Yale law professor and Newsweek columnist Stephen L. Carter is the latest pundit to draw attention to President Obama’s curious aversion to winning a military conflict:
The president promised to bring the troops home, and he is carrying out that promise. But did we win? Are they coming home because they did the job? Or has the enormous sacrifice of blood and treasure been for naught?
The president spoke not of victory but of goals achieved and commitments fulfilled. That is the language of contemporary diplomacy and scholarship. Among sophisticates, the concept of winning wars seems so 1980s; perhaps even 1940s. …
… In short, whatever the fashionable language of the day, we Americans do not much like fighting merely to achieve commitments and goals. We like to win. There is a fair argument to be made that we won in Iraq—a proposition that might be admitted even by those of us who wonder whether it was worth the price. We toppled the regime with surprising ease (crushing a 400,000-man Army along the way), then dragged Saddam Hussein from his hole in the ground. We left in place a democracy that, although struggling, seems likely to survive.
In Afghanistan, we plainly won the first war—toppling the Taliban in mere weeks—and President Obama should not be reluctant to say so.
