Sunday, June 24, 2007

Winning Hearts and Minds

I don't get the attitudes of those who oppose the war.

They say we should talk to our enemies.

But when we talk to them to get them to side with us, this is apparently a disaster:

And as it struggles in the raging heat and violence of central Iraq, the U.S. military appears to have bought into the tactic in its struggle to pull what victory it can from the increasingly troubled American mission in Iraq, under congressional pressure for a troop pullout and a presidential election campaign already in the minds of voters.
Good grief, people. The objective is to end the insurgency and terrorism campaigns--not to exterminate every Sunni Arab who had bad thoughts about America or the Shia and Kurd majorities. How is it possible to portray the defection of enemies as something bad?

I for one have called for getting the enemy to switch sides since November 2003. We don't have to kill every current enemy to call it a victory. Getting the enemy to lay down their arms is just fine. That counts as victory too, and trying to portray this trend as somehow a sign of our desperation is simply idiotic. When our military speaks of our armed efforts as being just a small part of the campaign that relies on non-military means to win, this defection of the enemy is exactly what that means! Do you think this balance of effort is just talk? It is real.

It's almost as if these anti-war types only want talks with the enemy to arrange the terms of our surrender to them.