Herschel Smith has posted a lengthy and technical analysis of the Surge, now under way in Iraq. Is it too little, too late, and for too short a time? Herschel says we’d need to Surge for 18-24 months to be effective but acknowledges that politically we juist don’t have that long. I agree, having written late last month that “US political and domestic opinion will ‘wait and see’ no more than six months whether Gen. Petraeus can turn things around.”

Herschel’s essay is called, “The Petraeus Thinkers: Five Challenges,” and worth your time.

I’m tempted to say, “more war against Iraq,” for if the president does decide to “go big” in Iraq early next year, then the coming campaign will be as violent as the initial invasion, though limited in scope. The report of the mostly-dilettante Iraq Study Group, released Dec. 6, has all deservedly but dropped out of sight. Like a bowling ball thrown into a swimming pool, it made a big splash, sank like a brick and left few ripples. Not even the Democrati-majority Congress is screeching for it to be implemented by the executive. (Gerard Baker, writing in the UK’s Times, said the ISG’s report was met with “a drenching chorus of raspberries.”)

So what can President Bush do? Fred Barnes explains,

Last Monday Bush was, at last, briefed on an actual plan for victory in Iraq, one that is likely to be implemented. Retired General Jack Keane, the former vice chief of staff of the Army, gave him a thumbnail sketch of it during a meeting of five outside experts at the White House. The president’s reaction, according to a senior adviser, was “very positive.” Authored by Keane and military expert Frederick W. Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute, the plan (which can be read at aei.org/publication25292) is well thought-out and detailed, but fundamentally quite simple. It is based on the idea-all but indisputable at this point-that no political solution is possible in Iraq until security is established, starting in Baghdad. The reverse-a bid to forge reconciliation between majority Shia and minority Sunni-is a nonstarter in a political environment drenched in the blood of sectarian killings.

Why would the Keane-Kagan plan succeed where earlier efforts failed? It envisions a temporary addition of 50,000 troops on the ground in Iraq. The initial mission would be to secure and hold the mixed Baghdad neighborhoods of Shia and Sunni residents where most of the violence occurs

The link in the cited text is to Kagan’s executive summary. The full, PDF report is really a PowerPoint-style slide show that makes it clear that tens of thousands of additional American soldiers and Marines will be required to decide the issue on the ground in Iraq. In Baghdad:

We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.

We must send more American combat forces into Iraq and especially into Baghdad to support this operation. A surge of seven Army brigades and Marine regiments to support clear-and-hold operations starting in the Spring of 2007 is necessary, possible, and will be sufficient.

These forces, partnered with Iraqi units, will clear critical Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shi’a neighborhoods, primarily on the west side of the city.

There’s more; I am trying to keep this post reasonably short. Al Anbar province gets similar treatment. The focus is exactly where it should be, pithily summed up by Richard Brookhiser’s reaction to the ISG report: “An Alternative to Baker: Kill Our Enemies, Quickly.” One of Kagan’s points is that the size of the Army must increase. Some of us have been urging this for a long time, but since the main military figure of this alternative plan to the ISG was a retired Army vice chief of staff, Jack Keane, perhaps it is no coincidence that the serving chief of staff, Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, warned the House Armed Service Committee two days ago,

… that the active-duty Army “will break” under the strain of today’s war-zone rotations, the nation’s top Army general yesterday called for expanding the force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops.

Why only 7,000 troops per year? Perhaps because since before the end of the Cold War the Base Realignment and Closure commissions have been recommending shutting down bases at home and abroad. From 1988-1995, the Army closed 112 installations and realigned (mainly meaning combined) 26 others as well as numerous lab sites. But if the 7,000 per year increase is all the Army can manage effectively, then we are in a very precarious position.

Victor Davis Hanson writes,

Could we not raise two more Marine Divisions and four more Army divisions (e.g., about 100,00 addition combat troops), costing per annum perhaps about 6-8 billion dollars—to be paid without more borrowing but by cutting farm subsidies and putting a 10-cent per gallon tax on gasoline?

I don’t agree with the gas-tax idea, since average working stiffs use their cars and trucks a lot for business and therefore would bear the brunt of increasing the military. I’d be inclined toward an income-tax surcharge of X percent; for filers due refunds the refund would be decreased by the same percentage.

Back to Baghdad. A perpetual peril for military planners is forgetting that the enemy plans, too, and reacts to what we do. This is what the ISG’s reports evinces little evidence that the ISG understood. The ISG simply seemed to assume that all Iraq’s neighbors had a common interest (which it seemed to think was the same interest) in a pacified, stable Iraq. Therefore the ISG believed its recommended diplomatic initiatives would be met with good faith, leading to success (but pointedly, not victory, a concept James Baker said they deliberately dismissed) or just rejected. And then what? The ISG does not say.

The Keane-Kagan concept, though, explicitly recognizes that the various enemies of democratic order in Iraq certainly will react and to our going big there, and Kagan recommends counters to the enemies’ most likely responses.

Make no mistake, though: if this concept is put into action, it will be done whether the Iraqi government agrees to it or not. It will be war the old way, not seen since the Army and Marines conquered Fallujah in November 2004, but likely with less restraint on our part. As Diana West observed last week,

The fact is, the United States has an arsenal that could obliterate any jihad threat in the region once and for all, whether that threat is bands of IED-exploding “insurgents” in Ramadi, the deadly so-called Mahdi Army in Sadr City, or genocidal maniacs in Tehran. … It could be over in two weeks if we cared enough to blast our way off the list of endangered civilizations.

We won’t go quite that Pattonesque, but all hands, from the president on down understand that if we go big, it will be the final roll of the dice in Iraq for this administration, or the next, can make there. Either we crush the enemy, various as they are, or we lose the war.

Update: Ralph Peters explains the rub: “Send more troops? Only if we mean it.”

Old Europe’s motives in opposing the US in Iraq are opaque, but the Arab countries’ reasons are pretty clear.

Wouldn’t it be nice if the rest of the West stepped up to the plate in the broader context of the war against Islamist terrorists? That’s what Jules Crittenden muses. While complimenting the Canadians on their continuedf fighting in Afghanistan, he says,

But I would still like to know where the Canadians, the French and the Germans in particular were when we needed them in Iraq … if only to get out of the way. In fact, we could use a lot more troops in Iraq right now. More to the point, the Iraqis could use a lot more troops. …

Some people say they don’t want the French there … deer hunting with an accordian. Some people say coordinating a multinational force can create as many problems as it solves. More to the point, most people would say this is all idle and pointless dreaming.

But I’m an optimist and a dreamer. Why not? Tens of thousands of troops flooding in, under NATO leadership, to engage aggressively as we’ve seen them do in Afghanistan. Do these nations care about Iraq? They claim to. Do they care about freedom and stability in the Middle East? They pretend to. So let’s end the hypocrisy. We all know what is needed in Iraq. It isn’t a pullout.

I’m ready to see the free, prosperous nations of the world stand up. Even the French nation, about which I’ve expressed disgust, I am ready to welcome into the fold of purposeful, moral nations such as Australia, Britain, the United States, Italy, Poland, Denmark, Romania, ever-true South Korea and Thailand — with us in Vietnam, as was my ancestral land of Australia — even pacifist Japan. I live for the day when I don’t have to disparage the French. I know the French people are capable of bravery in the face of adversity. Let’s see it. …

But not only the West.

Then, there is the issue of Muslim nations. A lot of noise, a lot of trouble, not a lot of action to any good end. Muslim nations want peace in Iraq? How about cutting off the support to the terrorists from Iran, Syria and Saudi Arabia. How about, from Morocco to Indonesia, offering up some troops? Do you care about Iraq? Prove it.

In a short email conversation with Jules gthis morning, he wondered why, if the other Muslim nations claim to be so interested in peace in Iraq, they don’t send troops to help the Iraqi government suppress the insurgency.

My answer was basically that it is a mistake to presume that the other Muslim nations, especially the Arab nations, actually want peace in Iraq. Or at least, they don’t necessarily want peace on the Iraqi government’s terms. Why?

1. As I wrote yesterday, they are profiting by exporting their homegrown Islamist jihadis to Iraq, where they are promptly killed by American and Iraqi forces. The Iraqi militias are not necessarily friends of the American forces (though some are) but they are unwelcoming of the Sunni jihadis who have been flocking to Iraq. Especially do the Shia Iraqi militias oppose them.

So for the while, the combat in Iraq serves countries such as Egypt, Algeria, Syria and Saudi Arabia as a safety valve for bleeding off the energy of homegrown Islamist movements and eliminating a great many of homegrown Islamists.

2. There is an enormous fear among most of the Arab world, especially Jordan, Egypt and Saudi Arabia, of a “Shia crescent” extending from Iran through Iraq to Hezbollah-dominated Lebanon, thence to Iran-backed Hamas.

The idea of electorally established Shia dominance of Iraq deeply troubles Arab regimes, with or without Shias of their own.

Jordan’s King Abdullah has most publicly declared what others keep to themselves. For him the great peril is Iran, the world’s only (apart from Azerbaijan) Shia-majority state that is also Shia-ruled - and clerically, militantly ruled to boot.

Iran’s “vested interest”, he says, is “to have an Islamic republic of Iraq; if that happened, we’ve opened ourselves to a whole set of new problems that won’t be limited to the borders of Iraq”. He warned of a Shia “crescent” stretching from Iran into Iraq, Syria and Lebanon, destabilising Gulf countries and posing a challenge to the US.

“This is the first time,” said the Lebanese commentator Joseph Samaha, “an Arab official has used such crude, direct and dangerous language to publicly incite against a particular confession and warn that it may turn into a fifth column to be used against the majority.”

3. As well, while it is true that democracy is the mortal enemy of Islamism, it is likewise the ideological enemy of the Arab regimes generally. For the former,

Yussuf al-Ayyeri, one of Osama bin Laden’s closest associates since the early 1990s, was killed by Saudi security forces in Riyadh in 2003. He wrote a book published by al Qaeda entitled, The Future of Iraq and The Arabian Peninsula After The Fall of Baghdad. In it Ayyeri wrote, “It is not the American war machine that should be of the utmost concern to Muslims. What threatens the future of Islam, in fact its very survival, is American democracy.” Islamic absolutism, Ayyeri wrote, cannot exist inside a society where the people think they can pass their own laws and makes their own rules.

Because democracy is “seductive,” as Ayyeri put it, its defeat in Iraq is the first imperative in all the world for al Qaeda. More than 18 months ago, al Qaeda’s head man in Iraq, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi (now dead) wrote that Iraqi democracy is “suffocation” for Islamist aims.

For the latter, as Ralph Peters pointed out,

No major Arab state wants to see a functioning democracy emerge in Iraq. They don’t want a free Iraqi media or decent human-rights practices to set an example for the oppressed in their own countries.

Even a marginally successful democracy in Iraq would undermine the decrepit, villainous regimes, from Riyadh to Damascus to Cairo, which have done so much to retard Arab development.

While the motives for Arab regimes in staying away from Iraq, or even covertly working to foil American aims there, can be understood is realpolitik and religious terms, the motives for “Old Euriope” are less clear. Any ideas?

Mitchell Zais is a retired Army brigadier general who is the president at Newberry College in South Carolina. On Nov. 9 he gave a speech at the college in which he stated that “most of our problems in Iraq stem from a flawed strategy that has been in place since the beginning of the war.” I won’t paste the ehole speech here, yoo may read it at the link, but here are his central points:

Our strategy in Iraq has been:

1) Fight the war on the cheap.

2) Ask the ground forces to perform missions that are more suitably performed by other branches of the American government.

3) Inconvenience the American people as little as possible.

4) Continue to fund the Air Force and Navy at the same levels that they have been funded at for the last 30 years while shortchanging the Army and Marines who are doing all of the fighting.

No wonder the war is not going well.

Read the whole thing.

The Age reports the latest Islamist threat against England:

A MUSLIM convert plotted mass murder in Britain and the US then submitted his carefully laid plans to the al-Qaeda leadership in Pakistan for approval, a British court has heard.

Dhiren Barot, 34, planned to set off a radioactive dirty bomb and attack hotels, buildings and railway stations with gas bombs in cars, a Crown prosecutor told the court in what may be Britain’s most significant terrorist trial since the September 11 attacks on the US. …

Barot expressed excitement about detonating a bomb in a tube tunnel under the Thames. “Imagine the chaos that would be caused if a powerful explosion were to rip through here and actually rupture the river itself,” he wrote.

“This would cause pandemonium, what with the explosions, flooding, drowning etc that would result.”

He and seven alleged co-conspirators — who will stand trial in April — also planned to pack stretch limousines with gas canisters and explosives and detonate them in car parks under buildings, prosecutor Edmund Lawson, QC, told Woolwich Crown Court.

As chilling as these plans - which were carefully drawn and detailed - were, they are not the frightening thing al Qaeda et. al. may yet have up their sleeve. In 2002, al Qaeda claimed in a written statement, “We have the right to kill 4 million Americans - 2 million of them children - and to exile twice as many and wound and cripple hundreds of thousands. Furthermore, it is our right to fight them with chemical and biological weapons … .”

The clock is ticking. Or should we say the clock is now racing?

Since 1947, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has published the “Doomsday Clock” to signify the threat level of nuclear weapons within the changes of international security. Midnight on the clock is atomic war. In those decades, the clock’s time has been adjusted 18 times. It was last adjusted in 2002 and currently stands at seven minutes til midnight.

The “Golden Hour” is a term used by trauma doctors and EMTs to refer to the sixty minutes after serious injury when medical treatment is most likely to succeed. Belmont Club once compared this term to the present security environment. The Golden Hour is this context is the time remaining until Islamist terrorists obtain WMDs, especially atomic weapons.

After this “Golden Hour” our actions will be severely constrained. In fact, once terrorists have acquired a steady source of WMDs, we will have no freedom of action at all. Or rather, the US will have as much room to maneuver as at that nightmare moment, envisioned during the Cold War, when NORAD might detect several thousand Soviet MIRVs inbound over the North Pole. In that instant, which thankfully never happened, the entire concept of choice would have become an illusion. The dreadful mechanism of retaliation would go into automatic effect with humans providing only the counterfeit of control. It follows that the War on Terror must not fail. Not if mankind is to live; not if the Muslim world is going to survive. Our current efforts carry the whole burden of future hopes and if we falter nothing will be left but to witness the consequences of our failure.

Is this overstating the consequences, severe though they would be, of Islamists obtaining and using one or more atomic weapons against us? Perhaps, but can we take that chance?

Joe Katzman picked up on that theme with the latest, distressing news from the Arab world, saying that we are now heading toward atomic perdition.

In Britain’s The Times Online, Richard Beeston reports that 4-6 Arab states announced that they were embarking on programs to master atomic technology [also RCI]:

“The countries involved were named by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) as Algeria, Egypt, Morocco and Saudi Arabia. Tunisia and the UAE have also shown interest….”

Mark Fitzpatrick, an expert on nuclear proliferation… “If Iran was not on the path to a nuclear weapons capability you would probably not see this sudden rush [in the Arab world],” he said.

He’s almost right. If Iran was not on the path to a nuclear weapons capability with no meaningful checks in sight and none even imagined by the majority of Western policy-makers, plus tacit support from Russia and China, you probably would not see this sudden rush. But it is, and they do, and you’re seeing it. And if you believe the bit about powering de-salination plants, you’re dumber than all the dirt in Arabia.

So, concludes Joe, welcome to a glimpse of our future:

… One that features nuclear weapons in the hands of death-cult barbarians, the vast majority of whom grew up in an atmosphere glorifying suicide-martyrdom as mankind’s greatest moral achievement.

The world in which your children will live.

I reiterate my prediction of 10-100 million dead within the next 2 decades. Or maybe numbers don’t do it for you, and you’d rather read this story as a kind of mental intro to the sorts of futures to prepare for.

Have a nice day.

Sorry, too late for that. I hope this all-too-likely scenario helps explain why I maintained that the single most important issue facing America today is our war against Islamist terrorists.

Ralph Peters:

Iraq was never our Vietnam. It’s al-Qaeda’s Vietnam. They’re the ones who can’t leave and who can’t win.

Islamist terrorists have chosen Iraq as their battleground and, even after our departure, it will continue to consume them.

I respect Ralph Peters and usually, agree with his analyses of politico-military affairs, at least in broad terms. And truth is, I agree with the general thrust of the cited piece, which despite this very brief excerpt is not about al Qaeda in Iraq but why America should get out. For that is exactly what Peters says we should do.

My disillusionment with our Iraq endeavor began last summer, when I was invited to a high-level discussion with administration officials. I went into the meeting with one firm goal, to convince my hosts that they’d better have Plan B in case Iraq continued to disintegrate. I left the session convinced that the administration still didn’t have Plan A, only a blur of meandering policies and blind hopes. After more than three years, it was still “An Evening at the Improv.”

Peters is no “cut and runner.” His op-eds through the last five years of war make it clear that he is a smash-mouth tactician with all the subtlety in combat operations that Dick Butkus displayed playing football. Right after four American, civilian contractors were murdered in Fallujah in early 2004, their bodies burned and hanged from a bridge, Peters said the US should have immediately retaliated with extreme violence. A retired lieutenant colonel, he is no “chickenhawk,” either.

Peters says,

And contrary to the prophets of doom, the United States wouldn’t be weakened by our withdrawal, should it come to that. …

We’ll still be the greatest power on earth, indispensable to other regional states — such as the Persian Gulf states and Saudi Arabia — that are terrified of Iran’s growing might. If the Arab world and Iran embark on an orgy of bloodshed, the harsh truth is that we may be the beneficiaries.

In a piece only this week, Peters urged the US either (basically) to re-conquer Iraq (ain’t gonna happen) or install a military government - the Iraqi military being the least corrupt institution in the country. This is no compliment; the military is plenty corrupt, just not quite rotted all the way through as the police forces seem to be. Now Peters has abandoned even that Machiavellian approach and says we should should just leave Iraq to its own tragic and violent devices - unless “at this late hour, Iraqis in decisive numbers prove willing to fight for their own freedom and a constitutional government, [then] we should be willing to remain for a generation… .”

But he sees little chance of that happening.

Does Iraq have a reasonably democratic future? I’m inclined to say no, but really I think it is still too soon to tell. Time is not infinitely on our side, though, or on Iraq’s, either. I disagree with Mr. Peters on these points:

1. Whatever it might mean for Iraq to be al Qaeda’s Vietnam, Iraq isn’t. Al Qaeda is essentially fighting a defensive war against America there. That means that they win as long as they don’t lose. Their own captured documents, captured by Coalition forces, show that they know they lose if Iraq becomes democratic. Anything short of that, including a military government that Peters says is likely to come whether we design it or not, counts as an al Qaeda victory. For even a military government there will take on a significant Islamic character (which Huessin’s regime did not) that will be exploitable by al Qaeda and other Islamists. A military government in Iraq will not be a defeat for al Qaeda; it will be halfway to an Islamist state. And Islamists have already said that they would like very much to make Iraq the base of the new caliphate.

2. Unlike Peters, I see no upside to the kind of withdrawal he urges. As I pointed out here,

… for the US to withdraw before victory would have catastrophic consequences for us. No other enemy - Syria, Iran or North Korea - would give us the slightest credibility. Neither would strategic competitors such as China or Russia. Inside the Middle East, America’s reputation as a nation determined to defend its honor would be irretrievably sullied, this in a culture where honor, shame and perception are of primary importance. The perceived honor of al Qaeda would rise dramatically. The shame imputed to America would not reside solely with us. Cooperative Arab governments would also suffer diminished respect by their own people and the hostile regimes named just now. Resistance to Islamism across the Middle East by government such as Jordan’s and Egypt’s and their peoples would be badly harmed, perhaps even fatally. Such developments would only encourage Iranian and Syrian adventurism, spell violent trouble for Israel and endanger the ruling bodies of Arab governments friendly or neutral toward the United States. Precipitant withdrawal from Iraq would be a prescription for a much more violent world.

It is less than a week until election day here in the US. To decide to take the course Mr. Peters urges before then is, I think, to mis-perceive the tenor of the violence in Iraq and what it really portends. Let’s do another gut check a month from now. I think there is a deliberate design to the present violence that is oriented toward pre-election America.

I also commend for your reading, “No Viet Cong Followed Us Home, Al-Qaeda Will,” by Hollywood screenwriter Dan Gordon.

To put it in its simplest terms, we can quit the battle field but the battle field will not quit us.

Whether we like it or not, we are in a war with Islamist terrorists. It is not a “supposed war,” or a war with quotation marks around it. Al-Qaeda declared its war against America years before 9/11. 9/11 was simply their Pearl Harbor. To suggest, as some have, that America and its actions in Iraq are the only thing that stands between us and peace with the Islamo terrorists would be like saying that after Pearl Harbor the reason we were at war with Japan was because we engaged the Japanese at Wake Island. The truth is much more uncomfortable. We are at war with Islamist terrorists because they want to kill us. That is not hyperbole, nor is it metaphor. They have announced it as clearly and as plainly as humanly possible. Al-Qaeda has declared we have the following choice: convert to Islam or die. …

If we quit Iraq they will follow us home. If they are defeated in Iraq, it does not mean the end of them. It does mean, however, that the wind will be knocked out of them. It means they will have suffered a set back that will take them almost as long to overcome as it took us to get over Vietnam.

Read the whole thing.

OOTB cites an NYT piece that uses US Central Command’s own internal assessments that Iraq is sliding closer to chaos.

Click image for larger version.

Yesterday in OpinionJournal, Iraqi Omar Fadhil wrote, “It wouldn’t be an exaggeration to say that Iraq might turn into a second Somalia within a year if the situation is allowed to keep descending the way it’s doing now.”

As bad as the military situation is there, what with sectarian militias acting with near impunity, Iraq’s domestic political situation is worse. The central government under PM Maliki is ineffective. Read the whole piece.

Also take a look at James Joyner’s post about former NSA head William Odom arguing in the LAT that “cutting and running is our only option in Iraq and that the only question is how to overcome the political obstacles to doing so.” Among other things, Odom argues,

Fourth, real progress must be made on the Palestinian issue as a foundation for Middle East peace. The invasion of Iraq and the U.S. tilt toward Israel have dangerously reduced Washington’s power to broker peace or to guarantee Israel’s security. We now need Europe’s help. And good relations with Iran would help dramatically.

To which James replies,

The Arab-Israeli issue has absolutely nothing to do with Iraq. If we rounded up every Jew into a concentration camp and gave the Palestinians every square inch of the former Israel, the reduction in sectarian tension in Iraq would be zero. Ditto the Kurd problem. Or the militias. Or al Qaeda.

Indeed.

Update: Ralph Peters:

We have only two rational choices. The first is to read the government the riot act, then give democracy one more year. If Iraq’s leaders refuse to lead honorably and effectively - and get the police and militias under control - we should abandon Iraq (except for Kurdistan) by autumn 2007. The other option is to start preparing the best Iraqi military leaders to take charge of their country.

The alternative to a military government looks like continued mayhem - an endless slaughter of the innocents - along with more American casualties as we protect our enemies.

A grim assessment, but a serious one.

OTOH, at the third annual Coalition Conference in Warsaw, Poland, just completed, Gen. George Casey, senior US commander in Iraq, said,

“We make progress every day all across Iraq. … It’s troubling to see the perceptions people have here because of the violence — now, is there violence? Sure there is, but what people don’t see is the Iraqis are taking little steps forward every day.”

Even so,

The picture of Iraq presented to and by the coalition members over two full days was a complex one – every province was different, and every strategy was tailored to specific conditions on the ground. A security-handover schedule was presented with the caveat “excepting Anbar” — where the fight against the worst of the insurgency and Al Qaeda is still in U.S. hands — and calming troubled Baghdad remains the ultimate barometer of success.

It’s tough for us to get a very clear picture of the situation.

“I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” Attributed to Japanese Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Much has been discussed lately - at least in the blogosphere - of the current situation in Iraq and with al-Qaeda in general as a war of wills and a media war at that. Don Sensing recently reported on an Islamic Global Media Front document written just this past August which calls for jihadists to “invade” the US media. We’ve seen a significant improvement this year in the sophistication of al-Qaeda video productions suggesting that they are focusing resources on their own media capabilities as well. All this to target the American public will. Here’s why.

In the military there is a term called “center of gravity.” The center of gravity for a military entity or nation-state is that component of power that when lost, well, then all is lost. Think about it like the hub of a wheel. A few spokes of the wheel can break or be lost but that wheel can keep turning. But when the hub is gone, that wheel isn’t going anywhere.

So what is the center of gravity for the United States? It is the popular will - or at least the popular will as perceived by national leaders. And that will is generally manifested in military terms by the tolerance or intolerance for casualties. When casualties get too high, then we lose our will. Then we lose the fight. And in the War on Terror we would lose much more than just a skirmish. One look at Europe these days portends what vacillation, accommodation and sheer avoidance begets.

Military strategists try to identify the enemy’s center of gravity and attack it. Just as important is to know your own center of gravity, use it and defend it. The enemy and we both know our center of gravity. Our enemy is currently relentlessly attacking it chipping way at our will as it chips away at our forces. But we are trying to protect our will instead of using it – and this only encourages the enemy to continue to attack. If you are discouraged by events in Iraq today, realize then that is exactly what the enemy wants and is intending to happen.

Words mean things. And the message that we are sending our enemy is that they are pursuing the right course. Our reaction to military casualties and related civilian casualties sends the message for the enemy to keep it up. We speak of losing too many good people, that their sacrifice is not worth the effort, we speak in terms of when the minimal conditions will exist so we can leave Iraq without appearing to have lost. This tells the enemy to pour it on, to push the threshold. Hysteria and defeatism is an invitation to defeat.

And the problem is that this language goes beyond mere election time posturing. Not only do words mean things but actions really do speak louder than words. And our actions have demonstrated just where our center of gravity has tipped in the past. Nearly three decades ago our wheel stopped turning when Hezbollah bombed US barracks in Beirut, killing 220 Marines, 18 Navy personnel and 3 Army soldiers. Just over a decade ago our wheel stopped turning in Somalia when our threshold was 18 military deaths and 73 wounded. Our actions stated that it just wasn’t worth it.

Our enemy is trying to determine what our threshold is in Iraq. Our words of withdrawal and timetables and “when we can leave” and “stuck in Iraq” are indicating to the enemy that they are getting close.

I suggest we speak a different language and take different action. I suggest we begin using the language of perseverance and victory. That we speak of fighting to win and not just to “not lose”. That we speak of doing everything it takes to win no matter the cost - for the cost of losing will always be higher than the cost of winning. I suggest that we speak again of “give me liberty or give me death” and “live free or die.” The language of Washington, Henry, Stark, Lincoln, both Roosevelts, John Kennedy, Reagan and, yes, George W. Bush. But for this language to mean anything it must be spoken by a unified national voice. And that means Durbin, Pelosi, Murtha and Gore. Like Wendell Willkie, Republican candidate president who ran against FDR in 1940 but who also said during World War II, “In no direction that we turn do we find ease or comfort. If we are honest and if we have the will to win we find only danger, hard work and iron resolution.” That’s how a truly “loyal opposition” speaks in wartime.

I suggest we manifest this language with a national military build-up such as we had in the early days of World War II and that brought the end of the Cold War. We need unified political resolve to take action to seal Iraq’s borders and disarm their militias. That resolute action will send a message to our enemies of today as well as to our looming adversaries in North Korea, Venezuela and especially Iran that we will not falter. It will send a message to our fence-sitting allies that we can be expected and trusted to win. Those used to surviving by switching to the winning side will jump to our side instead of jumping from our side.

We do not protect our center of gravity by shielding it. We protect it by using it. Instead of protecting our public will from fear, we must use our public will for perseverance and commitment. The Japanese realized they had awakened a sleeping giant 60 years ago. They saw commitment and resolve in the common public will of the United States and articulated and manifested uniformly by our leadership. Our enemy thinks that not only is the giant falling asleep but that the giant is falling over. They think we have lost our center of gravity - our will - and that we will go no further. They’ve thought all along that we could not persevere in a war that lasted more than a few years. We’ve been in Iraq just over three of them. What will the enemy think come November 7? What will we be saying and doing?