Decision ‘08

Reconsidering Iraq

There is, for the first time in months, a sense that Iraq is turning for the better. The breaking of the political deadlock has occurred in tandem with a seeming weaking in al-Qaeda’s position. AJ comments:

Well, the civil war has broken out and broken out ugly in Iraq. Not the one the leftwing media and liberals predicted, but it is out in the open. Between Sunnis and the Foreign Terrorists. Now that the US ‘war’ effort is over in Iraq (there is a new government which is an ally to us, so by definition we are not at war with Iraq), the divide between the Sunni’s and the foreign terrorists is cracking wide open.

That’s an important point; America remains at war, to be sure, but the war is not against the Iraqis - it’s a continuation of the War on Terror, on the Iraqi front, if you will.

The editorial board of the Washington Post leads with similar sentiments today:

The appearance of an al-Qaeda video on the Internet more often than not is a sign of good news in the war on terrorism. Tuesday’s posting by Iraqi commander Abu Musab al-Zarqawi is the latest example: The 34-minute show by the newly unhooded extremist is in part a bid for advantage in factional feuding that has curtailed al-Qaeda’s visibility and effectiveness. More important, the terrorist acknowledges that the agreement of Iraq’s leading Shiite, Sunni and Kurdish parties on the country’s first permanent postwar government last week was, as he bluntly put it, “a dagger in the heart.” The Zarqawi movement has spent the past several years trying to ignite a sectarian war between Iraq’s Sunnis and Shiites; the new “unity” government, if it takes hold, could be the turning point toward defeating that strategy.

Iraq’s insurgents and terrorists are a long way from beaten, as the daily toll of killings tragically demonstrates. But the nominee for prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, has made an encouraging start. Although he has yet to form a cabinet — that may take another month — Mr. Maliki was on Iraqi television Tuesday night appealing for national unity. Though he has been thought of as a relatively uncompromising Shiite partisan, Mr. Maliki promised to appoint nonsectarian ministers and said he believed the participation of “our Sunni brothers” in the government would “dry up the sources” of the insurgency. He appears focused on pragmatic results, saying his top priority after fostering national accord is increasing electricity supplies.

Not for the first time, I find myself truly grateful that we have a leader committed to seeing this through, low approval ratings be damned…

8 Responses to “Reconsidering Iraq”

1 AcademicElephant Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 9:55 am
Again I find myself wondering what the other side of the aisle will do if, God forbid, Bush was right.

Maybe I should have been a psychologist.
2 HenryH Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 10:16 am
Excuse me? How is the situation different, with regards to whether we are “at war with Iraq” or not, as a function of the nature of their govenment?

Is it not the case that Iraq has been governed by American allies for nearly three years now? Were we “at war with Iraq” when Paul Bremer was in charge? When Allawi was PM? When al-Jaffari was PM - by way of an earlier election?

AJ is spouting nonsense, and all you do is nod.

With the new PM, what we have accomplished is to establish, in the highest levels of their government, someone with close personal and historical ties to Syria, to go along with all the others there who have such relationships with Iran.
3 Mark Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 11:49 am
HenryH, I don’t claim we are not at war…I thought I was very explicit about that…AJ states it stronger than I would, but it’s still an important counterweight to those elements (stronger on the left) who still talk about a ‘resistance’ in Iraq. There is no resistance, really, to speak off, there are struggling factions, but it’s not the U.S. presence that they are struggling over, it’s who gets the lion’s share of power.

Is that new? Yes, I think it is…

Is it perfect? Of course not…but it beats the days when you could really speak of a true ‘resistance’…
4 Mark Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 11:57 am
And just one more thought - of course, there are the terrorists, and of course the casualty count is still terribly high…but the terrorists have been nearly completely marginalized now, as far as public support and sympathy - and that was the larger point of both AJ and the WaPo, I believe…
5 Mark Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 11:59 am
Oh, hell, one more thought, again…’what we have accomplished’ with the new PM? Who’s we? He’s not a figurehead, he’s a compromise figure chosen by the Iraqis to break the months-long impasse since the last elections.

Winning in Iraq is not imposing a U.S. figurehead…it’s bringing real democratic change to the Mideast, even if the result is an unfriendly government. An unfriendly, but democratic government, is, in fact, probably the best we can hope for…
6 Sgt Garth Gehlen Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 1:31 pm
My name is Sgt Gehlen from the U.S. Centrasl Command Public Affairs office. A transcript of the Zarqawi message can be found in the “What Extremists Are Saying” section of the CENTCOM website: www.centcom.mil
7 Mark Says:
April 27th, 2006 at 1:37 pm
Thank you very much, Sgt., and God bless you and all our wonderful troops…
8 Swords Crossed » Iraq: War and Politics - Part 2 Says:
May 1st, 2006 at 9:15 am
[…] At Red State, they write: You hear a lot these days about war fatigue. I’m feeling it myself–we’re three years into the mission and I am getting fed up. Fed up with the sanctimonious anti-war left, who in the absence of smoking stockpiles of WMD are unwilling or unable to understand the value of a free and stable Iraq and fed up with the equally short-sighted conservatives among whom it is now fashionable to recant earlier support for the Iraq war and declare its failure according to their new-found “historical” perspective. Hindsight is of course supposed to be 20/20, but I am wondering if enough time has yet gone by to give anyone such clarity of vision. At the end of the week, Mark Coffey had two interesting posts (here and here) on the changing political landscape in Iraq that led me to reflect on the state of our ongoing “dialogue” over the decision to invade, which seems to focus alternately on whether we were right or wrong to go in given what is happening in the country now and on the dubious merits of the post-war reconstruction effort. I put dialogue in quotes because it seems to me that there’s precious little debate going on. Pervading “conventional wisdom,” to quote John Kenneth Galbraith, holds that we were wrong and reconstruction has failed. The administration went in without a plan and stubbornly refused to develop one out of stupidity or arrogance. Because of unresolvable sectarian differences that we should have known about going in, the government-that-never-was is a shambles, civil war is raging, and it’s only a matter of time before a pro-Iran ultra-conservative theocracy takes power. The Iraqi security forces are a disaster, if they exist at all. . . . Such conventional wisdom has become the foundation of accepted truth on which most discussions of Iraq now build. What amazes me is the certitude of those who have been willing–even eager–to throw in the towel and declare failure over the last six months. […]