So what are the different plans we Americans should have in mind in this war?  We need to have a plan for a maximum victory, if we can achieve it,  and  also a plan for the absolute minimum victory that is acceptable to us--one which will, at the very least, allow us to go on living as a free people, in the comfort and safety to which our labor, our parents' labor, and their and our basic human rights entitle us.  In other words, no one gets to come here and kill us--not even a few of us, let alone thousands.  And furthermore, because we like to travel, and must do so in order to sell our products and buy other people's products, and thus live in prosperity rather than starve, we have a right to go anywhere in the world without being killed.  Without, in fact, even being kidnapped or mugged.  Such acts against even one of us--such as, for example, Mr. and Mrs. Pedicaris  (look it up)--when carried out by thugs acting on the orders of, or with the assistance of,governments of nations or large groups such as terrorist bands, are acts of war,  and must be replied to as such.  Our minimum goal, the minimum victory that we must achieve in this war, is to put an end to such acts of war against America or Americans everywhere on earth for the forseeable future (nothing is forever).

     A larger goal, a more total victory, such as establishing a new political system in the Middle East generally based on real democracies living in peace with their neighbors (including us)--as real democracies tend to do--will be a good thing, if we can afford to achieve it.  If we can even establish one or two such real democracies, in Iraq and Afghanistan, as seedbeds for the education of Middle Eastern peoples in the advantages and how-to-do-it of democracy, then that will be a great step forward for the peoples of the region, and will assist us in attaining goal #1 (the minimum victory we insist on--see above).

     Now, no one is unpatriotic simply because they believe we can't afford more than the minimum victory described above.  However, they'd better damned well be willing to do whatever is necessary to achieve that minimum victory--after all, the next American taken hostage in Beirut, or Baghdad, ---or Beverly Hills--might just be them, or their daughter.  Think about it.  And furthermore, if we do think about it--intelligently, and based on a thorough understanding of the cultures of the peoples who are trying to kill us and destroy America, we may just discover that only a major transformation of their political culture will achieve even this minimum victory goal.

     Reflect for just a moment on a little history:

     In 1918, we defeated the Central Powers--Germany, the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and the Ottoman Empire--decisively, and had every right to transform their political systems in such ways as to make it as certain as one can be that they would never again start another war; or at least, not for a very long time.  Instead, we settled for the politically more palatable course--because it was more popular, because it was easier, and meant an immediate end to any further killing of the ciizen-soldiers of the democracies who, God knows, had already suffered enough.  The people at home--which means the voters at home--as well as the soldiers at the front, wanted an immediate end to the killing.  They wanted Peace Now.  And because their governments were democracies, led by men elected by the voters, they got just that.  Peace Now, in 1918--but not for very much longer.

     The Ottoman Turks were not prevented from crushing the remaining non-Turkish ethnic communities in their territory--Armenians, Kurds, Greeks; the Balkans, where ethnic hatred and dynastic ambitions had started the war in the first place, were re-Balkanized, without any guarantor of national defense capable of ensuring peace for the resulting tiny nations, or any guarantee of basic human rights for the ethnic minorities in 'Yugoslavia'--which was, perforce, dominated by the Serb majority there until invaded first by Italy, then, when the Italians proved incapable of conquering their victim, by the Germans themselves.  

     As for Germany, even absent the financial burdens imposed by the Versailles Agreement, who can deny that the the myth of the 'dolchstoss' ('stab in the back')--the idea that a victorious German Army was cheated of victory at the last moment by pusillanimous politicians in Berlin--supposedly, in the fervent imaginations of men like Hitler and Roehm, manipulated by 'Jewish Bankers'--would have led inevitably to a German regime determined to seek the victory thus denied in a second round of warfare as soon as the German people could catch their collective breath and rearm?

     It was this failure to occupy Germany and make clear to the German people, for a generation or so, the evil of starting an aggressive war, which led to the Second World War in as many generations; a war in which many of the survivors of the first war were finally murdered--along with their children and grandchildren.  The toll of the Great War, 1914-18, was about 15 million human lives; that of the Second Round of the German War to Conquer Europe, 1939-45, was about 50 million human lives from America to Russia (not even counting the war in Asia).  This second toll of death was the cost of not completing the pacification of the German nation in 1919-32.  Instead, as we now realize, the democracies stood by  as though hypnotized while the German nation descended from exhaustion to anarchy, then from self-delusion to tyranny, and from tyranny to lunacy--and from there, to the abatoir.  50 million dead, and that many more crippled, were the human cost of foregoing the drive to capture Berlin and occupy Germany in 1919.  So much for 'Peace Now' as opposed to peace forever--or at least, for a very long time.

     The United States, in the wake of the overthrow of the Baath regime in Iraq in 2003, has had to face the same choice as the Allies in 1918--whether to declare victory and pull out, leaving the defeated enemy to sort out his own political future entirely by himself, or stick around and do whatever it takes to ensure the minimum victory that can alone make any war worth the winning--namely, that we do not have to send our sons, 10 or 20 years hence, to fight the same people all over again for the same reasons.  Except that in 2003, we would have been contemplating fighting the same people again for the third time--remember 1991?   Note: we are not staying there just to do the Iraquis a favor, although favor it is--but to ensure that, as a genuinely democratic regime, ruling over a predominantly sane people, we will not have to worry about them undertaking, anytime in the forseeable future, yet another war against us or any of our allies.