We Have Guarded Iraq Well

Well over a year and a half ago, I put forward an explanation for what our soldiers were doing in Iraq. It didn’t attract much notice then, but I saw later that some other, more prominent writers, had the same thought, and their ideas certainly did.

Unfortunately, that explanation still hasn’t been adequately covered in the MSM, nor even among war supporters.

Let me sum it up. What we are doing in Iraq right now is not fighting a war, except in the sense that our front in Iraq is just one front in a greater war against the Islamists who declared war on us over a decade ago. We did fight a war there, and we won it decisively, as our Secretary of Defense predicted. We then moved our military to an entirely new mission, against enemies of an entirely different composition with entirely different tactics.

We became Iraq’s bodyguard, standing between its new government and the forces determined to strangle it in its crib. Here’s how I put it in December, 2004:

Think about it for a moment. The Iraqi people are, right now, weak and unable to defend themselves against the enemies who want to take over their country. They’ve been made weak by decades of horrific abuse, conditioning that tells them that only the strongest brute in the crowd should be the leader, and supposedly benign nations who took advantage of them to the tune of billions of dollars. They have no army – it fell apart as soon as we defeated it (since it was made up primarily of conscripts who had to be forced to serve and lackeys of the former regime). They have no idea how to stand up on their own and run their own affairs. They don’t know how to build a democratic government, though they very much want to. In short, even after a couple of years they’re easy meat for the ravening wolves howling around them.

All they have is us and those who have chosen to stand with us. They need us desperately to stand between them and those who want them so badly to fail. They need us to stand there and take the mortar attacks and suicide bombers and roadside IEDs because, quite honestly, they can’t take that load yet. They need us to suck up the damage that would collapse their nation in a heartbeat while they learn how to be strong and proud again.

We’re still there and we’re still acting as a bodyguard to the new goverment. Now, as the government grows more stable and more able to protect itself and, more importantly, to strike back decisively against its enemies, we will be needed less and less until we are not needed at all.

It appears that the al-Qaeda franchise in Iraq believes that we’ve been Iraq’s bodyguard as well, and that we’ve done a very fine job. Ralph Peters gives us a summation of a recently-found document taken from the late Ab Musab al-Zarqawi:

* The Iraqi military and security forces had become painfully effective, paralyzing terrorist efforts in parts of Iraq where they’d previously moved freely.

* Losses due to U.S. and Iraqi strikes had badly sapped terrorist strength – and they were having grave difficulty gathering new recruits. Guess not everybody wants a Saturday-nighter with the virgins of paradise.

* While elements in our own media continued to claim that the terrorists couldn’t be defeated, the terrorists themselves felt that the Iraqi media’s reporting on terrorist atrocities had badly undercut their base of support.

* The terrorists were suffering from the loss of financial resources, as well as a shortage of weapons – old allies were bailing out on them, while their dwindling assets were being seized by Coalition and Iraqi-government forces.

* In the terrorists’ view, regional and world opinion had moved behind the Coalition and the elected Iraqi

Basically, what this says is that our resolve to continue to take the punishment the terrorists have been relentlessly throwing at us has not only bled them nearly dry in every meaningful way, but hasn’t even done the damage they had hoped to do. It says that while the terrorists were beating themselves bloody against the stone wall of the US military, the Iraqi forces were getting stronger and more professional and were scoring real victories that only increased the new nation’s confidence.

We are doing our job. There is no question that it is largely a thankless job and that it comes at a price (though a far smaller price in lives than we have paid in any comparable military action), but it has been a necessary job and our soldiers have done it remarkably well.

What concerns me is that the American people do not understand what we are doing in Iraq. Mostly due to the administration’s inability to communicate with strength, America believes we are fighting a war there, much like every war we have ever fought. This could not be more wrong. I truly believe that if the President and his people would tell us, simply and powerfully, that we are in Iraq to take the blows that would shatter that nation if it landed unblunted by our brave soldiers, our nation’s opinion on the war would change overnight.