Thus we may know that there are five essentials for victory:
He will win who knows when to fight and when not to fight.
He will win who knows how to handle both superior and inferior forces.
He will win whose army is animated by the same spirit throughout all ranks.
He will win who, prepared himself, waits to take the enemy unprepared.
He will win who has military capacity and is not interfered with by the sovereign.
Victory lies in the knowledge of those five points. Hence the saying: If you know the enemy and know yourself, you need not fear the result of a hundred battles.
~Sun Tzu

In The Art of War I, I spoke about the need to know our enemy and know ourselves in order to save our civilization as a whole from the wider, global threat of jihad. With the passing of the recent election, and the campaign that preceded it, the subject of withdrawal from Iraq has taken center stage in American politics. I myself am entirely in favor of withdrawal, and my reasons tie into the arguments laid out in part one.

The time has long since past for America and the West to arrive at the realization that modern warfare, such as defined by our so-called civilized institutions that define it - ie the UN, international law, the Geneva Conventions, etc. - can no longer be waged to a successful conclusion because A> those who agree to abide by those standards tend not to wage war with each other, and B> we inevitably find ourselves fighting enemies which do not abide by such standards. We have to come to terms with the fact that the standards we set for ourselves were in reality (unintentionally) a pact for defeat in future conflicts, since enemies, more determined to win than to fight fair, would quite naturally seek out and discover ways to exploit these standards as weaknesses. This worked to a large extent in Vietnam (the South Vietnamese government's incompetence and corruption notwithstanding), and has been honed to perfection by jihadists in Iraq, just as jihadists take full advantages of the protections of our Constitution and legal system to propogate jihad here at home. The second we set standards for ourselves, we immediately place ourself at a disadvantage to those who do not.

William Tecumseh Sherman, who's brutal tactics are at least in part credited for bringing about an end to the American Civil War, is supposed to have once said, "War is cruelty. There's no use trying to refine it. The crueler it is the quicker it will be over." To contrast, I am reminded of a scene from the great Vietnam War film Apocalypse Now, where Captain Willard narrates, "It was a way we had over here with living with ourselves: We'd cut them in half with a machine gun and give them a band-aid. It was a lie." Trying to wage a civilized war - or, in this case, a civilized occupation - is a lie.

The realization of this incontrovertable fact is not an concession of defeat. It is simple, humble wisdom. When a jihadist, wearing civilian clothes, walks into a crowded mosque or market and blows himself up, killing dozens and injuring hundreds, what is the recompense for such an act? Who do we go after? Even if we were to go in and conduct a brutal, house-to-house search of peoples' homes - which would almost certainly be viciously condemned by every media outlet and most nations of the world - who are we looking for, and how would we know when we found them? The point is moot of course, because in today's age of light-speed global media, which generally is anti-American and anti-war, we would never conduct such an operation on a scale necessary to truly root out the jihadists and their weapons, because the bureaucrats who run this war desire good PR more than they desire victory. And even if we did so, can we stop Iran from re-supplying them? For three years we have shown a complete inability to do so. Even if we take out Al-Sadr's Mahdi army and his death squads, they can always revert back to the reliable and near-impossible to defend against "suicide" campaign (it's not really suicide to jihadists, but I digress).

The necessity for brutality is particularly highlighted when we consider that the jihadist enemy considers death the highest honor our brave men and women can bestow upon them. Like Ho Chi Minh, who said, "You can kill ten of our men for every one we kill of yours, but even at those odds, you will lose and we will win," the jihadist aren't discouraged by casualties. When one of their own is killed, they give out candy, for the second their life ceases they instantly arrive in paradise, where 72 virgins await them, swooning over what swell guys they are. Bin Laden refers to Muslims as The Nation of Martyrdom; the Nation that desires death more than you desire life, and cites Qur'an 3.169-171:

Think not of those who are killed in the Way of Allâh as dead. Nay, they are alive, with their Lord, and they have provision. They rejoice in what Allâh has bestowed upon them of His Bounty, rejoicing for the sake of those who have not yet joined them, but are left behind (not yet martyred) that on them no fear shall come, nor shall they grieve. They rejoice in a Grace and a Bounty from Allâh, and that Allâh will not waste the reward of the believers.

Indeed Bin Laden is correct: we are a culture of life. Even for the most devout Jew or Christian, not to mention secularist, atheist, or agnostic, life is a precious gift that should be valued, treasured, a lived to the fullest. If we believe in Heaven, we will arrive in due time. The Muslim fundamentalist thinks, This life is a prison for the believer and Paradise for the disbeliever. How do we, against such a foe, wage a war of mercy and compassion and expect to win?

This is not necessarily to suggest that we should turn Iraq into a parking lot. Again, I don't think we should be there in the first place, because, again, I believe there were alternatives to war against both Iraq and Afghanistan that could have protected our homeland even more effectively than the current strategy. But, again, I digress. In 1992, then-General of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Colin Powell, said, "We must not ... send military forces into a crisis with an unclear mission they cannot accomplish -- such as we did when we sent the U.S. Marines into Lebanon in 1983. We inserted those proud warriors into the middle of a five-faction civil war complete with terrorists, hostage-takers, and a dozen spies in every camp, and said, 'Gentlemen, be a buffer.' The results were 241 Marines and Navy personnel and a U.S. withdrawal from the troubled area." Tell me this doesn't describe the current situation, almost to a "T".

And let's talk about the media for a moment. Who can even imagine what World War II would have looked like if it were waged in a media environment similar to today? Can we imagine the attacks against Roosevelt for sending our troops to war, poorly equipped and poorly organized? Our Sherman tanks were no match for the German Panzer; their MG-42 machine gun had a rate of fire 3 times that of any weapon in the US arsenal, and the Japanese Zero was dominating American air power until the Mustang and Hellcat were developed years after Pearl Harbor. On June 6, 1944, D-Day, Americans suffered over 1,400 dead, over 3,100 wounded, and almost 2,000 missing in action. That was one day. The average number of Coalition (note, this is the entire coalition, not just American) troops killed per day in Iraq is 2.32. This means it took the coalition two years to total the number of Americans killed in one day of WWII. And for God's sake let's not even talk about Iwo Jima (over 6,800 KIA).

In WWII, Allied air power reduced entire German and Japanese cities to ruins; much of this destruction was done prior to the use of Little Boy on Hiroshima and Fat Man on Nagasaki. When the Allies entered Berlin it was practically a pile of rubble.

Allies occupy "Berlin"

Dresden in ruins, not much better off than Hiroshima

Tokyo burns.

The brutality of these acts, like William Tecumseh Sherman suggests, brought our enemies to their knees, shortened the war, and saved untold numbers of lives that would have inevitably been lost during a protracted war. Today our use of satellite and laser-guided precision bombs have little effectiveness against jihadists fighting from homes and mosques. We can strike a military target without damaging the civilian sites that surround it, but weaponry that can distinguish between combatant and non-combatant will not be developed anytime soon. Faced with this reality, sixty years ago Fallujah would have been reduced to a smoldering ruin and no one would've batted an eyelash, except perhaps Iraqi insurgents who feared the consequences of their own barbarity - that their barbarity would be repayed with barbarity of our own. Today every civilian killed is focused on like a laser beam, not to mention each and every American death, with the media howling bloody murder for being forbidden to take photos of their flag-draped coffins arriving at Dover AFB.

War, as we all recognize, is a disgusting human sin. It is also sometimes an unfortunate necessity. Being force-fed the horrors of war has a tendancy to drown out and cause us to forget the necessity of it: we lose our vigilance, our will to see this to the end, to do what is necessary to win, not what is necessary to look civilized committing uncivilized acts. This is an unavoidable modern reality: we will see the destruction, often with reporters covering it on-scene. We will witness dead and mutillated bodies, often women and children. We will hear about every dead soldier, as if a dead soldier in war is something unheard of or shocking. We will be fed spurious reports of civilian casualties since the war began. Anything to weaken our will to win, to highlight and exaggerate the incompetence of the administration - and these aren't even the tactics of the enemy. This is our own media.

So, with these sobering facts in hand, I endeavor to you that withdrawal is not defeat; it is not a surrender in the traditional sense. It is simply the wisdom of the art of war, that we will win if we can recognize when we should fight, and when we should not. Clearly, this was not a fight we should have had to have taken on in the first place, and, taking into account our unwillingness and inability to fight a war on our own, so-called "civilized", "honorable" terms; and, if we know our enemy and recognize that they use these "honorable" and "civilized" strategies to their advantage, there is no sensible, rational, or sane reason why we should continue to stay.

And if our withdrawal is defined in this context, we can walk out of Iraq with our heads high, knowing that, while we certainly were not defeated, we were unable to complete our objective because our enemy refused to stand and fight toe-to-toe, that they used cowardly and dispicable means to wage their guerilla campaign - blending amongst civilians, openly targeting and slaughtering civilians: men, women, children and the elderly, indiscriminantly. They attacked houses of worship, and/or used those houses to plan and carry out attacks. They kidnapped civilians and mutilated their bodies. They beheaded them on camera and showed off this barbarity to the rest of the world. Our soldiers obviously know that, had it been their wish, they could have ravaged the entire country, brought them all - jihadist and non-combatant alike - to their knees, and, had the jihadists engaged them in open warfare, the jihadists would have been as lambs to the slaughter. The jihadists, instead, waged a campaign designed to pry, through shock and horror, the will to win from the collective American psyche:

A Jihadist proudly poses with a dead, mutilated American corpse

And three years of this barbarity has taken its toll. Not just on the American people, but especially on the Iraqi people, who, by a large majority, find attacks against coalition targets justifiable, and, though trained by Americans to police and secure their country, often simply collect their paycheck and do little or nothing to bring their own country under control. They don't care enough to fight and bring their own country under control, and they're sick of our inability to do it for them. There comes a point where we can no longer blame ourselves for uprooting a nation's political structure when the natives continually - for three years now - express an unwillingness to govern themselves in its stead.

Perhaps the biggest psychological obstacle in the American mind to withdrawal is the Somalia complex, which brings about memories of Somalian barbarians dragging our dead soldiers' bodies through the streets of Mogadishu, followed soon after by American troops leaving the country, percieved by Al Qaeda as having their tails between their legs. This perception was adequately described by Bin Laden, when he said, "When people see a strong horse and a weak horse, by nature they will like the strong horse."

But this inevitably brings us back to the issue of protecting our homeland, as I outlined in part one. Let the jihadists dance around like the apes that they are; let them fire their Kalashnikov's into the air, and distribute candy, and chant "Down with America, Death to Israel! (blah blah blah)" Then what? What is their next move? What will they do to bring America further to her knees? If you agreed with the premise of part one, then you understand that 9-11 should never have happened in the first place, because none of the perpetrators had any business being here at all. And so it should be with future jihadists - future perpetrators of future 9-11's. How do they get in here if we shut the door in their face? And thus, all of their howling and chanting and promises to destroy America amount to nothing more than much sound and fury, signifying nothing.

And this, in the end, if we are half as steadfast and patient as the jihadists are, will ultimately amount to our own victory, as frustrated jihadists grow old dreaming of bringing destruction to America, but never being able to come within sight of our borders or shores. We win because we will have realized when to fight and when not to fight, knowing our enemy and knowing ourselves.