This article discusses the Shia-Sunni alliance against al Qaeda in Iraq:
Commanders in the field think they have tapped into a genuine public expression of reconciliation that has outpaced the elected government's progress on mending the sectarian rift.
"What you find is these people have lived together for decades with no problem until the terrorists arrived and tried to instigate the problem," said Lt. Col. Valery Keaveny, commander of the 3rd Battalion, 509th Airborne unit in the Iskandariya area south of Baghdad. "So they are perfectly willing to work together to keep the terrorists out.
"As late as this summer, there were no Shiites in the community policing groups. Today, there are about 15,000 in 24 all-Shiite groups and 18 mixed groups, senior U.S. military officials say. More are joining daily.
Here in Qarghulia, a rural community east of Baghdad, the results are palpable. Killings are down dramatically and public confidence is reviving."Sunnis-Shiites, no problem," said Obede Ali Hussein, 22, who stood at a checkpoint built by the U.S. Army along the Diyala River. "We want to protect our neighborhood."
One problem with spotting a trend is that predicting when the trend will bear fruit is more difficult. More than two years ago, citing posts that I wrote nearly three years ago and the summer of 2004 even, I could see the beginnings of what the LAT writes about today:
As sovereignty passes more and more to the Iraqis in concrete terms, it will be easier for the non-Baathist Sunnis to join other Iraqis to kill and expel the foreign invaders--the Islamists--and subdue the Baathists who aid the foreign invaders.
The Baathists screwed up big allying with the Islamists (as I noted in "Center of Gravity" in June 2004). They thought they could use the Islamists to spark a national revolt against American forces but instead the Islamists are giving all Iraqis a foreign enemy to rally against.
This will be our enemy's critical error in this war. Rumsfeld should be grateful he isn't their defense chief.
I wrote that in January 2005.
On this trend, Jack Kelly writes about the jihadi campaign of errors that turned Iraq into a quagmire:
We're floundering in a quagmire in Iraq. Our strategy is flawed, and it's too late to change it. Our resources have been squandered, our best people killed, we're hated by the natives and our reputation around the world is circling the drain. We must withdraw.
No, I'm not channeling Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. I'm channeling Osama bin Laden, for whom the war in Iraq has been a catastrophe. Al-Qaida had little presence in Iraq during the regime of Saddam Hussein. But once he was toppled, al-Qaida's chieftains decided to make Iraq the central front in the global jihad against the Great Satan.
Indeed, back in October 2005 it was clear that Iraq had become a quagmire for al Qaeda. Zawahiri was depressed about events in Iraq, and I wrote:
One of the more interesting things is that the jihadis no longer talk of bugging out of Iraq if democracy comes to Iraq. Now, winning in Iraq is the basis of their plans for world domination. Why? Earlier, the jihadis argued that they'd have to leave Iraq once democracy came to Iraq and find another battlefield. Then, just fighting us somewhere was step one. Now the jihadis are determined to stay and fight in Iraq.
I never bought the idea that we deliberately invaded and liberated Iraq in a deliberate attempt to create a battlefield to fight the jihadis. If we had we'd have behaved differently in the immediate months following the capture of Baghdad. But this is what Iraq has become by the jihadis' own decisions. And in spite of the fact that the jihadis judged that success could not be achieved once democracy came to Iraq, the jihadis think they can win in Iraq.
Perhaps there are no greener pastures. Perhaps the jihadis considered moving the battleground elsewhere but they could see no alternative to fighting in Iraq. I mean, no alternative other than halting their jihad and living in peace. When thugs decide that they will continue to fight in a particular place even though they believed they would not be able to win there, can we say they are in a quagmire?
And today, with the surge hastening their downfall, the jihadis are being pursued by Americans and Iraqis--including their former allies from the heady days of spring 2004.
If we can avoid shrieking and giving in to the panic that still pushes too many to believe we must run away as fast as we can, we will win the war in Iraq. And build on this success in the wider Islamic world by showing that not only is bin Laden not the strong horse but that he isn't even in the race any more.
The trend is good. I never could understand why people have been so nervous the last several years. Can we lose? Sure. No war is guaranteed. But losing this war would require us to surrender to corpses.
I admit, with disgust, that losing at this late date is a feat that isn't beyond the ability of our Congress to achieve.
