2009 Election Recap

What a difference a year makes.

Lots of commentators will no doubt spend days scrutinizing the tea leaves, pontificating on the implications (or total irrelevance) of several races.

I won't get into any pointless discussions over whether or not this election was or was not a referendum on Obama, or what, if any, importance these races have for predicting 2010's midterm contests.

But there are a few things I'd like to point out:

Republican comeback in Virginia
- Republican Bob McDonnell defeated the hapless Creigh Deeds by 18 points in the biggest electoral victory for the Virginia GOP in a decade. McDonnell won Virginia with the highest percentage of the vote for a governor since 1961 -- and for any GOP gubernatorial candidate, ever.
- Republicans swept all of Virginia's statewide races.
- The GOP unseated 8 Democratic incumbents in the Virginia General Assembly.

Exit polling: Independents back GOP
- In both the Virginia and New Jersey governor's races, independent voters -- whose support enabled Barack Obama's victory in 2008 -- have switched sides, backing the Republican candidates by an astounding 2:1 margin. (65% of independents backed McDonnell, 34% voted for Deeds; 60% of independents voted for Christie, just 30% for Corzine).
- This is due to many factors -- mostly concern over the economy -- but one thing is certain: Negative. Campaigning. Doesn't. Work. It didn't work for Deeds, who ran one of the most negative campaigns in recent memory in a desperate and pathetic attempt to paint McDonnell as a far-right sexist bigot. And it didn't work for Corzine, who actually ran ads claiming that Christie was pro-cancer. Yes, really.

Jersey blues for the Dems
While most Democrats had probably resigned themselves to the fact that Creigh Deeds was a lost cause in Virginia, Corzine's loss in New Jersey must have been tough to take, whatever the spin today. Even Obama himself was campaigning on Corzine's behalf as late as Sunday.

I must admit that even I didn't think Chris Christie could pull off a win in New Jersey. Polling in the run-up to election day showed the two essentially tied, and Corzine with the momentum. Considering New Jersey's history of fraud and corruption by the Democratic Party, I figured it'd be an unlikely mountain for Christie to overcome. But he did, beating Corzine 49%-45%. Despite the hype, in the end, Daggett (the Independent candidate) didn't siphon off enough anti-Corzine votes to deny Christie his victory.

I don't know if Chistie, or anyone, can salvage the train wreck that New Jersey has become, but here's hoping.

NY-23
The crazy, dramatic, twist-filled race for the vacant House seat in New York's 23rd Congressional district ended with a narrow, hard-fought victory for Democrat Bill Owens -- the one bright spot for Democrats last night. Doug Hoffman, the upstart Conservative Party candidate, took 45% of the vote to Owens' 49%.

However, the nominally Republican candidate Dede Scozzafava -- who dropped out of the race this weekend and endorsed Owens (yes, the Democrat) after collapsing in the polls, still received 5.5% of the vote, probably mostly from loyal, elderly Republican voters who don't pay much attention to the news. Needless to say, those votes could have put Hoffman over the top.

The media and Democrats have been crowing that NY-23 is the start of a disastrous "GOP civil war" and a harbinger of doom for the Republican party, which will tear itself apart over "purity tests" regarding the conservative credentials of GOP candidates. I find these hysterical predictions pretty absurd, considering the extremely unique and special circumstances surrounding this particular race, and not worth discussing here.

Eyebrow-raisers
In Virginia, McDonnell's 18-point landslide margin of victory was not a surprise. But there were a few:

- McDonnell won Virginia voters under the age of 30 by a 10-point margin. In fact, he won every age group.
- McDonnell won Fairfax County (51-49%). Obama won the county by 21 points last year. Even after the Washington Post ran about a hundred stories on the sinister implications of McDonnell's college thesis, and Deeds blanketed NoVa with negative ads and flyers for months in an attempt to convince suburban voters that McDonnell was a scary, sexist, homophobic religious nut. Actually, McDonnell swept all of NoVa, except Arlington and Alexandria City -- counties that all went heavily for Obama and made Virginia go blue in 2008.
- And on that note...McDonnell also won the female vote (54-46%). McDonnell even won among self-described "full-time working women." Maybe due to the fact that 65% of Virginia voters said McDonnell's college thesis did not influence their vote.

I think it's pretty indisputable that Deeds's all-thesis-all-the-time negative attack strategy was a complete and utter failure.

Not only did Chris Christie receive a higher percentage of the vote than the previous two (rare) Republican NJ governors, but he won in New Jersey counties (Middlesex and Gloucester) that had voted for Obama by 10+ point margins last year.

The closest race of the night (as far as I can tell): Ron Villanueva (R) defeated Bobby Mathieson (D) for the Virginia Beach City house seat by just 16 votes out of more than 15,000 cast (49.94% to 49.84%). A good reminder that every vote matters.

John McCain sums up the Afghan strategy debate in less than 90 words

On CBS's Face the Nation yesterday, host Bob Schieffer asked John McCain what he thought about a potential "hybrid option" of the two opposing Afghanistan strategies currently being considered.

In less than 90 words, McCain pretty accurately and concisely summed up the problem with such an approach:

"It may be a matter of semantics, I don't know. But there has been this ongoing public debate between the so-called Biden counterterrorism strategy and the McChrystal counterinsurgency strategy. I don't know how you make them hybrid. There are elements of counterterrorism in counterinsurgency, but fundamentally [a successful] counterinsurgency will require the implementation of the strategy that General McChrystal has recommended. The counterterrorism strategy -- killing [insurgents] and then returning to base -- has proven to be a very disastrous strategy in Iraq and in other places."

McCain makes a important point here. Obama is known to favor "Third Way" compromises which blend two diametrically opposed political positions or policy recommendations. That's a fine instinct for a politician -- but it's simply not workable when it comes to counterinsurgency.

In counterinsurgency, it really is all or nothing. A buffet-style selection of half-measures will not only be unsuccessful -- it'll actually be counterproductive. Adopting just 50 or 75% of the strategic adjustments necessary for a successful counterinsurgency, but leaving out the difficult parts -- like, for instance, the temporary but substantial increase in U.S. troops that will be necessary for such a policy to succeed -- will end in failure.

That failure would not only leave our allies disillusioned -- and whatever remaining commitment they still have to the mission in Afghanistan would certainly evaporate under the weight of even more massive public opposition -- but more importantly, the Afghan people would become even more jaded and frustrated with the coalition and with their own government...and more sympathetic to the Taliban.

When it comes to Afghanistan, it's time we either go all in, or fold. There's no point in wasting more American (or British, or Polish, or German) lives and resources on an effort that can't be successful -- and if we're not going to give our efforts the full commitment and resources they need, it won't be.

It has been rumored that General McChrystal may well resign if Obama declines to accept his strategy. As Gen. Jack Keane, former head of the Joint Chiefs, explained on "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos recently:

KEANE: I can't speak to what General McChrystal's reaction would be to a presidential decision that opposed him. I can say this: if you're a general on the ground and you believe the recommendation you've made is the winning recommendation in terms of strategy, that will accomplish the goals that you've been assigned, and then you're told you cannot execute that, and ask the troops to go out and do something else, that you don't believe will accomplish those goals, that gets very difficult in terms of a moral dilemma, asking your troops to do something you believe is going to fail.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So you resign?

KEANE: That would be up to him to face that. That's something personal for every general involved--

STEPHANOPOULOS: Is that would you would do in that situation?

KEANE: Probably. Yes, under those circumstances, yes.

I don't envy Obama. Making hard decisions -- especially in which thousands of lives and the future of nations hang in the balance -- is no easy task. But sometimes it's unavoidable.

What the Iraqi parliament has in common with Kinston, NC

Paralyzed by partisan bickering, the Iraqi parliament has thus far failed to bring a crucial new election law to a vote. Time is running out -- according to Iraq's constitution, the new rules must be in place 3 months in advance of the parliamentary elections scheduled for January 2010. Which means that the law needs to be passed...now.

At the heart of the heated debate is the question of whether or not Iraq's national elections should function according to a "closed list" or "open list" system. In the former (the status quo in Iraq at the moment), Iraqi voters would simply vote for the party or alliance of their choice, and the parties would dole out seats in the National Assembly to whoever they saw fit, based on their proportion of the vote. An "open list," however, would mean that individual candidate's names -- not just the parties -- would be placed on the ballot. Advocates of this system argue that it will enhance democracy and accountability by giving voters greater choice and say in who exactly represents them.

Not surprisingly, support for each option has broken down more or less along partisan, self-interested lines -- those parties that did well in previous elections under a closed list system are against the reforms, figuring they will do well again under the old system. Alternatively, parties that made gains in the recent provincial elections (conducted under an open list system) are in favor of the open list.

We Americans understandably grow impatient with such transparent partisan bickering during a critical time -- especially with the planned withdrawal of 70,000 U.S. troops on the line. We may even scoff at what seems to us a childish, juvenile spat that jeopardizes the progress that has cost so many American and Iraqi lives. It may even seem obvious to the American eye that an individual-based, open list system would be superior. I know I sympathize with all of the above sentiments.

But perhaps we shouldn't be too quick to jump down the Iraqis' throats. From the Washington Times:

KINSTON, N.C. | Voters in this small city decided overwhelmingly last year to do away with the party affiliation of candidates in local elections, but the Obama administration recently overruled the electorate and decided that equal rights for black voters cannot be achieved without the Democratic Party.

The Justice Department's ruling, which affects races for City Council and mayor, went so far as to say partisan elections are needed so that black voters can elect their "candidates of choice" - identified by the department as those who are Democrats and almost exclusively black.

The department ruled that white voters in Kinston will vote for blacks only if they are Democrats and that therefore the city cannot get rid of party affiliations for local elections because that would violate black voters' right to elect the candidates they want.

Yeesh.

While it's true that the Kinston case isn't an exact equivalent of the Iraqi situation -- lives aren't at stake in Kinston, for one -- it is similar in that it is transparently partisan, juvenile, and embarrassing. It is also a humbling reminder that no democracy is perfect (and in fact, democracy by definition is slow, messy, and frustrating).

Should the Iraqi parliament be criticized for their inaction and exhorted to consider the larger issues at stake? Yes. But before we look down our noses too far at the Iraqis, we should remember that we've still got a few democratic kinks to work out ourselves.

Wavering on Afghanistan: Giving Obama the benefit of the doubt

The prevailing notion among hawkish commentators these days is that Obama's very public vacillations on whether or not to commit to defeating the insurgency Afghanistan (and even whether Afghanistan is worth America's effort) are signs of a lack of backbone and leadership in the face of a challenging situation. Obama was committed to Afghanistan during the campaign, when he could use it to score easy rhetorical points, but once he got into office and realized it was going to be a hard, uphill slog...well, he lost his nerve. Unfortunately, I find that explanation pretty convincing.

But there is an alternative -- though somewhat fanciful -- explanation. What if Obama's dithering on Afghanistan isn't a sign of weakness, but actually an intentional, methodical attempt to lay the groundwork for pressuring the Karzai government to clean up corruption and improve governance?

It stands to reason that any American "pressure" would be of little use if Karzai thinks he can be sure that America will continue to back him (and the mission in Afghanistan) no matter what he does. It is plausible that the Obama administration is intentionally creating doubt about Obama's commitment to Afghanistan in order to show Karzai that America's commitment to Afghanistan isn't rock-solid. Creating this perception (or at least a bit of doubt in Karzai's mind) would mean that American could threaten Karzai -- and that those threats would actually be credible. As Thomas Friedman put it:

If Karzai says no [to cleaning up his act], then there is only one answer: "You’re on your own, pal. Have a nice life with the Taliban. We can’t and will not put more American blood and treasure behind a government that behaves like a Mafia family. If you don’t think we will leave — watch this." (Cue the helicopters.)

Could Bush have pulled that off? Doubtful. Bush's unwavering public commitment to support the Afghan government meant that he never had that kind of credibility with Karzai. The Afghan president knew that no matter how badly his regime behaved, the US would never seriously consider packing up and going home. No matter how loudly the US might yell at him about corruption, mismanagement, and lack of accountability, he was secure in the knowledge that he could always call their bluff. They'd never actually leave him and his government out in the cold to fight the Taliban alone.

But with Obama...can he be so sure?

I believe that Barack Obama is a smart man. However, if Obama is indeed consciously pursuing such a shrewd strategy, I think perhaps he's been a little too convincing -- combined with other foreign policy decisions he's made, the rest of the world -- including Pakistan -- has clearly begun to doubt the strength of America's commitment to its allies. That doubt can be a very dangerous thing for international security. But allowing for a series of pretty hopeful conditional statements -- if Obama is actually pursuing this strategy, and if it succeeds in giving the US the leverage it needs to credibly pressure Karzai to improve governance -- it may pay off. It's a big risk, and it better work -- because if it doesn't, America's credibility and respect around the world will be dealt a pretty devastating blow. And not just in Pakistan.

Though now that I've written all that out, I'm even more unconvinced that this explanation is plausible. Especially considering the proliferation of stories recently about some of the incredibly foolish and short-sighted "alternative strategies" gaining traction in the White House. But maybe -- just maybe -- this won't turn out to be a disaster.

Sarkozy mocks Obama -- yes, really.

Apparently French president Nicolas Sarkozy mocked Obama's UN speech -- especially his comments on making the world "free of nuclear weapons" -- as a naive fantasy in his own speech to the UN.

We live in a strange, strange world.

As noted on (where else?) Andrew Breitbart's Big Government, Canada's National Post's front page story contrasted these quotes:

Obama: “We must never stop until we see the day when nuclear arms have been banished from the face of the earth.”

Sarkozy: “We live in the real world, not the virtual world. And the real world expects us to take decisions.”

Ouch. Sarkozy continued:

“President Obama dreams of a world without weapons … but right in front of us two countries are doing the exact opposite.

“Iran since 2005 has flouted five security council resolutions. North Korea has been defying council resolutions since 1993.

“I support the extended hand of the Americans, but what good has proposals for dialogue brought the international community? More uranium enrichment and declarations by the leaders of Iran to wipe a UN member state off the map,” he continued, referring to Israel.

The sharp-tongued French leader even implied that Mr Obama’s resolution 1887 had used up valuable diplomatic energy.

“If we have courage to impose sanctions together it will lend viability to our commitment to reduce our own weapons and to making a world without nuke weapons,” he said.

Mr Sarkozy has previously called the US president’s disarmament crusade “naive.”

The full text of Sarkozy's remarks can be found on the French Embassy's website here. It's pretty brutal.

Yet not only has this story not appeared in any American papers...but the National Post has apparently de-linked their own front page story from their website. Curious.

Luckily you can still browse the PDF version of the print edition here.

The only mention of this story I could find in the American press was buried 8 paragraphs into this Boston Globe story, which briefly noted Sarkozy's "we live in a real world, not a virtual world" line. But even more amazingly, the line was characterized by the Globe as criticism of Iran -- not Obama:

"President Nicolas Sarkozy of France was more pointed in his criticism of Tehran, listing offers made by world powers...

“There comes a time when stubborn facts will compel us to take a decision if we want a world without nuclear weapons,’’ he said. “We live in a real world, not a virtual world,’’ and the world must act if Iran does not respond at a crucial Oct. 1 meeting in Geneva."

There's no mention of any of the context that would make it obvious that Sarkozy's speech was ripping Obama's stance.

Meanwhile, Iran has declared to the IAEA that it has been "covertly" building a second nuclear enrichment facility (apparently several Western intelligence agencies have been aware of the facility's existence) inside a mountain near the city of Qom.

Iran vowed today to make the second facility operational as soon as possible.

But hey...let the games continue.

Hold fast

Obama's "Full Ginsburg" -- appearing on all five Sunday talk shows on the same day -- was supposed to be a "full court press" to advocate the Democrats' health care reform proposals. Yet in the end, his comments on Afghanistan, not health care, proved the most newsworthy. On multiple occasions, Obama expressed doubt about the U.S. strategy in Afghanistan -- the strategy he himself had unveiled just six months ago -- and made headlines by declaring that he was "skeptical" about any proposals to send additional troops to Afghanistan.

To ABC's George Stephanopoulos:

OBAMA: Now, I think we've lost -- we lost that focus for a while and you started seeing a -- a classic case of mission creep where we're just there and we start taking on a whole bunch of different missions.

I wanted to narrow it. I did order 21,000 additional troops there to make sure that we could secure the election, because I thought that was important. That was before the review was completed. I also said after the election I want to do another review. We've just gotten those 21,000 in. General McChrystal, who's only been there a few months, has done his own assessment.

I am now going to take all this information and we're going to test whatever resources we have against our strategy, which is if by sending young men and women into harm's way, we are defeating al Qaeda and -- and that can be shown to a skeptical audience, namely me -- somebody who is always asking hard questions about deploying troops, then we will do what's required to keep the American people safe.

The comments come in the wake of a precipitous decline in popular support for the war in Afghanistan from a battle-weary American public, as well as growing opposition to the mission in Afghanistan from many Democratic politicians and liberal pundits (for example, David Corn in Mother Jones recently claimed that Obama's arguments re: Afghanistan were "...reminiscent of what the Bush-Cheney gang tried to pull off when they were pushing the case for invading Iraq.")

Yet despite all of these troubling developments, one would think that President Obama understands the stakes. In his much-heralded "strategy speech" on Afghanistan and Pakistan back in March, Obama made it clear he understood the gravity of the situation in Afghanistan, using...well, his favorite rhetorical device:

Let me be clear: al Qaeda and its allies – the terrorists who planned and supported the 9/11 attacks – are in Pakistan and Afghanistan. Multiple intelligence estimates have warned that al Qaeda is actively planning attacks on the U.S. homeland from its safe-haven in Pakistan. And if the Afghan government falls to the Taliban – or allows al Qaeda to go unchallenged – that country will again be a base for terrorists who want to kill as many of our people as they possibly can.

Indeed, his commitment seemed unshakable:

So I want the American people to understand that we have a clear and focused goal: to disrupt, dismantle, and defeat al Qaeda in Pakistan and Afghanistan, and to prevent their return to either country in the future. That is the goal that must be achieved. That is a cause that could not be more just. And to the terrorists who oppose us, my message is the same: we will defeat you.

"No cause could be more just." Yet just six months later, that seemingly firm, unyielding conviction has given way to equivocation and uncertainty. Obama is no longer sure that goal is one that must be achieved. He is no longer sure the cause is just. He is no longer sure America can defeat the terrorists who oppose us.

The recent strategy assessment prepared for Obama by Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the top U.S. commander in Afghanistan, makes it clear that without additional troops and resources, the U.S. will almost certainly lose in Afghanistan. But not only is Obama not convinced that more troops are critical to the success of the ISAF's efforts to fight the Taliban -- he's not sure the war is worth fighting in the first place.

Nothing was more unsettling than the president's open admission on Sunday that even he is not really convinced that the war in Afghanistan is worth fighting. On CNN's "State of the Union":

OBAMA: I don't want to put the resource question before the strategy question. You know, the -- because there is a natural inclination to say, if I get more, then I can do more. But right now, the question is, the first question is, are we doing the right thing? Are we pursuing the right strategy?

It's hard to blame our European allies for being reluctant to send more troops to Afghanistan when even the President of the United States isn't so sure the cause is worthwhile.

As a candidate, Barack Obama's commitment to Afghanistan was similarly unambiguous. Obama on 7/15/08: "I will make the fight against al Qaeda and the Taliban the top priority that it should be. This is a war that we have to win."

As Jim Geraghty aptly tweeted: "Obama did not say, 'this is a war we must win... unless, you know, I look at it once I'm in office and it looks a lot harder then.'"

It has been said that "there's nothing more demoralizing than a leader who can't clearly articulate why we're doing what we're doing." By all accounts, America has the most articulate leader in decades. So why do we feel so demoralized about our mission in Afghanistan?

**UPDATE 9/22/09: And today, the Washington Post editorial board makes essentially the same argument: "Wavering on Afghanistan? President Obama seems to have forgotten his own arguments for a counterinsurgency campaign."

**UPDATE 9/23/09: And the Wall Street Journal too:

The critical question here remains one of U.S. leadership...Mr. Obama has an opportunity to use his political capital to persuade his European allies to see the war in Afghanistan through to victory. But he cannot expect NATO to follow where he is increasingly unwilling to lead.

Freedom and fear are still at war

"Great harm has been done to us. We have suffered great loss. And in our grief and anger we have found our mission and our moment. Freedom and fear are at war. The advance of human freedom -- the great achievement of our time, and the great hope of every time -- now depends on us. Our nation, this generation will lift a dark threat of violence from our people and our future...We will not tire, we will not falter, and we will not fail."

-- President George W. Bush, Speech to Joint Session of Congress, September 20, 2001

Eight years after President Bush spoke those words, Americans should remember that freedom and fear are still at war.

I found this gem today while doing research at work:

"Is Islamism losing its thunder?"

That's the title of a 7,000-word article penned by Max Rodenbeck in March 1998 for The Washington Quarterly.

In it, Rodenbeck argues that the Islamist threat was being grossly overstated by "alarmists" and that the movement was actually in the middle of a dramatic decline. This paragraph was especially jaw-dropping:

A decade ago, the harnessing of Islam to political goals was widely believed to have released an unstoppable force. Alarmists spoke of an "Islamic threat" that would replace communism as the major challenge to the West. Islamists themselves seized on such warnings to validate their claim. Subsequent events - such as the rise of Hamas and Hizballah, the Islamist uprising in Algeria, or the [1993] bombing of the World Trade Center in New York, to name a few - would turn the idea that Islam was a potent counterforce to the values of the Enlightenment from conjecture into conventional wisdom.

And yet, when stripped of the telegenic drama generated by their stridency, their declarative wielding of symbols, and their occasional resort to violence, the Islamists can be seen to have made little headway towards their chief political aim of taking power. The political regimes they challenge have proved unexpectedly resilient. The demands of the Islamist platform, the most important of which is the application of shari'a or religious law, have inspired surprisingly feeble public responses. Perhaps most tellingly, Islamists have largely failed to move beyond opposition rhetoric. They have failed to articulate practical policies appropriate to a complex world in the grip of wrenching change. And countries such as Sudan and Iran, where Islamists have captured power, have failed to project much influence beyond their borders.

Hindsight is 20/20 of course, and it's easy now, on the 8th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, to look back and criticize Rodenbeck's analysis as -- to put it mildly -- very mistaken. How could he have foreseen al-Qaeda's bombing of the U.S. embassies in Kenya and Tanzania just five months later? Or anticipated their attack on the USS Cole two years later? Or predicted that three and a half years into the future, Islamist militants would execute the most horrific terrorist attack in American history? Or the outbreak of the second Intifada in the Palestinian territories? Or Hamas's crushing electoral defeat of Fatah in 2006? Or the resurgence of the Taliban in Pakistan's NWFP and Afghanistan from 2006-2009? I could go on.

The problem I have is that Rodenbeck's discredited analysis isn't a relic of history. In fact, the argument that the Islamist movement is "in decline" or has been defeated has continued to be made fairly consistently by various analysts for the past 8 years.

Joshua Muravchick absurdly claimed in a Washington Post op-ed earlier this summer that the post-election crisis in Iran spelled "the end of radical Islam." Jason Burke, for the Guardian from Pakistan, made this claim as early as June 2002. It's not just journalists, either -- prominent French Middle East scholars Gilles Keppel and Olivier Roy have been predicting the imminent demise of radical Islam since the early 1990s.

This sort of wishful thinking is just as wrong-headed now as it was in 1998. Militant Islam isn't going to disappear anytime soon, as much as I, and the rest of Western civilization, no doubt would prefer that it would.

It'd be nice to declare the War on Terror over; to return to the nice, comfortable pre-9/11 days when we could treat terrorism as just another crime to be dealt with by routine indictments and subpoenas. After all, the war America has engaged itself in has been costly, both in treasure and American lives. We've got plenty of other problems that could benefit from a reallocation of the attention and resources we've been giving to this struggle. Let's just get on with our partisan debates about health care reform, stimulus bills, cap and trade, and how rude Joe Wilson was during Obama's speech. Forget about this annoying terrorism business. It's distracting us from the "real" issues.

Unfortunately, the world doesn't work that way.

Al-Qaeda and their fellow militant Islamist compatriots are still a grave threat to the United States. Al-Qaeda may have taken a severe beating in the eight years since 9/11 (and it does feel good to type those words), but they are not beaten. They are a patient enemy -- one that views history with a pair of very long-term glasses. They have repeatedly stated very clearly and deliberately that they will not rest until they achieve their goal -- the collapse of the United States, followed by the re-establishment of a global Islamic empire, or caliphate.

“We are patient. . . . Our patience will only end with the collapse of America . . . ”
— Al-Qaeda’s Abu Salma Al-Hijazi, on Islamist internet forum Al-Qal'a, November 2003

Absurd? I think you, and you probably do too. But in the minds of al-Qaeda's leaders, their jihad against the Red Army in Afghanistan during the 1980s led directly to the collapse of the godless Soviet Union. Why should the same not be possible for the United States? One non-Islamic superpower down, one to go:

[O]n April 21, 2009, Islamist websites posted an audio interview with “Islamic State of Iraq” minister Abu Hamsa Al-Muhajir, in which he appealed to Muslim scientists, “The mujahideen today are in great need of chemical, biological and even . . . nuclear weapons. . . . ”

“Abu Qandahar,” moderator of Ansar Al-Suna, wrote on June 7, 2009, “Al-Qaeda has nuclear weapons, praise Allah. This is 100% certain.”

The Global Islamic Front, an online media branch associated with al-Qaeda and other jihadi-salafi groups, published a communiqué by a “Dr. John Boutros” on August 25, 2009, titled “Don’t Worry, Islamic United States Is at the Door.” In it, “Dr. Boutros” promised that the U.S. is only one or two thrusts from “crumbling.” He ridiculed the U.S. Department of Homeland Security: “Hundreds of thousands of soldiers stationed in the streets of Washington and Los Angeles wait for a martyr to cross the continents carrying nuclear, biological, or chemical bombs.”

Despite the setbacks they have suffered at the hands of the U.S. and its allies in the campaigns of the past eight years, al-Qaeda and the international jihadist movement still believes that Islam's final victory over the United States is not only certain, but imminent.

What would reinforce their resolve and their determination more than the U.S. unilaterally ending its commitment to that war?

GWB, 9/20/01:

It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal. We'll go back to our lives and routines, and that is good. Even grief recedes with time and grace. But our resolve must not pass.

Well, Bush got the first half of his wish -- eight years later, this country surely has "returned almost to normal." Perhaps too much so. But will President Obama carry on that resolve? That remains to be seen. I sure hope so.