The editorial page of the Wall Street Journal surveys the Ba'athist-led insurgency still fighting democracy in Iraq and draw the right conclusions.
All of this has strategic and political consequences. One is that the troubles in Iraq aren't a matter of starry-eyed nation-building gone awry, as some conservative second-guessers now suggest. Most Iraqis really do want to build a free country. But they are opposed by an entrenched, ruthless Baathist network that is akin to the Mafia. These elements can't be bargained with, or lured into elections. They have to be killed. Imagine if the Nazi SS still had sanctuaries in Germany in 1947; no one would be thinking it had to be given a place in a future Adenauer government.Posted by Alan at December 21, 2004 05:50 AMThis also suggests that the number of U.S. troops on the ground matters much less than the intelligence our forces can get from Iraqis. We could have half a million troops there and they wouldn't do much good if they didn't know where to find the "former regime elements." The Pentagon strategy of training Iraqis to fight with us is exactly correct, even if the effort began much later than it should have.
The largest lesson concerns the will of the U.S. political class to prevail. Especially now that the U.S. election is over, it'd be nice to think that we could forge a consensus directed at victory, rather than at domestic score-settling. Everyone claims to like that Saddam was deposed, but it becomes clearer every day that his forces aren't yet beaten. Along with the imported terrorists, those forces are trying to make Iraq their Stalingrad, where they can outlast America. If they succeed, it won't matter a whit that John McCain lacked "confidence" in Donald Rumsfeld.