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I didn’t think the plan would show results so quickly. In a column a year ago, I predicted that even with the additional troops, by the end of 2007 the pattern of mayhem would be broken only occasionally by reports of improvement. Sectarian warfare would drag on and headlines would bring more news of grisly massacres.
Instead, the surge coincided with an “awakening” that began in Anbar province and spread rapidly to other parts of the country. Iraqis of all stripes have had enough of al-Qaida and jihadism.
Now, normal life is breaking out in some unlikely places. Commercial air service recently began in Mosul, once one of the most violent cities in Iraq.
Is this victory?
Not yet, but it’s in sight, as defined by the Bush administration: “a unified, democratic and federal Iraq that can govern, defend and sustain itself and is an ally in the war on terror.”
A more down-to-earth definition was suggested recently by Victor Davis Hanson in an article in The Claremont Review of Books. Victory, he wrote, isn’t achieving all of your objectives. It’s achieving more of yours than your enemy does of his.
The article (available at http://claremont.org/publications/crb/id.1500/article_detail.asp), also offers some critical perspective for those who see the Iraq war as an unparalleled debacle. Almost all of America’s wars have been marred by incompetence, strategic blindness, intelligence failures and sheer bungling.
We were caught off guard by Pearl Harbor. We were unprepared for the German offensive that triggered the Battle of the Bulge. The North Korean invasion of the South caught us flat-footed. Later, several hundred thousand Chinese troops slipped into North Korea before our forces were even aware of their presence.
In World War I, we sent poorly trained and equipped troops into the meat grinder of trench warfare. We misjudged Japanese strength on Okinawa. In 1942-43, we ordered thousands of air crews to fly disastrous raids over German cities in broad daylight.
The arrival of the right strategy and the right commander usually comes only after a long series of disasters and foul-ups. In Iraq, the right man turned out to be Gen. David Petraeus, who advocated a counterinsurgency strategy aimed at separating jihadists from the general population.
As retired Gen. Barry McCaffrey wrote after a recent trip to Iraq, al-Qaida has been defeated tactically in Anbar and on the streets of Baghdad. “The intelligence picture has shifted from night to day,” he wrote, “as Iraqis by the thousands come forward to identify (al-Qaida in Iraq) and criminal Shiite extremists in their communities.”
With the Congress controlled by Democrats, however, sustaining this momentum will be tough. Success in Iraq would plant a seed that could, over time, bring greater stability to the world’s most troublesome region, a strategic prize in which the Democratic majority in Congress seems utterly indifferent.
Democrats spent their first year in the majority by insisting on one pointless, futile vote after another in an unsuccessful attempt to tie additional war funding to troop-withdrawal deadlines.
It’s amazing how doggedly this party clings to the Vietnam-era view that the moral high ground is always claimed by those seeking to “end the war” and “bring the troops home.” The idea of ending a war by winning simply doesn’t compute.
If leading Dems had had their way, their mandated troop withdrawals would have begun this summer — just as the troop surge was nearing full strength and before the initial clearing operations could even begin.
So far, the center has held in Iraq, but the future is hardly guaranteed. The next test will come as the 21,500 troops that made up the surge are withdrawn, and the Iraqi Army and police take on a bigger share of the security load.
Al Gore called Iraq the “single worst strategic mistake in American history.” But that’s a fair description of what would have ensued from the Democrats’ preferred policy — a precipitous U.S. withdrawal that would have left Iraq naked to the jihadists and the Middle East veering toward chaos.
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