[link|http://www.nationalreview.com/comment/comment-hawkins100901.shtml|Another op-ed, this one on what we need and why we must insist on it]

Excerpt:

President Franklin Roosevelt spoke of "unconditional surrender" as "the destruction of the philosophies in those countries which are based on conquest and the subjugation of other people." This meant the removal of the Axis regimes and their replacement with democratic governments. It would have been unthinkable to stop at the German border after the liberation of France, leaving Adolph Hitler in Berlin.

Mussolini was executed by Italian partisans after the fall of Rome; Hitler committed suicide in his Berlin bunker. Emperor Hirohito was spared, but General Tojo was hanged. Denazification programs, war-crimes trials, purges of collaborators, and the writing of new constitutions cemented democratic governments which then joined the United States as allies. Western Europe settled into the longest period of peace in its history.

While the U.S. has attempted to impose political change in several small-scale settings (Grenada, Panama, Haiti), it has not done so in any major war since 1945. It tried to unite Korea in 1950, but was unwilling to further escalate the war after China intervened.

In Vietnam, while Hanoi sent an army south to overthrow the Saigon regime; the U.S. only sent bombers north to coerce Hanoi \ufffd an asymmetry in objectives that led to disaster. The war only ended when one side was able to impose fundamental political change on the other.

In the Gulf War, the U.S. stopped after liberating Kuwait. Saddam Hussein was left untouched in Baghdad to foment new plots, including a probable role in the attacks of September 11. Indeed, the failure to remove Saddam a decade ago, when U.S. troops were on his doorstep, can be considered the motive for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz to make "decisive war" the core of future doctrine.