No one there wants to admit that al Qaeda has been beaten in Iraq, but the more first-hand accounts that show up, the more convincing the stories are. The truth is this. The al Qaeda volunteers have long been enticed by the prospect of killing American soldiers. That rarely happens, and survivor accounts always make that point, and the fact that al Qaeda is mostly killing Iraqis. Last year, most of the Sunni Arabs turned on al Qaeda, and this has been most difficult for the al Qaeda recruiters to deal with.
Some of the volunteers get no farther than Syria, where they find that you can't always get across the border, or that the contacts on the other side are not up to the task of delivering the foreigners to operational al Qaeda units in the interior. ... For most of the last four years, the al Qaeda volunteers would go to Iraq and "die a glorious death." Now the trip tends to end in despair and humiliation. The word is getting around, and the recruiters don't like it.
This highlights the silliness of the anti-war side's claim that fighting the jihadis just creates more jihadis. Obviously, both sides mobilize resources as the fight drags on. But once we start really killing them and defeating them, the jihadis have problems recruiting for the cause.
This impact on enemy recruiting is really more important for the wider war on Islamo-fascism than it is for Iraqi itself. Inside Iraq, breaking up the cells that "manufacture" and deliver the suicide bombers is more important than drying up the supply of cannon fodder to detonate themselves. But the evidence of defeat in Iraq will discourage the vast majority of people who increasingly will now decide to limit their personal jihad to a really stinging flame war on a bulletin board.
We continue to recruit and retain troops to expand our ground forces while our jihadi enemies find themselves unable to scrape up the dreg suicide bombers they need to appear all powerful.
So we find ourselves winning in Iraq and winning the wider war against Islamo-fascism.
UPDATE: One element of the story is our rolling up of the al Qaeda recruiting teams who filmed videos to put on jihadi websites:
The U.S. military said on Saturday it had hampered al Qaeda's ability to recruit new members in Iraq by capturing or killing many of the people who make slick videos used to attract disaffected young Muslims.
U.S. military spokesman Rear Admiral Greg Smith said that in the past year, 39 al Qaeda members in Iraq responsible for producing and disseminating videos and other material to thousands of Internet Web sites had been captured or killed.
This highlights another element of the war--let's not get too wrapped up in the cyberwar aspects of the Long War. Yes, we need to fight the war on the Internet. But where a "conventional" Internet-centric analysis of the conflict in cyberspace would have argued for an online counter-attack, our military thought outside the box and simply nailed the offenders in the real physical world.
Death is the ultimate denial of service attack.
