The Long War

The War on Terror will last for decades. But not many decades. Al Qaeda is reeling. My sons, now well under ten years of age, will probably fight in this war. We will still be losing soldiers fifteen and twenty years from now, even when the Iraq War is but a memory.

We will still be operating under Bernard Lewis's paradigm that we must liberate them or they will destroy us. This is the only paradigm that plausibly allows us to prevent all future attacks by al Qaeda that involve the destruction of entire American cities. If we do not liberate them, they will be unable to interpret their scriptures loosely enough to reject their prophet's jihadism or to grow out of their tribalistic contempt and hatred for other societies. And where there is a will to destroy an American city, there is a way.

George W. Bush will be known fifty years from now as little more than this: the first Commander in Chief in the War on Terror, who liberated 50 million, knocked al Qaeda back on its heels and never backed down amidst the hateful vitriol dumped upon him by the loud and deranged American left. Twenty years from now, many of these leftists will select Iraq as vacation spot, as a way to demonstrate their taste for the exotic, their heady attraction to advertisements for archaeological tours of Mesopotamia, and the superiority of their sensitivity to the life of the Iraqi to that of his liberator George W. Bush.

The fearless and pure of heart will calmly persist in smiling in the face of the evil and the deranged, displaying the heroism that comes naturally to them. These are the heroes of September 11, 2001, the men and women of the U.S. military, and the few political leaders who support them here at home by handling the pushback by the unhinged American left with equanimity, firmness and pity.