This article (tip to Instapundit) says that the Baathists are giving up:
The wider Sunni insurgency — the groups beyond Al Qaeda — is being slowly, and surely, defeated. The average insurgent today feels demoralized, disillusioned, and hunted. Those who have not been captured yet are opting for a quieter life outside of Iraq. Al Qaeda continues to grow for the time being as it cannibalizes the other insurgent groups and absorbs their most radical and hardcore fringes into its fold. The Baathists, who had been critical in spurring the initial insurgency, are becoming less and less relevant, and are drifting without a clear purpose following the hanging of their idol, Saddam Hussein. Rounding out this changing landscape is that Al Qaeda itself is getting a serious beating as the Americans improve in intelligence gathering and partner with more reliable Iraqi forces.
In other words, battling the insurgency now essentially means battling Al Qaeda. This is a major accomplishment.
Last October, my sources began telling me about rumblings among the insurgent strategists suggesting that their murderous endeavor was about to run out of steam. This sense of fatigue began registering among mid-level insurgent commanders in late December, and it has devolved to the rank and file since then. The insurgents have begun to feel that the tide has turned against them.
In many ways, the timing of this turnaround was inadvertent, coming at the height of political and bureaucratic mismanagement in Washington and Baghdad. A number of factors contributed to this turnaround, but most important was sustained, stay-the-course counterinsurgency pressure. At the end of the day, more insurgents were ending up dead or behind bars, which generated among them a sense of despair and a feeling that the insurgency was a dead end.
The Washington-initiated "surge" will speed-up the ongoing process of defeating the insurgency. But one should not consider the surge responsible for the turnaround. The lesson to be learned is to keep killing the killers until they realize their fate.
Is this what is happening now? If so, it is consistent with what I've thought. (And see here)
I disagree that al Qaeda is the main threat. While al Qaeda will be the main source of casualties, they cannot take over Iraq. And with allies in Anbar and hopefully new Sunni allies in central Iraq who will turn on the jihadis now, al Qaeda will be destroyed as a foreign invader rsisted by Shias, Kurds, and Sunni Arabs. Cutting the supply lines to Iran and Syria will help destroy them, too.
Angry Shias seduced by Sadr's call for supremacy have been the main threat since about a year ago because they could potentially have the numbers, weapons from Iran, and appeal to fellow Shias to capture the government outside of the democratic process.
But this threat can be beaten. The Mahdi Army is a rabble good at killing civilians. It cannot stand up to soldiers and they know they've taken a beating twice already. They don't appear eager to go for round three. If we can arrest the leaders and key personnel while getting more moderate elements to defect and become official militias assigned neighborhood defensive tasks, we can neutralize this threat.
This will not be the last threat. Even as jihadis are hunted after the Shia militias are brought under control and the Sunni Arab insurgents are defeated, we will have to combat corruption across the entire government.
And this assumes that Iran doesn't decide to roll the dice and invade Iraq with conventional forces once the insurgents and terrorists are clearly being defeated.
I've hoped there were signs of ultimate battlefield victory before and that we could move on to the corruption fighting phase on three other occasions. Once in April 2003 when the Baathist regime broke without attempting a last ditch defense. Once in February 2004 as the Baathist insurgency was beaten. And once in January 2006 as the Iraqi government stood up after beating back the Shia Sadrist and Sunni jihadi uprisings.
But in each case a new enemy rose up to become the primary threat.
So I hope this report is true even as I remain aware that another threat could arise to replace a declining threat.
And if true, it will show that the kill-them-all-and-let-Allah-sort-them-out approach to defeating the insurgents that some hawks advocated was not in fact necessary to win.
We will win this war despite the efforts of some here to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. But much could happen before we win.
