We can win--and we must
More to be done. At home, we also have much to do. We are living on borrowed time, as the former Coast Guard chief Stephen Flynn writes in his book America the Vulnerable. There are innumerable soft targets that we have yet to find a way to protect in what is still fundamentally an open society. We have, of course, achieved much already. Many al Qaeda leaders have been killed or captured or are holed up in a cave somewhere in Pakistan. In Iraq, we didn't find the weapons of mass destruction much the world believed were there, and we were woefully unprepared for the postwar insurgencies, but at least there is now an Iraqi government, led by an Iraqi prime minister who appears both strong and independent, ready to put the country on a course for its first free election within just a few months. As Larry Diamond reports in Foreign Affairs, seeds of democracy are already taking root in south central Iraq. But serious challenges remain. Actions to stamp out the extremists are risky and costly--but essential if any kind of orderly society is to emerge. In any event, we must be prepared for attacks either in Iraq or at home, given the terrorists' understanding of their potential political impact on the upcoming presidential election.
We must remember that we did not choose the war on terrorism. It chose us. Nor can we walk away from it. That's precisely why both presidential campaigns and their parties' conventions have been dominated by the issues of leadership in the war on terrorism.
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