The appalling brutality in the Sunni Triangle yesterday was designed to have one simple effect: to encourage the West to abandon Iraq to the very people who perpetrated this atrocity. The methods are the same as Somalia. The response will be different. But it’s equally hard not to be worried by John Burns’ analysis in today’s NYT:
On Tuesday, before the Falluja attacks, General Kimmitt, the American military spokesman, appeared to back off at least somewhat from the emphasis on Islamic militants as the principal enemy. At a briefing, he offered an overview of the war in which he suggested that what has occurred, in effect, is a merging of the Saddamist insurgents and the Islamic terrorists into a common terrorist threat, and that, either way, “we just call them targets.”
Several Iraqis interviewed on Wednesday, including middle-class professionals, merchants and former members of Mr. Hussein’s army, suggested that that the United States might be facing a war in which the common bonds of Iraqi nationalism and Arab sensibility have transcended other differences, fostering a war of national resistance that could pose still greater challenges to the Americans in the months, and perhaps years, ahead.
All the more reason to maintain the deadline for the transition to self-rule, and to keep a close military and police alliance with the incoming government. I’m still an optimist – in the medium term. But the next two or three years could be brutal. We just got a taste of how brutal they could be.
PRE-9/11: The undelivered Condi Rice speech, leaked to the Washington Post, reaffirms what we already knew. The Bush administration – like the administration before it – did not adequately understand or guard against, let alone deal with, the threat of Islamist terrorism. Why is this such a scandal? The failure before 9/11 was a failure of intelligence but more deeply a failure to comprehend the full measure of the evil we face. Democracies tend to do that. It’s hard enough to grapple with the idea that we could soon be facing a nuclear, chemical or biological catastrophe in the next few months or years now, let alone before the 9/11 massacre. What matters is what we’re doing in the present, what our strategy is, how best to defeat the enemy. I don’t get the political controversy, I really don’t (although I appreciate the need to get to the bottom of what failed). Who believed the Bush administration was fully on the case in its first eight months? Of course they weren’t. The fundamental issue in this election is: which candidate would best protect us in the future? Fighting partisan wars over the past is at best a distraction, at worst a dangerous one.
The Dish 