winning the war on terror

Baseball Crank has a good post regarding the best strategy to accomplish true victory in the war on terror. Here's why he (and I) believe Iraq is an important part of the war on terror:

Essentially, the idea is that, by removing Saddam Hussein's terror-sponsoring tyranny and clearing the path for the first-ever free representative democracy in the Arab world, we have forced Al Qaeda and others sharing its basic ideology to fight us at a time and in a place of our choosing; both sides now recognize that the victor in Iraq will be in an immeasurably stronger position, both strategically and on the propaganda front, to pursue its goals throughout the region. Of course, Iraq was, aside from the other reasons for war, well-suited to this role for many reasons: the population was bone-tired of tyranny, the Kurdish north had developed institutions of self-government, the Shi-ite majority would not be receptive to foreign Sunni fanatics, and the terrain is more favorable to U.S. military technological advantages than, say, mountainous Afghanistan.

None of this is to say that the insurgency has been a good thing, but rather that the situation was one in which we could deal a blow to the enemy whether they fought or not. It is the recognition of that challenge that has compelled them to fight.

Anyway, part of the battle in Iraq has been essentially a war of attrition: we've been killing the enemy in large numbers and draining their financial and operational resources, while they have sought to find the magic number of U.S. casualties that will cause us to buckle and turn tail.

Whether or not this is a good strategy depends in part on the calculus of attrition--can we consume the enemy's resources faster than they can regenerate them? Baseball Crank (and I) are optimistic that we can win this war of attrition by expanding the battlefield:

Obviously, one of the major questions about this kind of war is to what extent the manpower and resources of the global enemy are finite, as opposed to being expanded by conflict.

I suspect that there is, in fact, some element of truth to the idea that the Iraq War "created" more terrorists...in the sense that conflict always enables extremists to rally more people to their banners. It's impossible to quantify that effect, though, and the bottom line is that this brand of extremist comes from the pool of those who are already strongly sympathetic to the jihadists. I have to believe that there remain real limits to how much manpower and financial and operational resources the jihadis can call upon.

That's where the concept of expanding the battlefield comes into play. At present, U.S. forces are operating in two theaters where the enemy needs to put resources into fighting us - Iraq and Afghanistan. One of the lessons both of the Cold War and the two World Wars, however, is that America's deep vein of untapped financial, technological and manpower resources gives us a major strategic advantage in war once we can open enough different fronts to force the enemy to become overextended. This is particularly true when we can call upon the assistance of allies, at least to the extent of assisting us within their homelands and home regions.

[I]f we can encourage peaceful (or violent) movements towards democracy in multiple other states at once, we can compel the enemy to divert scarce resources away from Iraq to try to prevent democratic norms - which are anathema to the jihadists - from taking root across the region. The National Strategy identifies the opportunities:

[C]hange is coming to the region, with Syrian occupation ended and democracy emerging in Lebanon, and free elections and new leadership in the Palestinian Territories. From Kuwait to Morocco, Jordan, and Egypt, there are stirrings of political pluralism, often for the first time in generations.

While none of this is new, the commentary on these stirrings of democracy have tended to focus on two aspects: (1) the idea that our ideals are being vindicated and (2) the idea that we are progressing towards long-term regional goals. But that overlooks the strategic advantage of pressing for more democracy, more liberty, and, yes, more destabilization of existing regimes now and all at once: the more places on the map we can turn into vital interests that the enemy needs to address by dispatching terrorists, money and other operational resources to battle against the forces of democratization and liberty, the more it helps us win everywhere. Regardless of how we go about it, that's the effect we need to be thinking about in the context of expanding the battlefield.

Of course, there are those that would say it's madness to try to destabilize the region further when we're clearly losing in Iraq. I question their interpretation of the evidence--it looks to me like it is Al Qaeda that is on the verge of defeat.