Published 24 Apr 07

Losing the War in Congress: Not in Iraq

by Walid Phares, Ph.D.
World Defense Review columnist

A simple statement made by a national legislative leader in Washington this week indicates that a war is being lost, but it is not the war in Iraq: It is the defeat of the War of Ideas taking place nowadays in the U.S. Congress.

One striking example is a declaration by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid that the United States had "lost" the war in Iraq; a conclusion he said he'd communicated to President Bush at a meeting last Wednesday. "This war is lost and the surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in Iraq yesterday," Mr. Reid, a Nevada Democrat, said at a Capitol Hill press conference with anti-war state legislators.

To Senator Reid, his conclusion is very simple; and to me, it is overly simplistic.

Reid believes the war is lost because there is "extreme violence in Iraq." I contemplated this statement and was about to conclude sociologically that this irrational logic happens only in America, but I refrained from doing so because most Americans - when informed accurately and not misinformed by their elite - think otherwise.

Under the pounding of a media that thrives on soundbites and not on calm analysis, if read quickly, the statement cut through. But then, if one reflects on what the highest figure in the U.S. Senate has said, one would conclude that he and other like-minded politicians defy the implacable reality of logic.

Consider this: how can the move toward victory in an ongoing war be measured by the mere existence of violence or by its intensity? While a war is taking place, it is - of course and of necessity - comprised of violent acts. Yet because the question raised by Senator Reid had been about whether we had been victorious in the war, he made an unnecessary and confused statement. Yes, the war is not yet over, America has neither won nor lost decisively, and it is precisely for that reason that one must expect to see the violence one sees in wartime. But in Mr. Reid's statement, he misguidedly concluded that the U.S.-led coalition had utterly lost the war in Iraq, just because the enemy still attacks and counter-attacks.

Historians would certainly disapprove of Reid's logic, and examples abound.

When the 101st Airborne Division was counter-attacked inland after the Allied landing at Normandy in 1944 and the U.S. took enormous casualties, America wasn't losing WWII: The Nazis were. One could have perceived that we were losing the war at that point, but the reality was entirely different. Mr. Reid and many other politicians, academics and commentators, in a gesture derived from farce, took it upon themselves to decide that progress towards victory in the war in Iraq will be measured only if no shots are heard and no car bombs explode. But if that were to occur, we would find ourselves at the end of the war, not in the middle of the war pursuing, and moving toward, victory which is where we are. Until the Iraqi state is up and running, the regimes threatening peace countered, and a strong anti-Jihadist movement leading the resistance against terrorism in the region; the enemy will of course be waging counter strikes relentlessly. Thus, measurement of our success in this war is about these factors, not about the mere evidence of violence that proves only that we are engaged in a war; and this we already know.

A more comprehensive and worthy analysis of the war in Iraq should factor in the direction of the global confrontation between the Democracy forces and the Jihadi-authoritarian camp in the region. Since 2003, a brutal regime - genocidal in essence - has been brought down in Iraq; the Kurds have reached a survival level; the Shiites were saved from the savage Baathist regime; and the liberal element among Sunnis has had a chance to emerge. Yes, and it should have been predicted, the Iranian regime is penetrating Iraq, Bashar Assad is sending the Jihadists across the borders and al Qaeda is attempting to seize control of the Triangle. Therefore, one stage of the war was accomplished, the removal of Saddam; the other stage, the Syro-Iranian and Jihadi counter-offensive, is evolving.

It doesn't really take a Middle East expert to understand this.

If Senator Reid and his colleagues were to engage in a serious discussion to create more effective plans to enable the Iraqi forces decisively to defeat the terror forces, if Congress were to debate the best strategies to contain the Iranian and Syrian regimes, and if the legislators were to invite more Muslim dissidents instead of Islamist radicals to the Hill, then the road to victory in the war on terror would be paved with meaningful evidence.

But, unfortunately instead of proposing a better map towards strategic victory, leading politicians - influenced by faulty expertise - are missing the whole logic of the War on Terror: its global dimension. And to add egregious insult to intellectual injury, a congressional panel recently voted to ban the use of the phrase, the "Global War on Terror."

In this context, Mr. Reid's statement needs to be understood differently. Indeed one war is being lost by America today; it is the War of Ideas, not the war in Iraq. Ironically, the former is being lost by the very group of people elected to defend America - her citizens and her interests - against her enemies: The U.S. Congress.

— Dr Walid Phares is a senior fellow with the Foundation for the Defense of Democracies (FDD) in Washington, D.C., and director of the Future Terrorism Project of the FDD. He is a visiting fellow with the European Foundation for Democracy in Brussels. His most recent book is Future Jihad: Terrorist Strategies against the West.
    Dr Phares holds degrees in law and political science from Saint Joseph University and the Lebanese University in Beirut, a Masters in international law from the Universite de Lyons in France and a Ph.D. in international relations and strategic studies from the University of Miami.
    He has taught and lectured at numerous universities worldwide, practiced law in Beirut , and served as publisher of Sawt el-Mashreq and Mashrek International. He has taught Middle East political issues, ethnic and religious conflict, and comparative politics at Florida Atlantic University until 2006.
    Dr. Phares has written seven books on the Middle East and published hundreds of articles in newspapers and scholarly publications such as Global Affairs, Middle East Quarterly, the Journal of South Asian and Middle East Studies and the Journal of International Security. He has appeared on CNN, MSNBC, Fox News, NBC, CBS, ABC, PBS, BBC, al Jazeera, al Hurra, as well as on radio broadcasts.
    Aside from serving on the boards of several national and international think tanks and human rights associations, Dr. Phares has testified before the US Senate Subcommittees on the Middle East and South East Asia, the House Committees on International Relations and Homeland Security and regularly conducts congressional and State Department briefings, and he was the author of the memo that introduced UNSCR 1559 in 2004.

Visit Dr. Phares on the web at walidphares.com and defenddemocracy.org.

© 2007 Walid Phares

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