John, your post is a snapshot, and not an encouraging one, for how very far we have strayed from our moorings in the war that we finally engaged in the weeks after 9/11.

You rightly say that the jihadists are streaming into Iraq from Iran and Syria, and that those countries could put a stop to that if they wanted to. But this didn’t start yesterday. They have been actively, consciously supporting our enemies – not just in Iraq but in Afghanistan – for *years.*

If we considered nothing for the moment other than what Iran and Syria had done since we invaded Iraq, these acts of war would be more than enough to have taken action, *directly,* against them. But that’s not all there is – not by a long shot. The regimes have long been the backers of Hezbollah. They have been supporters of bin Laden’s for the last several years. They have worked together with al Qaeda on training and weapons production. They have given al Qaeda safe passage and safe harbor. In short, they have been energetically seeking to kill Americans for years. They don’t want us to leave them alone. They want us to die.

The war on terror is not about stabilizing Iraq or, even more difficult, turning it into a functional democracy. Those things are subordinate goals. It would be nice to have them, or at least to tilt things in that direction since they may take years and years to accomplish. But they are not the imperative. They are not the reason we went to Iraq. We went to Iraq, like we went to Afghanistan, to eradicate the network of jihadists and their state supporters. It does not mean that you have to kill every last jihadist, but the goal of the mission is to leave militant Islam unable to project power.

If we leave Iraq and come home with Syria and Iran still intact and still supporting the terror network with impunity after years of dedicated sponsorship, it will not matter a wit whether Iraq is secure and has a fragile government that can survive. (In truth, it’s hard to imagine how the new Iraq would be secure if Syria and Iran were still intact and supporting the terror network – but that’s even more reason not to be speculating that maybe those regimes WHO ARE THE ENEMY might decide to be helpful to us.)

The mission was to destroy the terrorists and their state sponsors who pose a national security risk to the United States. Here is some of what the President said in the speech to Congress right after the 9/11 attacks:

Our enemy is a radical network of terrorists, and every government that supports them.
Our war on terror begins with al Qaeda, but it does not end there. It will not end until every terrorist group of global reach has been found, stopped and defeated.
…
Our response involves far more than instant retaliation and isolated strikes. Americans should not expect one battle, but a lengthy campaign, unlike any other we have ever seen. It may include dramatic strikes, visible on TV, and covert operations, secret even in success. We will starve terrorists of funding, turn them one against another, drive them from place to place, until there is no refuge or no rest. And we will pursue nations that provide aid or safe haven to terrorism. Every nation, in every region, now has a decision to make. Either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists. From this day forward, any nation that continues to harbor or support terrorism will be regarded by the United States as a hostile regime.

The idea is not to induce two countries that have demonstrated for eons that they are incorrigible enemies to see their way to being “helpful.” It is to “pursue” them, force them to choose between us or the terrorists, and if they make the wrong choice to regard them as hostile – which means taking them out. Four years later (or, if you want to calculate Hezbollah’s history, a quarter century later), when do you figure we’ll get the idea that they’re probably not inclined to be helpful? And what must they think when, after all this time and all they have done, we talk like we think they are anything but committed to defeating and humiliating us?