A few notes on one version of history
U.N. Security Council Resolution 1546…hold “direct democratic elections”…passed on June 8, 2004. If you’re a wire-service editor, eight months is an eon — but if you’re trying to politically reinvent Mesopotamia, it’s a millisecond. The January 2005 Iraqi election succeeded, giving terrorists and tyrants a disturbing “purple finger” — the very public ink stains marking the fingers of Iraqi voters.
That election was an incremental success, but one of many. This week’s publicized call for a more “normalized” U.S.-Iraq relationship is another indication that the incremental successes are accumulating. Every increment can become a decrement, but war is a dynamic process — and from a historical perspective the dynamic direction in Iraq has favored the United States — in other words, the big trend suggests an emerging success…
This emerging success required lots of money and unfortunately involved lots of blood. I had another document on my Baghdad desk, Musab al-Zarqawi’s February 2004 letter to al-Qaida’s leaders, in which he lamented al-Qaida’s looming defeat.
He also described his counter-strategy: a Shia-Sunni sectarian war. That’s war’s hideous dynamic, effort met by effort — with death, pain and suffering in each terrible collision. Zarqawi’s murderers did their best to incite a sectarian debacle. Oh, they got headlines, they enlisted a motley array of criminal allies, they set Iraq’s democratic timetable back 12 to 24 months — but they failed.
The evidence that al-Qaida has suffered a major strategic information defeat in Iraq continues to mount. StrategyPage.com noted on Oct. 27, 2005, that “the Moslem media is less and less willing to be an apologist for al-Qaida, at least when it comes to killing Moslem civilians” and that the Iraqi media in particular “really has it in for al-Qaida.” On Oct. 1, 2006, StrategyPage.com argued that “dead Iraqis were killing al-Qaida. … Westerners, unless they observe Arab media closely, and have contacts inside the Arab world, will not have noted this sharp drop in al-Qaida’s fortunes.”
Within the last three months, the “trend” (made of incremental successes) has become “fact.” Is this victory in Iraq? No. But it suggests we’ve won a major battle with potentially global significance.
If this progress persists for the next eleven months, will it really be possible for those who want to ignore it to do so effectively?