Andrew Sullivan unloads his frustration.
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YESTERDAY IN IRAQ: There's not much point in sugar-coating what happened. It was a great victory for the Baathists and international terror. If they can keep this up, the chances of a peaceful reconstruction in Iraq look more remote than they did last week.
Why? Not because this was that sophisticated an attack, but because it was relatively unsophisticated. Not so much because the Baathists can win, but because they don't have to. All they have to do is prevent the coalition from winning, which keeps Iraq in limbo, and tilts American public opinion against the war.
I'm not an expert but obviously we need a more successful military strategy to defeat these insurgents. This might mean, as Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt argue in the Weekly Standard, more manpower and more intensity:
[A] real counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq entails risks. It would concentrate forces in the Sunni regions that are the hot spots. Rather than reducing the U.S. presence, it might require putting an even greater American face on the war in those places. That could mean that, in the short term, the Pentagon might have to put on hold its plans to reduce the number of troops in Iraq to lessen the burden on the Army. The Marine Corps also might need to send fresh units back into Iraq.
A successful counterinsurgency campaign also would require American ground forces to carry out tasks and operations that today's "transforming" military, which increasingly is trading manpower for precision firepower, finds hard to perform. As one Army colonel in Iraq recently said to a New York Times reporter: "We are not trained to fight a war like this. We're training to fight an army face to face, to engage in direct combat, an enemy we can see." But that's not the kind of enemy we now face in Iraq.
It's obviously an extremely difficult task. But we have no alternative. This is indeed the frontline in the war against terror and tyranny. And that war is still in its infancy.
THE MURDERERS' ALLIES: Michael Totten notes that the main group behind the anti-war protests, ANSWER, is now openly supporting the Baathists, Islamists and Qaeda terrorists in Iraq. I said they were fascists before the war. Now we know they are.
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