09/23/2004: "Why we are in Iraq"

Andrew C. McCarthy, who led the prosecution of the 1993 World Trade Center terrorists, has written an important piece for NRO on the rationale for the war in Iraq. Here's an excerpt:

"War on terror," as previously argued here, is an ill-conceived and vaporous term. "Terrorism" surely is not our enemy. It cannot be an enemy because it is not an entity, it is a method. But even if one entertained the possibility that we could be at war with "terrorism"�loosely construing it as shorthand for "terrorists"�the phrase still fails. We are not even pretending to be fighting all terrorists. The Basques, the Tamil Tigers, and the many other regional groups that practice terrorism but do not target the United States are objects of our disdain, but they are certainly not our adversaries in this war. Indeed, if they are, we should stop now because it is then true, as the critics bray, that this war can never be ended or won.

No, we are fighting a very particular enemy: militant Islam. It is a global network of identifiable militias, as well as their state and non-state sponsors, who espouse and support an interpretation of Islam that calls for violent jihad against the United States and our allies. In the short term, that enemy seeks to alter American policy; in the long term, it would supplant our constitutional order with a caliphate that accords with Wahhabist principles. That is the enemy.

The forces who adhere to the enemy's creed and its imperatives, moreover, have demonstrated themselves incorrigibly dedicated to our destruction. They are thus not to be cultivated, co-opted, or otherwise negotiated with. They must be eliminated, as the Nazis and other totalitarian regimes have had to be defeated utterly�until they were no longer a dire threat.

If the foregoing description of the actual enemy is true, that ineluctably has certain consequences for the conduct of the ongoing war. By avoiding clarity to serve political correctness, by speaking vapidly about "terror" when we really mean Islamic militants, we disserve those ends.

For starters, having a just war against militant Islam means there must be some clear, comprehensible nexus between the operations of militant Islam and the opening of any front in the war. Afghanistan was an easy case�so manifest no effort was required to make it: The al Qaeda network orchestrated the 9/11 attacks (as well as others) and Afghanistan was where al Qaeda was given safe harbor. Q.E.D.

Iraq, on the other hand, was a tough case�as the cases against the worst bad guys usually are. Senator Kerry's "diversion" argument is wrong because there was a rich connection between Saddam Hussein's heinous regime and militant Islam�which fully explains why al Qaeda and its affiliated groups were in such a superb position to align with their Baathist confederates and spearhead the vigorous resistance still confronting our forces. But such a case has to be publicly made, its components marshaled with conviction.

This is an argument to be thought over long and hard. I'm still chewing on it, but I think McCarthy is really on to something. Read it all.