Posted by
JDComments on Monday, October 02, 2006 12:16:03 PM
Oftentimes in battle the hardest thing to do is get the enemy to engage you when and where you want. Up until Napoleonic warfare, forcing a battle on favorable terrain was extremely difficult, and warfare consisted of armies doing a lot of moving and relatively little fighting. Napoleon changed this through his organizational modifications which allowed his armies to be more mobile and "trap" his opponents. Thus was warfare forever changed.
In considering the threat posed by the Iraqi Islamofascists, this is a point well worth keeping in mind. The asymmetrical warfare which the pundits refer to really means that we are not fighting a conventional enemy using the tactics of an army. Rather, our enemy is an insidious one, lurking in the darkness, hiding within the camouflage of civilian populations, and striking wherever he detects weakness. On 9/11 I would imagine one of the major concerns of the people in charge of protecting us was "Where are these guys?". With the whole world as their potential battleground, where do you seek these fanatics? To sit back and wait for them was a recipe for disaster, as the rubble of the Twin Towers demonstrated for all to see. Yet they would never be stupid enough to congregate and fight us in a geographically limited area.
Think again. The Iraq war, aside from being justified by Saddam's refusal to abide by the armistice agreement of 1991, the potential for them to develop and share WMD's with terrorists whom they had supported [no one mentions Saddam's payment to the family of suicide bombers who attacked Israel. Imagine what he would have paid to have the US attacked.], and the opportunity for us to replace a brutal dictatorship with a democracy which could be used as a model to drag the Islamic world out of the Middle Ages, was also the perfect place to concentrate the Islamic terrorists so we could engage them, if they were that stupid, and they ARE that stupid, as the recent figure of 4000 deaths released by their leadership has shown. This is not just a matter of fighting them over there as opposed to over here, this is about taking a shadowy, almost ephemeral movement and making them visible, so that we can defeat them, and we are defeating them, as their internal memos state. Is Iraq a difficult place, with convoluted politics and messy coalitions? Of course it is, and how this will all end for the Iraqis is hard to know, though I can't imagine any of them , other than the die hard Baathists, would rather still be under the brutal regime we have eliminated, and it will take years, if not decades for a true, peaceful democracy to be established [just as it did in Europe and Japan after WWII]. In the meantime we have engaged our enemy on the terrain of our choosing, and we are killing them in the thousands, and in warfare it doesn't get any better than that.