Long Twilight Struggle

From IBD:

Posted 2/6/2006
National Security: Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and the Pentagon are planning for a "long war" against terror and the enemies of freedom. But then, President Bush told us that in the weeks after 9-11.

In a speech last week at the National Press Club that aides titled the "Long War," Rumsfeld rightly described our war against terror as a generational struggle not unlike our five-decade-long Cold War with the Soviet Union. And the stakes, he pointed out, are as high now as they were then.

Likening al-Qaida leader Osama bin Laden to the fathers of other tyrannical ideologies, like Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin, Rumsfeld defined both the stakes and difficulties in the speech made on the eve of the release of the Pentagon's Quadrennial Defense Review. Mandated every four years by Congress, the latest QDR opens with the declaration: "The United States is a nation engaged in what will be a long war."

This is not a statement or a policy that will sit well with congressional Democrats who whine about "exit strategies" and wonder not what it will take to win and bring democracy to the Middle East but what it will take to bring the troops home from Iraq.

These "white flag" Democrats no longer echo President John F. Kennedy's call to pay any price and bear any burden to ensure the success and survival of liberty. Instead, they embrace Rep. John Murtha's call for unilateral retreat.

Kennedy knew it would be hard to both confront the nuclear threat the Soviet Union posed and the guerrilla wars and Third World contests that Moscow sponsored and supplied. And certainly mistakes were made. But it was a struggle from which we could not shrink — from the Berlin Airlift to the Cuban Missile Crisis to "Star Wars" and the day President Reagan told Mr. Gorbachev to "tear down that wall!"

Today we find ourselves in a not-unfamiliar situation. China is rising to become the global threat the Soviet Union once was. Iran seeks to join North Korea as a nuclear power even as it reigns as the prime state sponsor of terror, with Syria running a close second. Together they finance the terrorist group Hezbollah. And the equally dangerous and virulently anti-U.S. and anti-Israel group Hamas now rules the Palestinian state.

In our own hemisphere, thugs like Venezuela's Hugo Chavez and Bolivia's Evo Morales have become the allies and heirs of Cuba's Fidel Castro. And then there are the terrorists who set off bombs at weddings in Jordan, discos in Bali, train stations in Madrid and subways in London, and who fly passenger jets into buildings in the U.S.

"Compelled by a militant ideology that celebrates murder and suicide with no territory to defend, with little to lose, they will either succeed in changing our way of life, or we will succeed in changing theirs," Rumsfeld said.
In the war on terror, as in the Cold War, no unconditional surrender will be signed on the deck of a battleship. Success will be measured not by events that happen but by events that don't happen.

On Sept. 20, 2001, President Bush told Congress and the nation: "Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have seen." He continued: "Our war with terror begins with al-Qaida, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated."

Like the Cold War, this war is going to be a long one and one we can't afford to lose.