I. Our Rules / Their Rules
Several governments have defeated Islamic insurgencies, but usually only after about ten years, and adopting policies of summary executions and carpet bombing or shelling.

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The Algerians in the 1990s finally stopped the so-called Islamic Salvation Army. The Russians decimated Chechnyan separatists. Syria’s Hafez al-Assad brutally exterminated several groups loosely affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood, most infamously by the thousands at the town of Hama.

But so far, no recent military has succeeded in defeating a radical Muslim terrorist insurgency, while subject to a constitutional government and an absolutely free media. In this regard, the United States — given its position as the world’s only superpower and recognized as the most sensitive of all countries to easy criticism — is especially at a military disadvantage.

Witness Guantanamo Bay that is demonized worldwide as the new Stalag or Gulag, when, in fact, it is the most humane detention center of jailed Muslim terrorists in the world.

Abu Ghraib was reprehensible for its sexual roguery and gratuitous humiliation, but the real military problem of that prison has been the serial release, not American mistreatment, of Islamic murderers. In Iraq, then, the question arises — can a liberal Western government defeat a barbarous Islamist terrorist insurgency while under constant audit — and remaining true to its own democratic principles?

Gen. Petraeus must cope with the reality that should a half-dozen, or perhaps even one, of his some 160,000 soldiers, in the heat of combat, shoot a wounded terrorist, the damage done could rival losing an entire battle — a fact well known to a religiously zealous enemy that feels no such humanitarian constraints. Radical Islamists may be the enemy, but American forces in the field must downplay, not accentuate religious differences, if they are to keep on their side Muslim forces loyal to an elected government.

II. Fighting For Democracy?
In the Cold War, America justified supporting authoritarian regimes in Asia, South America, and the Middle East on the basis of their expressed and shared opposition to Soviet-sponsored global communism. We had some nasty SOBs on our side in the Shah, Pinochet, Somoza, and Papadopoulos. The U.S. apology was that elected socialist governments would inevitably devolve into Communist ones, either by intent or subversion. With 7,000 nukes pointed our way, we supposedly had no margin for utopianism. So America erred on the side of short-term assumed loyalty, stability, and security.

But well before the Cold War, the United States put realist concerns above principled idealism. That’s why we generously supplied a mass-murdering Soviet Union in its war against a mass-murdering Nazi Germany or didn’t restrict too much the methodology that Chiang Kai-shek employed against Japanese invaders.

The present war, however, is again qualitatively different: We are not seeking to quell the violence in Iraq or Afghanistan by the imposition or use of a brute. Instead we expend blood and treasure in the hopes that a consensual government can fight as well as a dictatorship — while at the same time ensuring freedom for its people.

So in Iraq, not only are we waging a war according to American rules of engagement, but for the idea of constitutional government run by a poor, deeply traditional, tribal, and often religiously fundamentalist population.

General Petraeus knows that Iraq Security Forces can get information out of detained terrorists much easier than we can. But he also accepts that winking at systematic torture would be at odds with his directive to protect and promote constitutional government.

III. War-loving Republicans?
There is yet a third anomaly: We are presently fighting two simultaneous wars under a conservative Republican administration. And that too is fairly rare in the last 100 years, and far more challenging. Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, and Bill Clinton all at times proved bellicose, bypassed Congress if needed be, and (with the exception of LBJ) largely got a pass from the Left. World War I, Korea, and Vietnam were all controversial in their time. Apparently, the intelligentsia and media felt that no liberal Democrat could possibly have preferred war, and had only fought when forced to — despite the use of Democratic preemption in a variety of instances.

In contrast, it is hard to recall of any war in our history — the Vietnam hysteria aside — that a sitting Senate majority leader declared it lost in the middle of hostilities. We have not previously witnessed senior opposition senators alleging that their own American servicemen were analogous to Nazis, Stalinists, Cambodian mass murders, Saddam’s Baathist killers, or engaging in habitual terrorizing and killing of innocent civilians.