The War Continues

The Doc is, quite rightly, incensed by the atrocity in Fallujah. It's not just that the contractors were part of an effort to bring in electricity and water, as the Doc says quoting the Derb. In fact, they were actually bringing in food, as Peggy Noonan points out this morning. That is why they were attacked. It is because of the attention to the ordinary needs of Iraqis that wins the war against the insurgency. All they can offer the population is fear, the fear of being blow up in bombings that are increasingly aimed explictly against civilian targets. Remember that this comes after four days of fighting in Fallujah between recently arrived Marines and insurgents that left literally dozens of terrorists dead, terrorists who thought that the Marines would be an easier target than the 82nd Airborne. Killing four contractors was the best that they could do in reprisal. It's like a mini-Tet in Fallujah. We just gutted the insurgency in street battles, they hack up some burned American bodies and get all the news time they could possibly want.

So let's not get too incensed and too vengeful. If reprisals like that were carried out, then we lose the game just as much as we would if we decided to withdraw in a month...or set any sort of arbitrary date for an American withdrawal of forces.

No Iraqi or foreign insurgent will now dare to fire directly upon US military forces. They know they will be killed. Even their bomb attacks have become much less sucessful and frequent than they were in November. We adapt, improvise, and innovate; and due to our Vietnam experience, there are a lot of general officers who realize from first-hand experience that by innovating faster, we stay "inside their loop", to use a hip military phrase of the moment.

This means that the best the terrorists inside Iraq can do is strike at the population. And this is done because they fear the future. As strategypage.com puts it, "Sunni Arabs, who have ruled Iraq for centuries using such brutal methods, are terrified at the prospect of what will happen to them when an Iraqi government is formed by a democratic vote. Wander into any market or coffee shop in Sunni areas and you'll hear talk of "war crime" trials and revenge attacks from Kurds and Shia Arabs (and Christian Arabs, and Turkomen and even Iraqi Jews). The Sunni Arabs have a lot to be scared about, and the attack on the four Americans in Fallujah shows why. The video of the four Americans murdered in Fallujah will be shown throughout Iraq. Sunnis will see it as a victory over the invaders. Most other Iraqis will see it an another example of Sunni Arab cruelty..."

And based on the extensive polls reported upon in the last two weeks, it doesn't seem to me that the majority of Sunnis' will see it as a victory over the invaders. But realize that in June, things will get worse. If there isn't an outbreak of bombings and violence of the sort that happened in Fallujah as a way of swaying the transition of power from Coalition to Provisional Government, then that means in the next two months the insurgents will have been broken. Even with considerable success in the counter-insurgency effort, however, some of the bombers will still get through. We have to be ready for that.