There’s an interesting piece over at the Jawa Report arguing that we’d be best served by conceptually dividing the Iraq War into two Iraq Wars. The first, to topple Saddam, was a quick and tidy triumph for coalition forces; the second, to defeat Islamists, is now painfully underway:

Failing to see the two war distinction is critical. From Obama we hear that he was “against the war” from the beginning. From Clinton we hear that she “changed her mind on the war sometime after she realized that the war was a mistake.”

Continuing to allow politicians to criticize the war in Iraq by criticizing the decision to topple the Hussein regime is to allow them to conflate two very separate issues: 1) should we have invaded Iraq? 2) should we now give up fighting al Qaeda and anti-government Islamist elements in Iraq?

Answering no to question number one says nothing about how question two should be answered. Nothing.

That’s an indisputable point. But while recasting the fight in terms of Iraq I and Iraq II is helpful on a tactical level, the distinction actually manages to blur the moral clarity behind the initial undertaking and is, in the end, a rhetorical side-door best left shut.

For those who believe the Iraq War was not morally optional, this is all one war. We had a moral choice: Indefinitely leave 20 million people in the hands of a tyrannical killing machine or reduce the net suffering to the best of our ability. The latter “option” continues to define the ethical mandate that makes talk of withdrawal, frankly, revolting. Whether it’s a Ba’athist megalomaniac or a wave of Islamist fascists, we must keep such monsters in our cross-hairs.

Strategically, it is also the same war. After September 11, it became clear that abandoning a segment of the world to the whims of nominally secular or overtly fundamentalist dictatorships was no longer tenable. The diminution of human rights and education such conditions entail takes the West’s potential partners and turns them into envious and implacable enemies.

It’s disingenuous and sloppy for the Democrats to cite the decisions of 2003 as catalysts for the decisions of 2008, true. But in the most important ways, we still live under the paradigm defined by those decisions. And side-stepping the conceptual ramifications of that understanding weakens, not strengthens, the case to stay in Iraq until we finish the job.