson","date":"January 30, 2009","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson World Affairs Most Americans in 2003 thought that the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq were complementary theaters in the wider war on radical Islamic terrorism and the authoritarian Middle East regimes that aided and abetted it. The anti-Iraq War left agreed that the two fronts were\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "January 2009"","block_context":{"text":"January 2009","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2009\/january-2009\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3523,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/winning-ugly\/","url_meta":{"origin":3658,"position":3},"title":"Winning Ugly","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 2, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"Iraq doesn't need to be a Kodak moment. by Victor Davis Hanson National Review Online There is no need to review the now common judgment on the Iraqi war as a fiasco, quagmire, or \u201cworst\u201d something or other in American history. We have paid over four years, a high price\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "October 2007"","block_context":{"text":"October 2007","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2007\/october-2007\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3581,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-new-york-times-surrenders\/","url_meta":{"origin":3658,"position":4},"title":"The New York Times Surrenders","author":"victorhanson","date":"July 17, 2007","format":false,"excerpt":"A monument to defeatism on the editorial page by Victor Davis Hanson City Journal Online On July 8, the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0ran an historic editorial entitled \u201cThe Road Home,\u201d demanding an immediate American withdrawal from Iraq. 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