Building on Bruce

Bruce's excellent post of yesterday, Waiting for Eisenhower, reminds me of a passage in Philip Bobbit's Shield of Achilles:

Many persons in the West believe that war occurs only because of mis-calculation; sometimes this opinion is combined with the view that only aggressors make war. Persons holding these two views would have a hard time justifying the wisdom of Alliance resistance to Communism the last fifty years because it was usually the U.S. and her allies and not the Soviets who resolutely and studiedly escalated matters to crises threatening war. Besides the obvious cases involving Berlin in 1952, or Cuba in 1962, we might add the decisions to make the move to war in South Korea and in South Viet Nam, the nature and motivations of which decisions are underscored by the persistent refusals of the Americans and their allies to bomb China or invade North Viet Nam. That is, in both cases the allied forces fought to stop aggression by going to war and declined to employ decisive counteraggression.

Those persons who concede these facts and conclude that these decisions were wrong, and yet who applaud the victory of the democracies in the Cold War, are perhaps obliged to reconsider their views. For it was this peculiar combination of a willingness to make the move to war coupled with a benign nonaggression, even protectiveness, toward the other great powers that ultimately gave the Alliance victory. . .Even the ill-fated American mission in Viet Nam contributed to the ultimate victory: a collapse of military resistance in Indochina in 1964 would have had political effects on the very states of the region whose economies have since become so dynamic (analogous to those effects that would have been felt in Japan following a collapse of resistance in Korea in 1950).

Like the Cold War, the war against Islamo-fascism is an epic struggle of two ideologies battling for supremacy. While each battle in this fight may not be executed to perfection, i.e. Iraq, it is an important battle nonetheless, deserving of a resolution that will provide stability to the region by exiling those elements such as Al Qaida, Hamas, etc., that seek to impose their system of governance and culture on an unwitting populace. For this we needn't wait for Eisenhower, we must press forward with the current mission.