I don’t mean to be harsh regarding Senator Lugar. He is hardly a singular voice here. Unlike the foreign policy establishment, however, I have spent many years dealing with real live jihadists. Fact: They really do think they can and will win. They don’t need a lot of hope to carry on — people willing to kill themselves in order to kill you are already pretty motivated. But they derive great hope from what they (rightly) see as our surrenders and our ambivalence — compared to their own great certainty and confidence.
I am not a fan of how the war has been directed, and I believe expending our time and effort on the democracy project rather than on defeating our enemies in Iraq and elsewhere will go down as one of history’s great blunders. But with all that said, I note with the heartache of one who has seen it all too many times before: We will rue the day we leave Iraq without routing radical Islam. What we have not killed, we have made stronger.