Can We Prevail If We've Lost Energy Savvy?

IBD ^ | May 2, 2008 | Victor Davis Hanson

[Kaslin]

The gloomy election year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis?

First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves.

This rout helped the constitutional — and Shiite-dominated — government of Prime Minister Nouri Kamal al-Maliki renew its authority and has encouraged Sunnis to re-enter government. Two great threats to Iraqi autonomy — Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen and Sunni-supported al-Qaida terrorists — have now been repulsed by an elected government and its supporters.

Our armed forces are stretched, but Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and his colonels are quietly transforming a top-heavy conventional colossus into more mobile counterinsurgency forces.

Petraeus' recent nomination to Centcom commander suggests that, like the growing influence of Gens. U.S. Grant and William Sherman in 1863 or of George Marshall when he reconfigured the Army in 1940, we at last are beginning to get the right officers in the right places at the right time.

The despairing enemy seems to sense this as well. The more al-Qaida mouthpiece Ayman al-Zawahiri threatens the West, the more he sounds like Hitler's shrill propagandist Joseph Goebbels in his bunker as the Third Reich was crumbling.

[Eyes Unclouded]

“...a top-heavy conventional colossus into more mobile counterinsurgency forces.”

Rummy’s career is smiling from its grave.

[SoConPubbie]

From the article:

The way to shut down Iran's reactor or its subsidies for Hezbollah is not necessarily through bombing, but by getting oil back down below $50 a barrel, which would cut the value of Iranian petroleum production by nearly $100 billion a year and weaken an already weak economy.

Also:

But if our soldiers and intelligence agencies have learned how to win, our politically correct diplomats and the American consumer haven't — and are doing as much at home to empower radical Islam as those on the front lines are to defeat it.

Seems to sum up John McCain quite well, given his refusal to back drilling in ANWR.