The attacks in Fallujah, Iraq were horrifying, yet Mitch Berg finds something I’d missed in the coverage of the attacks:
No American troops were involved in the fighting. Officers from the 82nd Airborne Division stationed a 10-minute drive away could hear the battle clearly. They offered help but the Hammad said it wasn’t needed. The Americans did provide additional ammunition and weapons, including light machine guns.
After the battle, soldiers at the civil defense base proudly displayed a light machine gun and a pair of rocket propelled grenade launchers they had captured from the attackers. Thursday, insurgents fired a pair of rocket propelled grenades at this same base while Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, was staging an inspection. Abizaid was unhurt.
Mitch Berg then notes the context of this news:
The Iraqi police got beaten up. And then they hit back.
They took worse than they gave, but – and this is the important part – they didn’t buckle and run. They told the 82nd Airborne to hold off. And they did the job themselves.
And that is a key step toward victory; when the US can leave Sunni towns like Fallujah behind, and the locals will fight the Islamofascist scum as hard as we do.
This is important. The goal is to have the Iraqis running their own affairs as soon as is possible. The fact that a group of Iraqi policemen were willing to put their lives on the line to fight the terrorists says a lot. It says that the Iraqi people are indeed on the right side of this war, and that even in the worst part of the country we can count on the Iraqi people fighting back against the terrorists.
Yes the insurgents killed well over a 100 Iraqis in the last few days, and no this isn’t a victory quite yet.
But as Berg notes, soon there will be a victory thanks to the Iraqi police.
Zarqawi’s memo was just one sign of something that the major media is completely missing – we’re winning the war. The terrorists may be winning some tactical victories, but strategically they’re on the wrong side of time and the Iraqi people. After decades of oppression the Iraqi people are finding that they have the ability to fight back, and as that happens the last person I’d want to be is the person trying to put the old regime back in place.
Great, so now the police have confidence in themselves, except that a huge number of them were just killed, which is probably gonna temper that somewhat. Once the story spreads of how they didn’t request American assistance and got pummelled, don’t you think that could reinforce the notion that Iraq isn’t ready for us to leave in the summer, especially among Iraqis?
“The terrorists may be winning some tactical victories, but strategically they’re on the wrong side of time…”
No, strategically they’re in a good position, since we’ve set a date for turning over control and have a tentative timetable for force withdrawal. Now they know how long they should lay low, which targets are best to hit for now (avoid most Americans, focus on Iraqis that cooperate–you’ll piss off your countrymen but you probably weren’t hoping for them to be consulted in the process, anyway), and how long their munitions need to hold out. What happens in situations of popular rebelion of revolutionary activity is that rebels look for opportunities to strike, while spending most of their time avoiding detection. The government (or, in this case, the US) is forced to act in an aggressive manner to supress the revolutionaries. However, once a timetable is in place it becomes even more important for the government to finish rooting out enough elements of the resistance to make rebel activity too costly for potential rebels to regroup after the deadline.
Check out THE REBEL’S DILEMMA by Mark Irving Lichbach (you’ve probably seen it before, Jay) to see what the identified causes of rebel activity are and what steps can exacerbate or reduce the problems.
That’s an interesting piece, but the insurgency in Iraq isn’t a popular uprising. There are no more than 2,000 terrorists operating in Iraq, and very few of them are Iraqis. Most of them are Qaeda operatives brought in from Syria and Saudi Arabia. The only way the insurgency could be successful would be to bring Iraq to civil war, which seems very unlikely.
Instead, the terrorists are acting like simple thugs, and that has ensured that any chance of achieving a popular uprising is gone.
“…The insurgency in Iraq isn’t a popular uprising. There are no more than 2,000 terrorists operating in Iraq, and very few of them are Iraqis.”
Lichbach’s book is not just on how popular uprisings are conducted, but largely about how these uprisings are formed and strengthened in early stages (the “the identified causes of rebel activity are and what steps can exacerbate or reduce the problems” part was not directly pointing at the above paragraph, though the problems with setting timetables for exits from situations are discussed abstractly). Also, we have no way on earth of knowing the number of terrorists or, more importantly, POTENTIAL rebels there are in Iraq. The terrorists, foreign or not, are succeeding in increasing the costs of cooperation with the government, and increasing the costs of continued occupation by the US. Bringing me to my next point…
…when you say “The only way the insurgency could be successful would be to bring Iraq to civil war, which seems very unlikely,” are you forgetting the risk of a Shi’ite resistance, especially if al-Sistani doesn’t think he’s gotten a fair deal, or are you just choosing to ignore the risk because it doesn’t fit the party line?
“There are no more than 2,000 terrorists operating in Iraq, and very few of them are Iraqis. ”
You know, you quote that like our intelligence has never been wrong before. Hmm….