The Chaldean archbishop of Kirkuk takes the world to task for their reporting on Iraq:
“It is not all death and destruction,” explained Archbishop Louis Sako in an interview Tuesday published by AsiaNews.
“Much is positive in Iraq today,” he said. “Universities are operating, schools are open, people go out onto the streets normally.” He did acknowledge that “where there’s a kidnapping or a homicide the news gets out immediately, and this causes fear among the people.”
Yet, “there is no organized resistance” in Iraq, the prelate insisted. “Those who commit such violence are resisting against Iraqis who want to build their country.
“Iraqis instead are resisting against terrorism and are not carrying out attacks, which instead are the work of foreign infiltrators. I have stressed this before: Saudis, Jordanians, Syrians and Sudanese have entered Iraq. Prime Minister Allawi has said this as well. And clearly, there are also Iraqi collaborators who, for money, help the terrorist hide.”
It’s important to note that the violence in Iraq is overwhelmingly concentrated in the Sunni Triangle. With the terrorist stronghold of Fallujah now broken, the terrorists in Iraq are scrambling. They’re doing as much damage as they can while they still can, which is why we’re seeing such an uptick in violence as we are now. At the same time, there are only a few thousand terrorists operating in Iraq. In the past days we’ve just killed 1,600+ of them. Those kind of operational losses are not sustainable. We’ve had 51 soldiers lose their lives and about 400 wounded in some of the fiercest fighting we’ve ever had in Iraq. Even with our forces stretched as they are, the terrorists are no match for our training, discipline, and firepower. We’ve done what the Russians failed to do at Grozny, which is engage the terrorists at their own level. The the terrorists used the same tactics in Fallujah as they did in Grozny – small cells of riflemen, grenadiers with RPGs, and snipers operating in small groups that would work together to entrap the other side.
The reason why Grozny was a bloodbath where Fallujah was not is that we did the same thing. As Belmont Club explains, the Russians were counting on there being a traditional perimeter defense in Grozny. Instead they were lured into a trap. The Marines, on the other hand, knew they were fighting an asymmetric war, and adapted their tactics accordingly. We used small fire teams coordinating with each other using our superior air power to bring overwhelming force to the enemy. We fought the enemy as they would fight us, and we killed orders of magnitude more of them because our soldiers are better at those tactics than they are.
What has been accomplished in Fallujah is denying the terrorists safe haven. Without weapons, safe houses, and bomb plants, the terrorists can’t keep up their operational momentum. You have to have a certain amount of time and safety in order to regroup and coordinating attacks. Depriving the enemy of that forces them to stay on the run, which means that they can’t execute the kind of coordinated attacks that they have in the past. The factories that manufactured the car bombs used to kill hundreds of Iraqis and Americans have been destroyed. We destroyed a massive complex of ammunition bunkers resulting in an incredible 45 minutes of continuous secondary explosions. How many tons of munitions were stored there is unknown, but every ton of this material that is destroyed is a ton that can’t be converted into IEDs to be used against our troops.
This isn’t the end of the terrorist “insurgency” in Iraq, but it is the turning point. The coalition now has the operational momentum against the terrorists. Our biggest mistake was not doing this sooner. Now that we’ve deprived the enemy of their major stronghold, we need to continue to put the pressure on them. The terrorists will do everything they can to stop the progress of Iraq elections. Our job is to ensure that they don’t have the chance to do so. It will be a tough job that is not over yet, but we can and will achieve our goals and allow democracy to take root in Iraq.
Ideally, we should have finished the job last April. I can only guess that politics intervened and someone whispered in GWB’s ear that war is unpredictable and casualties might have been heavy among our soldiers or Iraqi civilians — which the Democrats would have made a meal out of, and possibly this reckoning never would have happened.
You are probably right that this will be the turning point against the kind of insurgency we have been up against so far. Unfortunately, the undesirable neighbors among the Iraqis will switch to new tactics, perhaps going under deep cover, Al Qaeda-style. But the flexibility and intelligence-gathering of our forces seem to have worked well so far, which gives me hope that whatever the next round brings, we can cope.