As the overtly intelligent and newly non-partisan Drumwaster pointed out, there are several misconceptions coming out of Iraq right now.  One of them is that the thug terrorists are actually an insurgency. 

Well, that’s a load of bunk.  The Chicago Boyzmapped out the casualties between the 1st and 25th of September.  Looking at the map shows where the combat deaths are.  They are primarily in the Fallujah area, the Baghdad area, and between the Syrian, Jordanian, and Saudi border.  It is safe to say that 90% of the total casualties were located in four or five locales in Iraq. 

These areas are either isolated or in hotbeds of Ba’athist activism.  Isolation tends to favor the terrorists, because they require secrecy to plan.  It is important to remember that most of the casualties in Iraq are not military.....they are civilian.  Men, women, and children are being killed by these people, most of them at the orders of an ex-pat Jordanian, who has no love for Iraqm and in the name of a Saudi who might be living in Afghanistan.  I would therefore maintain that the information that states that the Iraqis are against these terrorists is correct, and this dictates that the terrorists that are trying to harm the Allied forces are being forced to meet and plan in secret. 

The Ba’athists are also maintaining hotbeds of power in Iraq, the most familiar being Fallujah, but there are others.  These towns were not completely pacified during the March/April 2003 offensive, more than likely because the main goal of the Allied forces was to rush to Baghdad before adequate defenses were erected.  The Allies knew that the capital was where the seat of power was, they knew Basrah was the center of the Sh’ite community in Iraq, and their goal was to secure those two areas.  It was a strategic decision, based upon 50 years of modern warfare experience. 

Baghdad was conquered quickly, and the Ba’athists routed, but they were basically disarmed, and allowed to go home.  When they got there, they were re-armed, and sent out to harrass the Allied troops.  Fallujah posed a singular problem.  Sources within Fallujah have been sympathetic to the Ba’athists and foreign terrorists, as they have a common goal; therefore, information about the whereabouts of terrorist thugs, and their leaders, has been irregular and dishonest.  The American command was faced with two scenarios.....first, level the city (which they have always had within their power to do), and, second, try to pacify the city using social/political means. 

Many people thought that the Administration made an error in stopping in Fallujah when we did, back in March.  I say that they did the right thing.  No matter their political lean, Iraqi civilians are just that....civilians.  That being said, knowing that the terrorists have no problem with either hiding behind civilians and/or acting like civilians, the chance that we would slaughter a thousand civilians while a large element of the enemy melted away into the surviving population was too great.  That would have been a disaster.  That is why we tried the ex-Ba’athist, and then a post-Saddam leader, in an atempt to quell the trouble.  We, as the Allies, tried to do the right thing.  Iraqi civilians had suffered enough over the past 30 years, and we weren’t going to break all our eggs in order to make the perfect omelette.

So, Fallujah, Samarra, and Sadr City exist as problem areas.  OK.  They were problem areas in 2003, and 2004, and might be in 2005.  As I alluded to before, 90% of the violence in Iraq is in 15% of the country. 

This week, Allied and Iraqi forces began a systematic operation to quell the probems in these cities.  This will be important, and not only for the strategic value of crushing the terrorists.  In doing this, the Iraqi Defense Forces will gain experience in fighting these small-unit-type forces, and in fighting alongside other troops (US and British). Their techniques will be sharpened, and it will teach several tens of thousands of them that they can do the job. 

It will also teach them something else....that it is OK to be a patriotic Iraqi, and oppose religious zealotry.  That is missing in several other Islamic states...Iran and Saudi Arabia, for example.  Iraqi soldiers have to learn that it is OK to kill other Muslims for the defense of their nation, and they have to learn a harsher lesson....that being that they may have to kill Ba’athist Iraqi as well. 

So the security situation in Iraq is not what Andrew Sullivan says it is, nor is the plan that out of whack.  Anyone that says that this situation is the fault of the President is whacked....how could anyone have thought that the victory that we witnessed in 2003 was ‘too complete”?  There are too many examples of military operations that needed to change or be readdressed in mid-stream.  This current military operation is the result of such a sea change.  It isn’t a hallmark of failure that there is this spate of violence, but a hallmark that the invasion of Iraq was the correct and proper thing to do in the War on Terror.