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Tuesday, December 14, 2004

Winning the War

Fareed Zakaria writes in Newsweek that we are winning in Iraq:

The best evidence for this comes from the audio tape released by Abu Mussab al-Zarqawi, one of the insurgent leaders, on Nov. 24, in which he laments that the clerics, leaders and people of Iraq abandoned him: 'You have let us down in the darkest circumstances and handed us over to the enemy ... You have quit supporting the mujahedin ... Instead of implementing God's orders you chose safety and preferred your money and your sons.' Iraq remains unstable and highly unsafe. But if al-Zarqawi is reading the public's mood right, the insurgency is losing popular support. It will try to disrupt the elections. The bigger problem remains Sunni participation. But assuming substantial Shia and Kurdish turnout, if 30 percent of the Sunnis vote, and that is quite possible, it's enough to give the new government some real national legitimacy. And that will make it easier to tackle the insurgency.
I was certainly never as doubtful as Zakaria was at times about our prospects for success in Iraq but the past few weeks have been good news, as evidenced by the relative lack of bad news. This is certainly not to say that their won't continue to be violence in Iraq, winning isn't won, but Fallujah has seemed to have heartened those Iraqis who want democracy and certainly the claims that the campaign would turn more Iraqis against us haven't been born out. This bit of Zakaria's story is also interesting:
Six months ago America was headed for disaster in Iraq, with Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani threatening to call for active Shia opposition. At this point, Iraq policy was taken out of the Pentagon and run out of the White House, under Condoleezza Rice and her associate Robert Blackwill. Then began the reversals. Washington finally asked the United Nations to step in and arrange a transition that would junk the U.S.-appointed (and highly unpopular) Governing Council. The new, Interim Government, which came into being in June, was chosen by the United Nations and blessed by Sistani. De-Baathification ended. Military operations became much more conscious of their political effects, beginning with a carefully executed one in Najaf. And while vowing that it didn't need more troops, the administration has slowly increased troop strength so that by January 2005 the force will be 30 percent larger than it was a year ago.
I disagree with Zakaria on this. While it may well be true that the White House has taken a more active role, I believe that this doesn't demonstrate incompetence on the part of the military, but rather a learning curve that all wars require. Every conflict is different and the plans are never perfect going into them. Did we do everything perfectly? Obviously not. But no military ever has. I am no general, but I have made somewhat of an amateur study of war. Given historical precedents, Iraq has gone amazingly well so far and our military and political classes have adapted quite well to it's particular needs.

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