The left is thrilled that Senator Biden yesterday got Ambassador Crocker to ‘admit’ that it’s more important to defeat al Qaeda along the Pakistan/Afghanistan border than it is to defeat them in Iraq. Next up: getting FDR to admit that it’s more important to defeat the Nazis in Berlin than in Paris, getting Ike to admit that it’s more important to bring down the U.S.S.R. than to preserve a free and independent South Korea, and getting JFK to admit that Cuba is a distraction from the ‘real’ war effort. The left seems not to understand that the central battlefield in a war is not always the enemy’s home base. Sometimes we fight on multiple fronts, and it’s important to win on all. Sometimes ‘victory’ is impossible if you fail to defeat the enemy in different places. Would we still have enjoyed victory in the Cold War if we had decided that Greece, Korea, Cuba, East Berlin, Vietnam, and Nicaragua were ‘distractions?’ There are plenty of other reasons that Biden’s question is silly. The first is the false premise that we must choose one or the other. The reason we have the ‘inflated’ defense budget that liberals complain about is that we don’t want to be forced to choose one battlefield or another. The U.S. military is designed to fight multiple conflicts simultaneously. The second is that not all battles are fought the same way. The only way Biden’s question makes sense is if he believes we must choose between committing tens of thousands of troops in Iraq or Pakistan. As Fred Kagan points out, no Democrat is seriously considering this.
