Sizing Up Iraq
Things are coming to a head in the Middle East.
by Victor Davis Hanson
National Review Online
From the various insurgencies of the Peloponnesian War to the British victory over Communist guerrillas in Malaya, there remain constants across 2,500 years of time and space that presage victory or defeat. Drawing wisdom from that past, there are at least four critical issues that must always be addressed if we are to create a stable Iraq under the auspices of a broad-based consensual government. So far the occupation has been plagued by mistakes, false assumptions, and incompetence — and yet we find ourselves still with a good chance of success.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR
First, is the United States winning its engagements on the ground? The answer is an overwhelming yes — whether we look, most recently, at Samarra or at the thrashing of the Mahdists in Najaf. The combination of armor incursions, constant sniper attack, and GPS bombing in each case has led to decisive tactical defeat of the insurgents. Our only setback — the unfortunate pullback from Fallujah — was entirely attributable to our wrongheaded constraint, as if we somehow felt that releasing the terrorists from our death grip would either placate the opposition, empower the Iraqi government, or win accolades from the international community. (See here, here, here, and here.)
In fact, our retreat achieved the opposite effect. Thus the withdrawal from Fallujah will be taught for decades as a textbook case of what not to do when suppressing insurgents. Nevertheless, we have reestablished the fact that we can crush all the opposition on the ground, our willingness to restart real hostilities dependent only on how much flak from our critics in the Middle East and Europe we are willing to take.
Let us hope that our planners have learned that whatever ephemeral public relations or humanitarianism they achieved by sparing the terrorists in Fallujah was vastly outweighed by the death and destruction they wrought and the greater number of lives that must now be sacrificed to defeat the emboldened killers for good. The foreign killers in Fallujah are just the sort of folk who trained in Afghanistan, would like to repeat 9/11, and are psychopathic killers of innocent reformers. Instead of worrying about how they got to Fallujah, we should see it as to our advantage that they are now conveniently collected in one central place and can be dealt with en masse. Because the 4th Infantry Division never came down from Turkey during the war into the Sunni Triangle, hundreds of Baathist killers who should have been crushed were not, and instead they melted away. It is now time to finish the job.
Second, are the terrorists — through their suicide bombing, car explosions, hostage-takings, and beheadings — winning widespread Iraqi support? Here I do not mean the anti-American braggadocio we see on spec when a CNN reporter sticks a microphone into the face of someone whose house has just been demolished. Rather, is there a large minority of Iraqis — perhaps four to five million — who are actively helping the terrorists and Islamicists? Again, so far the answer seems to be no; to the degree that civilians provide help and shelter to a Zarqawi and his thugs, it is predicated on self-interest: His men are ruthless and in the neighborhood, while the Americans are forgiving and distant. There is as yet no mass movement analogous to the Vietcong — one with a clear-cut and popular agenda to seize power and either restore Saddam or institute sharia. Indeed, the Iraqi democratic military has suffered as many battle casualties in its struggle against the terrorists as have the Americans.
Third, does fighting the terrorists lead to a political resolution that offers manifest advantages to the majority of Iraqis, and is it recognized as such? The answer is yes, with scheduled elections in January that could develop along the lines of those in Afghanistan. The increasing role of the Iraqi defense forces, the growing prominence of Mr. Allawi, and the preparations for voting in less than four months can all offer a political endgame that will soon lead to some sort of greater freedom and prosperity. That we have been inept in publicizing our achievements is regrettable; but still, most Iraqis grasp that American success leads to water, power, and jobs, and that Zarqawi's victory ensures heads rolling on the ground or spiked on fence posts.
Unlike the case of South Vietnam, the provisional democratic government is not flanked by a hostile nuclear China or Soviet Union, nor is it attacked by an organized conventional military fueled by the romance of a secular and global leftist utopianism. Not even French students march on behalf of Zarqawi's beheaders. So there is an opportunity for a political dynamic to emerge that terrifies al Qaeda: an oil-rich democratic Iraqi state, near a similarly consensual Turkey and Afghanistan, with nuclear India, Russia, and Pakistan — all hostile to Islamic fascists — nearby.
Indeed, the long-term strategic outlook for al Qaeda is far worse than its occasional macabre killings on the ground might suggest: Its victims are often Muslims, from all over the world, and are entirely innocent. So far the terrorists have not galvanized the Arab Street as much as dealt a crushing public-relations blow to Islam itself, succeeding in just a few years to make the young Arab Muslim male the most suspicious and scrutinized fellow on the planet. Indeed, in three years bin Laden and Zarqawi have done for the stereotyping of Arabs what Hitler did for Germans in 15 — and it will take decades to undo the damage to the reputations of millions in the Middle East not yet born...
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