Winning By Fighting Back

MIchael Totten on the end of the Intifada.

The doom-mongers were wrong. Period. Just as they were wrong when they predicted disaster in Afghanistan. Just as they were wrong when they predicted disaster in Iraq the first time around. Just as they were wrong when they (although it was mostly Republicans this time) predicted disaster in Kosovo.
Those who keep insisting we or one of our democratic allies will actually lose a war have been wrong for a third of a century now. I am thirty four years old. The last time the doom-mongers were right I was three. They have been consistently wrong throughout my entire living memory. (Am I forgetting something? Have we lost a war since Vietnam?)

Wretchard, at The Belmont Club follows up;

The most remarkable thing about Israel’s campaign against the Intifada was not it’s adoption of new warfighting concepts, like Europe’s Human Security Doctrine, but its reversion to the oldest method of all: winning by fighting back. Social historians in the future, should we ever attain it, may endlessly wonder how it was possible for Western European and liberal American intellectuals to forget 5,000 years of military experience in favor of the slogans, some composed facetiously, of the Peace Movement of the 1960s.

For two fellows as observant as Wretchard and Totten, I’m surprised that they overlook the obvious – at their ideological core, the “Peace Movement” and Western European and liberal American intellectuals have far more invested in the notion of losing wars than they do in winning them.
Why would they endorse methods that have a proven track record of success?