In assessing international conflicts, there is a near-universal obsession with trying to determine victory and defeat: who “won” and who “lost.”
When it comes to Middle East conflicts, let me invoke the timeless wisdom of former President Joe Biden: “Don’t.”
There is a simple and incontrovertible reason for this: In the Islamic world, anything short of annihilation and evisceration is a victory.
Islamic armies might be pummeled, infrastructure destroyed, capabilities ruined and leaders obliterated, but as long as the mission can continue, the struggle proceeds.
Any agreement, no matter how framed, is also a victory. Why? Because having the enemy be party to an agreement represents their humiliation. They have been forced to acknowledge the integrity (in reality, the superiority) of the Islamists.
All of this seems somewhat incomprehensible to a Western sensibility.
It would be like positing that the Holocaust was a great victory for the Jewish people. Why? Because we were not completely destroyed.
Now, no matter how one would depict the experience and the outcome of the Holocaust, the concept of a victory would enter neither the discussion nor the thought process. Endurance, yes, as well as resilience and survivability. But victory? With victories like that, you’ll never want to know what defeat looks like.
So, once we intellectually understand the impossibility of seeing our Islamist adversaries admit to a defeat, we can start ignoring the truly mind-bending Islamist depictions of their so-called victories.
Complete fabrications of battlefield “success” actually parallel the Bizarro-world perspective on victory.
The mere launching of a missile is tantamount to wreaking damage and havoc. Forget that it was intercepted. It wrought destruction on the infidels.
It is very important for our morale and resilience that we contextualize the Islamist concept of victory. I suggest that, ironically enough, we take a page out of the Islamist playbook by recognizing that we will never win a definitive victory, barring regime change.
Until then, our victory is our own continuity, endurance and the ability to continue to live the lives we seek to live despite the toxicity around us. That, to my way of thinking, is in fact a great victory, one not at all referenced to how our enemies assess their own status.
From the beginning of recorded history, the Jewish people have been surrounded by alien peoples whose values and sensibilities were completely adverse to our own. To our credit, we understood that and managed to endure, despite our removal.
The current conflict is a variation on this timeless theme. Let our Islamists enemies—in Iran, Lebanon, Gaza and Yemen high-five themselves as much as they want.
We know who is winning, and with God’s help, will continue to do so.
