Yet It Happened

I never bought the "flypaper" strategy idea that asserted we invaded Iraq in order to provoke a jihadi invasion of Iraq so we could fight al Qaeda "over there" instead of "over here." If that had been our plan, we'd have acted rather differently after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. We started setting up Iraqi local civil defense forces for a low threat environment and began building a small 40,000 Iraqi army based on three divisions that in the long run the Iraqis could use as the cadre for an expanded army. This was not appropriate for the developing threat but it took into the fall for the strength of the Baathist insurgency to be apparent. As late as August 2003 we had an entire week without any of our troops dying.

Our forces were still good enough and numerous enough to defeat the remnant Baathists, however, and by February 2004, we'd ground them down. The capture of Saddam in December seemed to have sapped the will of the Baathists. This was not too surprising since the Sunni Arabs that the Baathists drew support from were only 20% of the Iraq population. Without the apparatus of the state behind them, even ample cash and weapons could not catapult the Sunni Arabs back into power.

But we were not set up for fighting the terrorism that soon followed in early 2004.

Because al Qaeda decided to make Iraq their central front, that is exactly what happened. It was the entry of jihadis who made the post-war so difficult for us, yet led to their ultimate defeat:

In hindsight, the Iraq operation was essential to the defeat of al Qaeda, and the shattering of their popular support in the Moslem world. Al Qaeda, true to its own beliefs and tactics, tried to use terror attacks against the Shia Arab majority in Iraq, after 2003, as a way to put the Sunni Arab minority back in control. All this did was kill thousands of Moslem civilians and deflate popular support for al Qaeda. This could be seen, year by year, as opinion polls in Moslem countries revealed declining al Qaeda popularity.

But al Qaeda still had a lot of Support in the West. The political opposition in the United States, true to form (as in all past American wars) found ways to criticize the Iraq operation without actually joining the enemy. The media in the West backed the opposition, as that's where the headlines, and the profits, were.

Add in Iranian support for Shia jihadis and you understand why the post-major combat operations fight has lasted longer than we anticipated in spring 2003. Back then, war critics charged that Iraq was just step one in the plan to attack Iraq, Syria, and Iran. Who believed Syria and Iran would actively support their jihadis inside Iraq? Who believed we'd let them get away with it?

And that domestic opposition quite nearly cost us the victory that we are achieving today. That opposition reached its high water mark in summer 2007 when a relative handful of United States Senators and our President stood their ground and refused to legislate defeat in Iraq. That was the high water mark of the anti-war movement that quickly receded as the surge offensive succeeded and our enemies failed to adapt. And without salvation in Washington, our enemies were crushed in Iraq by our forces and the growing and more experienced Iraqi forces.

In the end, through determination and not planning, Iraq actually was the flypaper that allowed us to smash up al Qaeda.

The jihadis can still kill inside Iraq, but they cannot win in Iraq. And they know it. Now if only our "reality-based community" can absorb this development.