Fridays With Vic

Another brilliant article from NRO's Victor Davis Hanson on lessons learned -- or should have been learned -- since 9/11:

Diplomatic solutions follow, not precede, military reality. Had we failed in Afghanistan, Musharraf would be an Islamic nationalist today, for the sake of his own survival. Withdrawing from Iraq in defeat would have meant no progress in Lebanon. Some hope followed in the Middle East only because the Intifada was crushed and Arafat is in paradise. The Muslims scholars of Iraq talk differently now than a year ago because thousands of their sympathetic terrorists have been killed in the Sunni Triangle. The would-be Great Mahdi Moqtada Sadr is more buffoon than Khomeini reborn since his militia was crushed last year.

A quarter century, from the Iranian hostage-taking to 9/11, should have taught us the wages of thinking that an Arafat, bin Laden, assorted hostage-takers, an Iranian mullah, Saddam, or Mullah Omar might listen to a reasoned diplomat in striped pants. Our mistake was not so much that appeasement and empty threats made no impression on such cutthroats. The real tragedy instead was that onlookers who wished to ally with us shuddered that the United States either would talk to, or keep its hands off, almost any monster or mass murderer in the Middle East — if such accommodation meant sort of a continuation of the not so bothersome status quo. In contrast, that bin Laden and Mullah Omar are in hiding, Saddam in chains, Dr. Khan exposed, the young Assad panicking, and Colonel Khadafi on better behavior will slowly teach others the wages of their killing and terrorism and that the United States is as unpredictable in using force as it is constant in supporting democratic reformers. . .

American policy should be predicated not on friendship or the desire for appreciation, but on what is in our national interest and what is right — whose symbiosis is possible only through the current policy of consistently promoting democracy. Constitutional government is not utopia — only the proper antidote for the sickness in the Middle East, and the one medicine that hateful jihadists, dictators, kings, terrorists, and theocrats all agree that they alike hate.

There's much more; read the whole thing.