The Washington Post's Eugene Robinson says that a war against identifiable foes can be won — and, for the most part, has been.
President Obama wisely avoided the phrase "mission accomplished" in his major speech last week about the "war on terror," but columnists aren't obliged to be so circumspect: It is time to declare victory and get on with our lives.
Obama could never say this, of course, because there will surely be future terrorist attacks that kill Americans both at home and abroad. But he came close when he said that "the scale of this threat closely resembles the types of attacks we faced before 9/11" — in other words, before we rashly declared war on a tactic rather than an enemy.
"We must define the nature and scope of this struggle, or else it will define us," Obama said. "We must make decisions based not on fear, but on hard-earned wisdom. And that begins with understanding the current threat that we face."
Osama bin Laden's al-Qaeda, the organization that flew airliners into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, is decimated and on the run …
Read Eugene Robinson's entire piece at the Washington Post.
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