David French reminds us that America’s enemies will make their plans according to what they think we’re going to do.  He quotes from a book by James Mitchell, who states that al Qaeda honcho Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was surprised when the United States actually retaliated for 9/11, rather than following the Clinton-Obama approach of treating such attacks as “law-enforcement matters.”  French goes on:

… as [Marc] Thiessen notes, our enemy is counting on our exhaustion. “In the end, he told Mitchell, ‘We will win because Americans don’t realize . . . we do not need to defeat you militarily; we only need to fight long enough for you to defeat yourself by quitting.’”

Unfortunately, we’ve spent the last eight years reinforcing the idea that differences within the United States mean defeating us by getting us to quit is a simple process of holding out for a few election cycles.  This is one area in which some national unity would really be to the better.