While the post-war fight has been harder than I anticipated, given the rapid collapse of the Baathist regime without attempting any last stands in Baghdad or Tikrit, the main reason has been that new enemies have arisen to replace both the Saddam regime and the Baathist resistance. And these enemies have been supported from abroad by both Sunni Arab states who supplied fanatics and Syria and Iran which provided help to these thugs. I never imagined we'd allow such hostile actions to go unpunished. This is a far cry from the charges of the anti-war side in April 2003 that Iraq was the first stop in a series of invasion in the Middle East. Further, ammunition stocked by Saddam and money generated by oil-for-food were plentiful in post-war Iraq.
Yet we have beaten the series of enemies. I never doubted we could defeat even well-armed and well-financed enemies supported by only 20% of the population. We just needed time. I doubted as early as November 2004 whether our home front would give us that time, but it has. Just barely, I think.
With the always-approaching civil war on hold and the surge working to tamp down violence, it is getting more difficult to deny that the surge has worked, as McCain and Lieberman wrote at the beginning of the year:
After years of mismanagement of the war, many people had grave doubts about whether success in Iraq was possible. In Congress, opposition to the surge from antiwar members was swift and severe. They insisted that Iraq was already "lost," and that there was nothing left to do but accept our defeat and retreat.
In fact, they could not have been more wrong. And had we heeded their calls for retreat, Iraq today would be a country in chaos: a failed state in the heart of the Middle East, overrun by al Qaeda and Iran.
Instead, conditions in that country have been utterly transformed from those of a year ago, as a consequence of the surge. Whereas, a year ago, al Qaeda in Iraq was entrenched in Anbar province and Baghdad, now the forces of Islamist extremism are facing their single greatest and most humiliating defeat since the loss of Afghanistan in 2001. Thanks to the surge, the Sunni Arabs who once constituted the insurgency's core of support in Iraq have been empowered to rise up against the suicide bombers and fanatics in their midst -- prompting Osama bin Laden to call them "traitors."
I object to the charge that the war has been mismanaged. Yes, we needed the change that the surge provided. But the situation in Iraq is complex and evolving and our past strategies were grounded in the situations and enemies of the times, and largely worked to get us where we are today. But that is slightly off-topic. The real point is that the surge is working. Sadly, the state of our debate just about requires most war supporters to charge past incompetence. Failing to avoid the friction of war is now "incompetence." I don't have to go along with that nonsense, but that's the state of the debate.
And as much as the anti-war side now denies that the surge is responsible for the reduced violence, or that the cost of success is too high, or even that the war was based on lies (going back to an earlier argument), the significant thing is that the anti-war side doesn't want to debate what is happening right now. They know that violence is down and given that they said that could not possibly happen as the various factions in Iraq geared up for the inevitable civil war (if the argument wasn't that Iraq was actually in a civil war), isn't their credibility dented a bit?
And the history of the last couple years undermines their condemnation of democracy in Iraq. If conservatives had made the same arguments that our anti-war side has made that Arabs or Moslems (or, horrors, Arabs who are Moslem!) are incapable of democracy and may not even want freedom, it would be off to the diversity re-education camps for them. Yet somewhow it is "progressive" to believe that Arabs must be ground down under the heels of a dictator to make them behave. Go figure.
Yet even under a brutal assault by enemies so vicious that it would be hard to make them up if you were writing fiction, Iraq has stuck by its new democracy:
Considering the violent threats, fractured politics and bitter history it confronts, Iraq's democratic government has accomplished much in two short years.
For a variety of reasons -- most self-serving, a few disgustingly dishonest -- American and European debate over Iraq all too often loses or conveniently discards three pertinent facts regarding the Iraq of May 2008: It has survived in very complex conditions, it is the product of democratic elections, and it has several hard-fought but significant accomplishments in its two bloody years of existence. ...
Yet Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki never buckled. In late May 2006, the fractious parliament approved a cabinet -- another step in the birth process of democratic government in Mesopotamia.
Maliki faced repeated attempt to oust him -- attempts using terror and violence but also using parliamentary means, which are, paradoxically, a positive sign.
The Iraqi government hasn't met American expectations, which are largely shaped by the American presidential election cycle, but dismissing its achievements is arrogant and ignorant. It is also myopic, given the century-shaping regional and global implications of Iraqi success.
Our Left denies the great progress Iraq has made in only two years with the same fervor they make excuses for communist Cuba's tyranny after 50 years of governing.
We have won a great victory in eliminating the threat of Saddam Hussein and creating a friendly Iraq. This victory would have stood even if we could not help democracy grow in Iraq.
But democracy in Iraq provides us an opportunity for a victory in the wider Long War. In the beginning, I did not think that Iraq was a part of the war on terror except in indirect terms (Saddam's support of terrorism and the chance he could provide WMD to such terrorists). But I believed that destroying the conventional threat that Saddam posed was a necessary objective to protect our national security, regardless of the war on terror we found ourselves fighting.
Al Qaeda changed that by invading Iraq and making Iraq their primary battlefield. Our enemy made Iraq a part of the war on terror. And on this battlefield we have defeated the best the jihadis had to offer. This accumulating victory in Iraq has discredited al Qaeda in large parts of the Moslem world.
Yet even this battlefield victory is not the same as a victory in the Long War. Defeating and discrediting al Qaeda on the battlefield blunted them in this jihad. But to keep the Arab Moslem society that generated this jihad from spawning a new jihad with even more terrible weapons leeched from our society in the future, we need to change the society that creates jihadis. It isn't our fault that they have a faltering society. But we have suffered the consequences of their failure. Promoting democracy in Iraq to unleash the talents and hope for a better future that exist, in the heart of the Arab Moslem world, as an alternative to jihad or autocracy, gives us a chance of winning the Long War and not merely scoring a tactical victory over the current jihad wave.
As long as the Left doesn't deny us the victory we are accumulating, I can live with their continued denials about the reality of Iraq. Or the reality of the Long War. Heck, add this in to their denials about how Vietnam was lost and how we won the Cold War. I've lived with those denials without too much annoyance.
The debate over Iraq is shifting. It is shifting because we are winning. Get ready for the next debate over Afghanistan when this "good" war becomes "bad." When it becomes the only war we've got, it will be the only war for our Left to oppose.
