Backbone!

"The conflict is not about Iraq, or any other territory for that matter. Still, we cling tenaciously to the anachronistic concept of wars based on geographic boundaries," says John Alexander, a retired Army colonel and senior fellow with two Department of Defense universities. "The ongoing struggle is about religion and irreconcilable competing belief systems. It did not start with Saddam or when the US-led coalition invaded Iraq in 2003, rather the genesis dates back thirteen hundred years."

I agree. This is a 1,400 year long war and it is a war about religion. But Alexander fails to give a solution. The solution is that we need to be perceived as persistent, powerful, and determined. We need to emerge with a key element in the vocabulary of Islam and of most warrior cultures intact. It's called "honor." Our persistence and determination are being weighed by the world.

Yes, our PERSISTENCE is being measured. If we emerge from the Iraq War as a quitter, we may lose far more than we think. So I'm with some of the least-publicized statements George Bush's speech writers have written to define this war. The Iraq War is an extremely expensive laboratory. It is a learning experience. One in which our job is to learn how to deal with what we're calling insurgents -- urban guerilla warriors -- and how to deal with hearts and minds.

Mohammed's solution for winning hearts and minds was slaughter and terror. "Make great slaughter in the land," he said. Guess what? It worked. It frightened people into becoming Moslems and making their great grandchildren's children Moslems for centuries to come. It worked in a 13,500 mile arc across Africa, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and even Malaysia and Indonesia, Islamic nations on the Pacific Rim. Right now, militant Islam in Iraq is using slaughter and terror to wean the Iraqis and all others who watch this war away from us and over to their side. They are using Mohammed's strategies, highly successful strategies. Said Mohammed, "I have been made victorious with terror (cast in the hearts of the enemy), and while I was sleeping, the keys of the treasures of the world were brought to me and put in my hand" [Sahih Bukhari: Volume 4, Book 52, Number 220]. We have to counter before militant Islam takes over any more of those keys. We have to counter with a military force that LEARNS.

Seldom is a nation given the opportunity to devise new strategies where it counts the most: in live battle. We have to wean this nation's obsessions from exit strategies and focus on innovating our way around obstacles. We have to focus on challenge if we're going to hold on to our core values: pluralism, freedom of lifestyle, and freedom of speech. We need weekly brainstorming sessions among the leading artists of war, the leading commanders of this war in Iraq. We need a weekly online meeting for brainstorming new strategies.

We also need to bring in the clever grunts on the ground. As In Search of Excellence author Tom Peters pointed out, everybody goes to work each day with a gripe, a beef. Listen to those gripes...and to the solutions the gripers have in mind, and you have continuous improvement. It worked for the Japanese in the auto industry and it will work for us in the military.

Now we have to apply it. Bring in the Special Forces. They specialize in working with communities and the individuals in them. Give as much help to as many Baghdad households as we can. So that despite the continuous violence of the "insurgents," the Iraqis know we are on their side and listening to their needs. Go house by house as helpers, not as nest-of-warrior seekers. Working on behalf of one family after another will not only win hearts, but will give us a sense of how to help Iraq as a whole. This is not a new strategy; it is what the Special Forces has been doing as its primary job for a long time. But we need to extend it. We should NEVER break down another door. Instead, we should knock.

Concepts like these should be brainstormed with the guys on the ground and their bosses. Let's hear their ideas and their sense of which ideas from armchair warriors like me and John Alexander are workable. Let's find out whether brainstorming the flaws of notions from folks like Alexander and me can help the folks fighting this war every day figure out how we're full of it and, in the process, come up with what you and I do when we take on a straw man or a fool-putting down the idiot, we often come up with more workable or more inspired ideas.

I'm perfectly willing to be used as the catalytic idiot. I'm sure that John Alexander would volunteer for the job as well.

But the real bottom line is not just learning from adversity. It's remembering Winston Churchill's words: "Never give up." Or, as Goh Chok Tong, the former prime minister of Singapore, puts it, "The key issue is no longer WMD or even the role of the U.N. The central issue is America's credibility and will to prevail.''