A better question to ask (and something I don’t see asked enough) is — what constitutes winning? A better way to cast the question of whether or not the US is winning its war on terror is to ask what constitutes winning say — a war on drugs, or a war on crime? Clearly not the absolute elimination of it (although some foolishly optimistic people might disagree with that claim) as these issues will always exist (not to mention, its also ridiculously difficult to define “drug problem” and “crime”). In that sense, these “wars” aren’t really wars in the slightest. A war on Iraq can be won — we did. A war against Nazi Germany can be won — we did. But a “war for the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people” … how do you WIN that?
I do believe that if the United States was run as a corporation, then things would have been run much differently — not because a corporation intrinsically has different people or whatever (I’m not making a pro-free market appeal here), but because a corporation DEFINES its goals clearly and then makes plans to achieve those goals and determines means to evaluate whether or not goals have been reached.
It sounds like commonsense — and it is — and sadly, its not what the government runs on. Bush can rightfully say that they have killed tons of terrorists and terrorist sympathizers. He can rightfully say that he dismantled the Taliban (for the most part) and has put a major dent in Al Qaeda’s operations and has mobilized much of the world against terrorists — they even killed Zarqawi recently, which is a major “victory” in a sense.
But his detractors can of course also rightfully point out how Americans don’t feel safer — how many American and Iraqi lives have been lost, how our actions have mobilized sentiment amongst many Muslims against the United States, how to this day Afghanistan and Iraq are still replete with terrorists. They can very rightfully say how Bush’s focus on Iraq probably led to the nuclear stalemates the United States is currently facing in North Korea and in Iran. In that sense, those are all “defeats”.
The fundamental problem with most government operations and non-profit organizations (except for the ones that are actually successful), and especially with this lousy war, is a complete lack of understanding as to what a “victory” is. A conspiracy theorist could even argue (as I’ve heard and definitely argued in debate rounds before) that this is just a ploy to perpetually be in war — b/c one can never achieve victory, and thus one is always supporting the military-industrial complex and is always empowering the government’s national security machinery. That’s not my point, though. We can “win” a war on terror if we know what that war is, what it means to win, and if we had planned how to go about doing it.
I personally was in favor of the War in Iraq, but not in how it was conducted. I still believe, however, that expansive United States military operations for anti-terror purposes and for humanitarian missions are in the best interest of Americans and the world, but I believe that until some basic commonsense is applied to thinking about these operations — nobody benefits, and everybody loses.