The Redhunter

No, I'm not doing a book review of Rush Limbaugh's second book.

I'm simply repeating what I said last month: We're winning the war in Iraq.

Last year at this time it was not so obvious. We'd stumbled the first time in Fallujah, and failed to take down mullah Sadr decisively. We seemed to be having a hard time getting our hands around the insurgency.

We turned the tide some time ago, although it was not easy to see it at the time. We rooted out the terrorists in Fallujah, and neutralized Sadr. Two elections played a decisive role; the one for the presidency here in the U.S. and the ones in Iraq to form a new government. It may sound partisan to say so, but the fact is that had Kerry won we may have lost in Iraq.

But my purpose is not to rehash our election. The second event, of course, was the election in Iraq. The Sunnis quickly realized that they made a grave mistake by boycotting it. To their credit, the Shi'is and Kurds were magnamimous in victory, inviting Sunnis into the government.

Some, of course, will claim that the current increase in terrorist bombings "prove" that it is the insurgent terrorists who are winning. Theirs, however, is a simplistic view, borne of the idea that wars somehow follow a linear trend. enI dealt with that nonsense last month.

Rich Lowry spelled out the course of events very well in an article in National Review last month, which I excerpted here.

Today, Jack Kelly has a must-read editorial that says just about everything I've been thinking recently (No I did not say that to sound like a know-it-all!). I won't bore you any more with my thoughts, but am going to reprint his editorial in full so you won't even have to click to go read it (aren't I nice):

More than 400 people have been killed in Iraq in the last two weeks, including at least five U.S. Marines taking part in Operation Matador in western Iraq.

A reader wants to know if, in light of this upsurge in violence, I still believe, as I wrote in a column Feb. 27th, that "the war in Iraq is all but won."

My answer is emphatically yes.

The body count is up because two offensives are under way. The insurgents have launched a suicide bombing campaign in an effort to destabilize the new Iraqi government. The Marines are clearing out the rats' nests in western Iraq to which insurgents fled after they were expelled from their stronghold in Fallujah last November.

The suicide attacks gather ominous headlines, but are failing in their strategic purpose. They have not diminished the willingness of Iraqis to enlist in the army and the police. Between 1,500 and 3,000 more sign up each week. And the Shia and the Kurds have not been goaded into bloody confrontations with the Sunnis.

The insurgents have to be discouraged by the headline which appeared in the Arabic newspaper al Sharq al Awsat Monday: "Iraqi Arab Sunnis head toward army enlisting posts in spite of explosions."

Until recently, Sunni religious leaders discouraged support for the government. But now that a Sunni has been appointed minister of defense, they're encouraging Sunnis to enlist.

"The Sunni involvement in the new government ...is a nightmare scenario for (the insurgents) — it means the loss of their only constituency," said the Australian web logger Arthur Chrenkoff, from whose blog I found I al Sharq al Awsat story.

"When the terrorist bombings began to kill large numbers of civilians back in late 2003, many Iraqis believed the Americans were behind the attacks," noted Jim Dunnigan of StrategyPage. "Iraqis didn't believe al Qaida and the Baath Party terrorists could be so stupid. Now, Iraqis consider al Qaida and the Baath Party terrorists to be depraved and rather clueless butchers."

The insurgency is now dominated by al Qaida. The news media describes this as ominous, as they describe every development in Iraq as ominous. But the opposite is true.

Al Qaida is coming to the fore through subtraction. Many of the"former regime elements" who dominated the insurgency are giving up. "The Baathists are secular-oriented socialists with little truck for the strict religious fundamentalism of al Qaida," noted web logger Donald Sensing, a former Army artillery officer. "They have been working together only because they each hate America and democracy, but at bottom, they hate each other, too."

Because they are Iraqis, all but the most blood-drenched Baathists have the option of quitting. Al Qaida does not.

"If they fail in Iraq, Osama and his whole crew are finished," retired Air Force LtGen. Tom McInerny told the Washington Times in a story published Wednesday.

The Marines say the insurgents they're fighting in Operation Matador are almost all foreigners, and that they're well trained, well armed, and fighting like cornered rats.

That's because they are. One has to go to blogs like Chrenkoff's, Dunnigan's, and Sensing's (One Hand Clapping) to get the information and analysis journalists ought to be providing, but aren't. Bill Roggio (Fourth Rail), Chester (Adventures of Chester), Wretchard (Belmont Club) and Scott Koenig (Indepundit), have done a superb job of describing the goals and progress of Operation Matador, complete with maps.

The Marines have established blocking positions on the escape routes into Syria, and are systematically reducing the pockets of resistance. The terrorists are fighting fiercely, because they've nowhere to run. They're dying in big bunches. The Marines are not.

The mere fact that a major offensive is being mounted in the mostly empty western desert indicates the situation in the cities is well enough in hand to spare the troops.

We don't know for how much longer the fighting will go on, or how many casualties there will be. The bloodiest battle of the Pacific war was Okinawa, the last.

But the insurgency's grave was dug militarily in Fallujah last November, and politically when Iraq went to the polls in January. The appointment of a Sunni defense minister and the success of Operation Matador are nails in the coffin.

See, I told you so. |