Jihadi Du Jour

Yesterday, Kuwaits’s Arab Times, featured the following opinion by Ahmed Al-Jarallah, the paper’s Editor-in-Chief. For those who advocate we should leave Iraq immediately, for those who claim that cutting and running, before finishing the job, is in the world’s best interest the following written by an Arab newspaper editor, should give them cause to ponder:

Arabs fear a job half done

By Ahmed Al-Jarallah
Editor-in-Chief, the Arab Times

WHEN the United States sent its troops to the region, it had the support of logic. However, America currently finds itself in a crisis for sending its military forces to the land of lost opportunities. At least these are the theories being taught at Brookings and Hoover Institutes, from where several of the neo-conservative strategy experts graduated. This is why the US administration was aware of all the historic events and the nature of the changes in the region since the occupation of Palestine, weakening of the ties of European countries with Arabs and the birth of new ties with the US, effect of the Cold War on some Arab regimes, the era of mutiny, and revolution. Even some Arab leaders don’t know anything about these issues. All the detailed studies on these issues lead us to one important conclusion: the head of the snake is no longer al-Qaeda. Currently it is Iran, which wants to turn the region into a commonwealth that belongs to it.

Under such circumstances naturally the United States wants more information to investigate the new developments. This is why the US Secretary of State, Defense Secretary and several members of the US Congress are visiting the region frequently. This makes us wonder whether the US has yet to complete its diagnosis of the problem and whether it is ready to make a move to achieve its objective.

The first step the United States has to take is make an effort to reassure Arabs, especially its allies who are afraid they will be left alone if the US decides to end its campaign and withdraw its troops from the region. Arabs are afraid because they will be in direct confrontation with people whose minds are rigid and dream about victory in the “Mother of all Battles.”

Arabs are afraid because Saddam continued to torture Iraqis even after the liberation of Kuwait as the Americans didn’t end his regime before ending their military campaign. Moreover Somali militias went out of control as their operations were not ended for good and the Lebanese lived their worst nightmare in the mid Eighties when American and multi national troops left them alone. It is no wonder Arabs are afraid of facing similar nightmares. No one can deny the fact that the US administration committed some mistakes in Iraq. But such mistakes are natural and can be considered small compared to the achievement of liberating Iraq, which is tasting freedom and democracy after 35 years of suppression.

The first Gulf War ended without taking down Saddam Hussein. Thanks for this this is due entirely to traitor par excellence, James Baker, who because of his saving Hussein’s head twice is directly responsible for the current Iraq War and the death and torture of hundreds of thousands of Iraqis and American soldiers… Were it not for his powerful friends he should be tried as a war criminal!). The result of leaving Saddam in place was a massacre of Shiites (who were at the time, very sympathetic to the Americans whom they viewed as would be liberators) and Kurds.

And yes, folks there have been grievous mistakes made in Iraq, whether by ineffective military commanders, whether by the civilians representing American administration. On the other hand, there is now a military commander, General Patreus, who rightly sized up the situation on the ground and is slowly but steadily producing the desired results. The possibility of successful results seem to scare to death the “cut and run” party in Congress! As Charles Krauthammer wrote, on this past July 13th:

“The key to turning [Anbar] around was the shift in allegiance by tribal sheiks. But the sheiks turned only after a prolonged offensive by American and Iraqi forces, starting in November, that put al-Qaeda groups on the run.”

– The New York Times, July 8

Finally, after four terribly long years, we know what works. Or what can work. A year ago, a confidential Marine intelligence report declared Anbar province (which comprises about a third of Iraq’s territory) lost to al-Qaeda. Now, in what the Times’s John Burns calls an ” astonishing success,” the tribal sheiks have joined our side and committed large numbers of fighters that, in concert with American and Iraqi forces, have largely driven out al-Qaeda and turned its former stronghold of Ramadi into one of most secure cities in Iraq.

It began with a U.S.-led offensive that killed or wounded more than 200 enemy fighters and captured 600. Most important was the follow-up. Not a retreat back to American bases but the setting up of small posts within the population that, together with the Iraqi national and tribal forces, have brought relative stability to Anbar.

The same has started happening in many of the Sunni areas around Baghdad, including Diyala province — just a year ago considered as lost as Anbar — where, for example, the Sunni insurgent 1920 Revolution Brigades has turned against al-Qaeda and joined the fight on the side of U.S. and Iraqi government forces.

We don’t yet know if this strategy will work in mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods. Nor can we be certain that this cooperation between essentially Sunni tribal forces and an essentially Shiite central government can endure. But what cannot be said — although it is now heard daily in Washington — is that the surge, which is shorthand for Gen. David Petraeus’s new counterinsurgency strategy, has failed. The tragedy is that, just as a working strategy has been found, some Republicans in the Senate have lost heart and want to pull the plug.

Even some Republicans have been so cowered by their Democrat colleagues they are turning against what works. It isn’t just the Reid, Pelosi and Co. crowd, some Republicans are themselves Defeatocrats who refuse to consider the facts on the ground and are looking forward to defeat.

[…]A month ago, Petraeus was asked whether we could still win in Iraq. The general, who had recently attended two memorial services for soldiers lost under his command, replied that if he thought he could not succeed he would not be risking the life of a single soldier.

Just this week, Petraeus said that the one thing he needs more than anything else is time. To cut off Petraeus’s plan just as it is beginning — the last surge troops arrived only last month — on the assumption that we cannot succeed is to declare Petraeus either deluded or dishonorable. Deluded in that, as the best-positioned American in Baghdad, he still believes we can succeed. Or dishonorable in pretending to believe in victory and sending soldiers to die in what he really knows is an already failed strategy.

That’s the logic of the wobbly Republicans’ position. But rather than lay it on Petraeus, they prefer to lay it on Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and point out his government’s inability to meet the required political “benchmarks.” As a longtime critic of the Maliki government, I agree that it has proved itself incapable of passing laws important for long-term national reconciliation.

But first comes the short term. And right now we have the chance to continue to isolate al-Qaeda and, province by province, deny it the Sunni sea in which it swims. A year ago, it appeared that the only way to win back the Sunnis and neutralize the extremists was with great national compacts about oil and power sharing. But Anbar has unexpectedly shown that even without these constitutional settlements, the insurgency can be neutralized and al-Qaeda defeated at the local and provincial levels with a new and robust counterinsurgency strategy.

The costs are heartbreakingly high — increased American casualties as the enemy is engaged and spectacular suicide bombings designed to terrify Iraqis and demoralize Americans. But the stakes are extremely high as well.

In the long run, agreements on oil, federalism and de-Baathification are crucial for stabilizing Iraq. But their absence at this moment is not a reason to give up in despair, now that we finally have a counterinsurgency strategy in place that is showing success against the one enemy — al-Qaeda — that both critics and supporters of the war maintain must be fought everywhere and at all cost

So why are Defeatocrats so deathly afraid of letting General Patreus show us if indeed he’s capable of finishing the job he started? The following will present us with the real reason for to their infatuation with defeat (H/T: Yid with Lid)

The Good News is Bad News It’s tough being a member of Congress. Even if you’re in the majority, as is Rep. Nancy Boyda of Kansas, you never know when your ears may be assaulted by outrageous and offensive ideas.

Like what? At a recent hearing of the Armed Services Committee, retired Gen. Jack Keane said “progress is being made” by U.S. military forces in Iraq; “We are on the offensive and we have the momentum,” he added. The freshman congresswoman was so distressed by these remarks that she got up and she walked out.

There was “only so much” she could take, she explained, so she “had to leave the room…after so much of the frustration of having to listen to what we listened to.” She said she was worried, too, that General Keane’s remarks “will in fact show up in the media and further divide this country.” Hey, that could happen!

What the good Representative from Kansas is so upset about, is not that it might “further divide this country,” what she’s really afraid of is that any evidence that this administration’s plans may have a chance of success might result in the Defeatocrats being dumped into the trashbin of American Congressional history by the very voters that brought them into power. Defeatocrats, like Representative Boyda, have shown themselves as caring little or nothing about the country as a whole. Instead they have focused on a very narrow but loud constituency whose understanding of events betrays their sheep like mentality, their total ignorance of current and historical events… and extreme mental laziness to boot. If General Patreus is allowed to succeed, Boyda and her cohorts are in for a heap of political trouble!

So, coming back to Ahmed Al-Jarallah’s opinion piece:

As a society, which suffered sectarian disputes, Iraq needed rehabilitation. If the United States were to withdraw its troops now, Iraq will suffer even more and create a fertile environment for the birth of thousands of clones of Saddam. We know some Iraqis want the Americans get out of their country. But we also know a huge segment of the Iraqi society wants the US troops to stay because they are scared of being left alone. The United States is aware that Iraq is the cornerstone of the Middle East which links three continents. What America needs at the moment is an experienced surgeon who can handle this historic operation in the Middle East by removing the tumor, which is the cause of all troubles.

Experienced surgeons usually don’t negotiate when it comes to dangerous tumors which are a risk to the stability, security and economic future of this vital region.

Arabs know Arabs best, they share the culture, the hopes and the ideals. It would behoove the Defeatocrats in both parties to heed the words of those Arabs who have consistently shown they share America’s ideas and values of freedom and lasting peace by destroying the enemy of both, through swift, unavoidably surgically precise actions. To cut and run may bring a few weeks of calm at best, but whether those few weeks come to fruition or not, the result of cutting and running will be the emboldening of terrorism, the betrayal of and the subsequent distrust by those we set out to help. More importantly and definitely worse, it will bring terrorism back to our very own shores!

(Cartoon by Chuck Asay as it appeared on August 1, 2007
at Townhall.com)