For the sake of open-mindedness on this blog, let me reprint an email from Hugh Hewitt’s blog from a marine in Iraq. I can’t “authenticate” it, and I hope Hewitt vetted it. (Hewitt is, alas, a pure partisan – his own site’s motto is about the destruction of Democrats, whoever they are – but the email rings true to me.) Here it is:
The naysayers will point to the recent battles in Najaf and draw parallels between that and what happened in Fallujah in April. They aren’t even close. The bad guys did us a HUGE favor by gathering together in one place and trying to make a stand. It allowed us to focus on them and defeat them. Make no mistake, Al Sadr’s troops were thoroughly smashed. The estimated enemy killed in action is huge. Before the battles, the residents of the city were afraid to walk the streets. Al Sadr’s enforcers would seize people and bring them to his Islamic court where sentence was passed for religious or other violations. Long before the battles people were looking for their lost loved ones who had been taken to “court” and never seen again. Now Najafians can and do walk their streets in safety. Commerce has returned and the city is being rebuilt. Iraqi security forces and US troops are welcomed and smiled upon. That city was liberated again. It was not like Fallujah – the bad guys lost and are in hiding or dead.
You may not have even heard about the city of Samarra. Two weeks ago, that Sunni Triangle city was a “No-go” area for US troops. But guess what? The locals got sick of living in fear from the insurgents and foreign fighters that were there and let them know they weren’t welcome. They stopped hosting them in their houses and the mayor of the town brokered a deal with the US commander to return Iraqi government sovereignty to the city without a fight. The people saw what was on the horizon and decided they didn’t want their city looking like Fallujah in April or Najaf in August.
Boom, boom, just like that two major “hot spots” cool down in rapid succession. Does that mean that those towns are completely pacified? No. What it does mean is that we are learning how to do this the right way. The US commander in Samarra saw an opportunity and took it – probably the biggest victory of his military career and nary a shot was fired in anger. Things will still happen in those cities, and you can be sure that the bad guys really want to take them back. Those achievements, more than anything else in my opinion, account for the surge in violence in recent days – especially the violence directed at Iraqis by the insurgents. Both in Najaf and Samarra ordinary people stepped out and took sides with the Iraqi government against the insurgents, and the bad guys are hopping mad. They are trying to instill fear once again. The worst thing we could do now is pull back and let that scum back into people’s homes and lives.
The last sentence reflects my feelings entirely. And I’m glad to see that morale has not been crushed by recent events. But it’s worth noting that Sadr is still free, that his power has increased and that many of his followers are still at large, armed and ready. The agreement in Samara is tenuous at best. Baghdad is slipping out of control. We have to thread an increasingly tiny needle in the next few months, while retaking Fallujah with an inevitably huge loss of innocent human life. It’s a brutal scenario – but one we have no choice but to confront.
KERRY FIGHTING BACK: Jake Tapper notices that the new “gloves-off” Kerry has been emerging at regular intervals since the beginning of the year.
The Dish 