Iraq - Why the Terrorists are Failing

The Belmont Club has some thoughts.

In retrospect, the insurgency's greatest failing was its inability to create a "national united front" against United States "occupation". To the end it remained a sectarian movement; and the narrowness of this focus was probably the price of its alliance with Syrian intelligence and Al Qaeda, whose tent was never large enough to admit the Shia or the Kurds. The moment of greatest danger to OIF probably came in April of 2004, when the towns west of Baghdad -- Falluja in particular -- erupted along with Moqtada Al Sadr's Mahdi Army in the south. Then, if ever, was the time to realize a "national united front". The American decision to go on the defensive on the Sunni front by aborting the Marine assault on Falluja and turning to crush the Sadr's Shi'a threat -- objectively the main threat because the Shi'as are the majority -- may have been fortuitous. Falluja never became a national symbol of resistance; and America gained time to build up effective Iraqi forces. By the time US forces returned to Falluja in November, it had acquired an evil reputation as the locus of slaughterhouses for Sunni insurgents. And the operation was carried out against a town largely deserted by its civilians and held by an enemy too vainglorious to run, with embryonic Iraqi forces in tentative attendance. Although the balance of opinion is that the aborting the First Battle of Falluja was a mistake, historians will have an interesting time examining whether in retrospect the seeds of victory were planted then. But if the failure to create a "national united front" constituted its principal strategic mistake, it was the insurgency's reliance on terror which ultimately poisoned its bloodstream. Terror is a Frankenstein monster which can destroy its creator unless it is carefully controlled. The myriad and decentralized killers, whose decentralization was accounted a military asset by some analysts -- turned their car bombs, mortars and knives on ordinary Sunnis, Shi'as and Kurds. While attacks on the Shi'a pilgrims, for example, may have brought the insurgency momentary recognition in the Western media, no one but a fool could believe it would buy them anything but enmity among its victims. Decentralization turned out to be another term for 'no command and control'. For terror to succeed it must succeed; against an immoveable object like the US Armed Forces it gradually became a public menace and another species of crime.

And yet the Left still want to make the Vietnam comparison.

More from the Belmont Club here.

It has been the presumption by some writers that if the Iraqi insurgency was not losing, it was automatically winning. But there is an argument to made for asserting the alternative: that if the insurgency wasn't winning then it was losing. If it failed to stop the gradual formation of organs of governance in the Kurdish and Shi'ite areas it would find itself further and further away from its goal to restore the status quo ante. The insurgents may have entertained hopes of driving US forces from Najaf; the Left may have believed that they could: but what chance do they have of driving the largely Shi'ite security forces from Najaf now? As United States forces begin to withdraw from Iraq the process in Najaf will be repeated in other Shi'ite and Kurdish localities. At some point the new Iraq, the Iraq irretrievably severed from its Ba'athist past will acquire a momentum too great to reverse.

The forthcoming trial of Saddam Hussein at the hands of a government which his own ethnic base has largely refused to join underscores this emerging reality. Saddam Hussein is the former President of Iraq. Jalal Talabani is the current President of that country. Neither Saddam nor the insurgency may like it; but there it is.

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