One of Ours

...We have seen two months of what looks like non-stop catastrophe, and we will see more, and maybe worse, before we are through. Here is my well-reasoned, historically researched, deeply nuanced opinion: Tough shit. This war will be over when we say it is over, and not a second before.

[...]

The Fallujah bridge pissed off a lot of Americans. It really made us see red. Would we be disgusted enough to walk away, or furious enough to go in and indiscriminately slaughter thousands? The architects of that atrocity must have thought they nailed that perfect tic-tac-toe move: we go one way, they win on the other. Quoth Den Beste: the object of Terrorism is to provoke an overwhelming response. And the response to that response is the political and strategic goal of the terrorist.

Al Sadr, you less than magnificent bastard! We read your book!

Blah, blah…war is lost…blah blah blah... disaster, wreck and ruin… Only it turns out that the United States military may have produced a few life-long professionals who actually hold victory more precious than crowing loud. Many of us value reason over emotion, and reality over wishful thinking. Well, we did not level Fallujah, and we did not do it because those bodies on that bridge were bait, pure and simple. We didn’t take the bait. Or, I should say, our military didn’t take the bait; I took it, hook line and sinker. I wanted to level the goddam city and then walk away and let them kill each other. Now, as Al Sadr’s support evaporates; as his militia thugs are being hunted and killed by shadowy Iraqi ghost armies and extremely corporeal Marines; as his fellow Mullahs condemn him; as Iraqi demonstrations against him and all that poison and ruin he represents continue to rise; as his headquarters are destroyed, his most vicious ‘soldiers’ killed in their own backyards, playing defense in an urban environment by Marines whose skill and tactics stagger credulity for their expertise and success – now, we must ask ourselves: did you want to feel good or did you want to win?

I want to win. I was an idiot for taking that bait. And I thank God daily that America makes better, smarter people than me.

The average Iraqi knows full well we can bomb and pummel the hell out of anything we damn well want. But this was different. This took patience, and a willingness to get inside the enemy strategy. This took commitment, and persistence. It was cunning. These people know how strong our military might is; no need to re-teach that lesson. But strong and cunning? Strong and cunning and patient? ...

The threat of the vast Shiite uprising that loomed in early April has largely evaporated. Things are still very tense. They may again get worse; they may become horrible. But we will win this because we are not going home until we do. This is slowly beginning to dawn on some of the hardest heads in Iraq. When Iraqi leaders start saying things like we’d better help the Americans stabilize the country, because they will not go away until we do – well, that is precisely, exactly the kind of victory we need. We need that attitude...

...while we have not found any W.M.D. in Iraq, we have found there a disturbing number of P.M.D.'s — people of mass destruction...

We're so shell-shocked, we just treat this as another day, another suicide bomb in Iraq. But we need to think about this. My rough estimate is that there have been 50 to 75 suicide bomb attacks in Iraq in the last year. So the first question I have is this: Where are all these suicide bombers coming from? How do you just get these people off the shelf?

I don't buy it myself, but one can plausibly argue that 37 years of Israeli occupation of the West Bank have made Palestinians so crazy that scores of them would have volunteered for suicide bombing missions over the last few years. But the U.S. "occupation" of Iraq is only a year old, and the suicide bombings started there within a few months of U.S. forces' arriving, to liberate the Iraqi people from Saddam's warped tyranny. So what does that mean? It means that some group or groups have the ability to recruit a large pool of people willing to kill themselves in attacks against American or Iraqi targets on short notice — and we don't have a clue how this process works.

We don't know who these people are — although reports suggest they are coming from Europe, Yemen, Lebanon, Syria and Saudi Arabia — how the underground railroad that gets them from their local mosques to Iraq operates, how they connect up with the operating cells in Iraq and how they get wired and indoctrinated for suicide missions.

"I don't think the P.M.D.'s are really a product of local Iraqi resentment against us," says Raymond Stock, an expert on Arabic literature and media based in Cairo. "They are mainly imported cookie-cutter killers, created by a combination of Arab mass media, certain extremist elements in Muslim culture, and some very shrewd recruiting by Al Qaeda and its ilk. When young, angry, futureless, sexually repressed people are taught that death is a permanent vacation of guilt-free pleasure, and they see it glorified in countless videos, all you need is a willing truck driver to ferry them over the border from Syria, Jordan, Turkey or Saudi Arabia and presto — a human bomb."

Whoever "they" are, they seem to be getting more and more sophisticated. What's worse is that these people are utter nihilists. At least Hamas has a stated political goal of ridding Palestine of all Jews and setting up an Islamic state there. It even offers social services. The people running the suicide operations in Iraq, whether they are working independently or are just one organization, don't even claim credit, let alone make any demands. They just want to ensure that America fails to produce anything decent in Iraq and they are ready to sacrifice all Iraqis for that end.

[...]

But it's another reason we need to shift authority and security in Iraq to Iraqis as soon as they can handle it. Only they will have the ears needed to pick up the accents of P.M.D.'s, the eyes needed to know who doesn't belong and the smell for where these rotten apples are being stored to solve this P.M.D. mystery. And only they will have the words in Arabic to delegitimize this suicide trend.

We must shut this play down before it comes to a theater near us.