That the United States is losing the war in Iraq has gone beyond conventional wisdom. It is now a premise that cannot be questioned, on penalty of being charged with the sin of “denial”. Liberals and conservatives, hawks and doves, the President’s staunchest supporters and fiercest critics all agree. Discussion of the new “surge” starts and ends with the question of whether it can “rescue” the American position.
The proverbial Martian reading current op-eds would infer from their tone that our Army and Marines had suffered a succession of reverses and were now grimly hanging on in the face of an overwhelming enemy offensive. He would envision a situation like Dunkirk or Pusan.
The contrast between the gloomy war of the intelligentsia’s imagination and the real one on the ground in Mesopotamia is astonishing. There is no sign that anti-government forces are expanding their numbers, gaining momentum, increasing their control of territory or otherwise advancing militarily. To the contrary: American combat deaths were slightly lower in 2006 than in 2005 or 2004 (and does anybody remember when Joe Wilson and the like were assuring us that the number would rise to 10 or 20 a day?); the Sunni tribal chiefs of Anbar province, the former Ba’athist stronghold, have come over to the Baghdad government’s side; reports indicate that al-Qa’eda recently pulled its men out of the capital; and terrorists have been unable to stifle the Iraqi economy. The increase in violence against civilians, tragic as it is, is not evidence of the enemy’s military strength. It stems primarily from attacks by Shi’ite militias (pro-government, albeit unsavory), spurred to vengeance by last year’s bombing of the al-Askareyya Mosque.
The classic pattern for a successful insurgency begins with guerilla warfare. The guerillas gain control over economic and demographic resources and steadily expand until they can raise armies to overthrow the incumbent regime. None of that is happening in Iraq. No credible observer argues that Ba’athist bitter-enders, al-Qa’eda mufsidun, Sunni tribes, or any combination thereof, will be able to reduce government authority to isolated pockets, demoralize its defenders and finally march into Baghdad with overwhelming force. The vision of helicopters desperately airlifting refugees from the roof of the American embassy, recently invoked by the increasingly bizarre Senator Biden, is fantastical. In 1975 North Vietnam defeated a South Vietnamese army that had no American support whatsoever. The Democrats in Congress had prohibited even the sale of ammunition to our former ally. In the Middle East today, the only armies that could engage the Coalition forces in Baghdad with any possibility of success are those of Israel and Turkey – not likely enlistees on the side of Islamofascism.
There are, in fact, only two plausible scenarios that lead to a regime in Iraq unfavorable to Western interests: In one, advocated by the anti-war Left in this country, the Coalition withdraws its troops, opening the way for Iran, Syria and perhaps Saudi-controlled Arabia to wage a conventional war for dominance over Mesopotamia. In the other, the present government transforms itself into a pro-Iranian dictatorship. The first is solely in our own hands. The second is all but inconceivable so long as a substantial Coalition force remains in Iraq.
To call the overall situation a “defeat” requires an extraordinarily stringent definition of “victory”. In objective military terms, the mufsidun are losing badly, and the only question is how long it will be before their physical and moral capabilities are exhausted. What emerges in Iraq after that may not be wholly in accord with Western interests, but the difficulties then will be political and intellectual: Too many Moslems prefer medieval illusions to modern realities. Too few Moslem leaders are ready and willing to tell the truth to their people. The easy course today, as it has been for a hundred years, is to blame the travails of the dar-al-Islām on malevolent outside forces rather than Moslem practices and attitudes. That is a problem that the West cannot solve in the short run, for reasons that have nothing to do with George W. Bush.
The mufsidun could still win in Iraq. They have made no progress on the battlefield, but plenty of Americans want to hand them a victory. The poll finding that only a bare majority of Democrats desire for the “surge” to succeed is chilling. It won’t be long before liberal opinion makers start extolling the virtues of al-Qa’eda, just as their predecessors idealized Ho Chi Minh.
The rationale for the “surge” is not that it is needed to defeat the enemy in Iraq but that the morale of the American public has fallen to a dangerously low level on account and can be restored only by the imposition of civil order in Baghdad. The objections of our commanders in the theater make a good deal of sense in purely military terms. Peacekeeping in a large city will distract from the task of rooting out the terrorist remnants and driving home the lesson that fighting against the West is a waste of lives. The President was right, however, to overrule them. Since we can now lose this war only at home, military operations must give first priority to the home front.
While it’s always risky to make predictions about warfare, I’m reasonably confident that the “surge” will make ordinary civilians safer in Baghdad. Al-Qa’eda has already scuttled to safer, more distant locales. Indigenous terrorists don’t have that option. They will be forced to devote greater efforts to simple hiding and staying alive, which will reduce their terrorist potential.
The magnitude of the improvement is impossible to predict. It will also be hard to judge after the fact, for, whatever happens, the elite media will portray the “surge” as a failure. Some aspect of the situation six months from now is certain to be negative, and that will be the one we hear about. In the rosiest of scenarios, where the Ba’athist bitter-enders are all killed or captured, the Shi’a militias disband, and the streets of Baghdad become safer than downtown New Orleans, the media will dig up “war crimes” to contemplate with horror. Or they will assert that the “momentary lull” in Iraq was purchased at the cost of turmoil elsewhere in the world. What they won’t do, I soothsay with absolute certainty, is give up the comforting hallucination that America should never fight and can never win.
