Here’s a fascinating nugget from Edward Wong’s latest report from Karbala:
After American soldiers occupied the Mukhaiyam Mosque, an insurgent stronghold, on May 12, they found some identification cards that an Iraqi interpreter said were Iranian. The military was still examining the cards and other documents found in the mosque to determine their origins, said Captain Noel Gorospe, a spokesman for the First Armored Division. “We’re doing our very best to intercept those people,” General Hertling said of outside fighters.
It seems pretty obvious to me that the insurgency in Iraq is composed of Sunni dead-enders and Shiite radicals, but also an array of enterprising terrorists, as well as Iranian-backed thugs and trouble-makers. What we have, in fact, is a regional war, in which many pro-terror and pro-Islamist and pro-autocracy elements are determined to prevent a democratic transition in Iraq. This alliance is both active (Iran) and passive (Jordan). America’s favorite autocrat, King Abdullah of Jordan, after all, is rightly afraid of Iraqi democracy. (I mean, who elected him?) And all of that points to one simple conclusion: this war is just beginning. The Arab establishment was not too fazed by the removal of Saddam. (He wasn’t too popular with his neighbors, either.) But they’re terrified of Iraqis actually determining their own future. And they will do everything and anything they can to stop it. That means that the terror attacks will continue for years. They are now directed at the infidel; but they will soon be directed more squarely at any elected Baghdad government. Do we have the stomach to hang in there if a future Baghdad government asks us to? That’s the question.
BUSH’S FAILURE: And the answer cannot be the president’s crude and simple rhetorical tropes. What Bush doesn’t seem to understand is that in any war, people need to be reminded constantly of what is going on, what is at stake, what our immediate, medium-term and ultimate objectives are. The president has said nothing cogent about Karbala; nothing apposite about al Sadr; nothing specific about what our strategy is in Falluja. Events transpire and are interpreted by critics and the anti-war media and by everyone on the planet but the president. All the president says is a broad and crude reiteration of valid but superfluous boilerplate. This is not war-leadership; it’s the abdication of war-leadership. We are at a critical juncture. With some perspective, we have achieved much in Iraq, with relatively low casualties. But it will all go to hell if we lose our nerve now. It’s long past time that people can be asked simply to trust the president. After the WMD intelligence debacle and the Abu Ghraib disgrace, he has run out of that capital. He has to tell us how we will win, what we are doing, how it all holds together, why the infrastructure repair is still in disarray, and how a political solution is possible. I’m not sure any more that this president has the skills or competence to pull it off. But I am sure that he has very little time to persuade us he can.
The Dish 