Achieving Real Victory

Daniel Pipes is something of a subscriber to what Rush Limbaugh calls "The Limbaugh Doctrine"--the idea that you can only achieve "peace" or "victory" in war after you have completely and utterly defeated your enemy: 

Bernard Lewis spoke those memorable words to sum up the necessary goal of U.S. policy at a Hudson Institute conference two days ago. More fully, to quote a New York Sun news report, he said "the only real solution to defeating radical Islam is to bring freedom to the Middle East. Either ‘we free them or they destroy us'."

I have the highest regard for Bernard Lewis, a great Middle East historian from whom I have been learning since I entered the field in 1969. (The very first book I read in Middle East history, not surprisingly, was his Arabs in History.) But I disagree that our goal is to free the Muslim world...[my emphasis] 

But I think the further point that he makes regarding what "complete victory" entails is absolutely indispensable to the argument about how to win the war on terror: It's not just a disarmed opponent with a "democratic government" thrown on top that we should be after; it is also the defeat of the ideology in the minds of those fighting us that we must seek in order to achieve true "victory." Otherwise, as Dr. Pipes points out, "freedom" just becomes an opportunity for the jihadist to prepare for future war. In this sense, I think the Left is somewhat correct when they say that we can't "impose" freedom.

Dr. Pipes adduces 2 very sound reasons for his position:

• There are plenty of born-free Muslims in the West who are Islamists. Take, for example, the four 7/7 bombers in London. Freedom did nothing for them.

• The goal in war has to be to defeat one's enemies, not liberate them. The invasion of Iraq, dubbed "Operation Iraqi Freedom," suffered from this mistake. The same applies to the war on radical Islam, where we must cause our enemies to feel a sense of defeat. We must crush their will. After that bitter phase has been experienced, they are then eligible for freedom.

So not only should we pursue a complete and utter military defeat of the enemy; we need to also press for an ideological victory in the mind and heart of the enemy.

For the Christian, that can only mean that in addition to the necessary physical war we're engaged in, we should at the same time ask God to cause the Gospel to be victorious in the hearts of those who hate us. That alone is true "peace."