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Jewish World Review June 29, 2005 / 22 Sivan, 5765
Dems' irrational fear doesn't allow them to see clearly
By Jack Kelly
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http://www.JewishWorldReview.com |
The civil war in Iraq that journalists long have been anticipating appears
finally to have broken out, reported Sabrina Tavernise in the New York Times
June 21st:
"Marines patrolling this desert region near the Syrian border have for
months been seeing a strange new trend in the already complex Iraqi
insurgency. Insurgents, they say, have been fighting each other in towns
along the Euphrates from Husayba, on the border, to Qaim, farther west."
She quoted a UN official who is in contact with "militant" groups:
"There is a rift," said the official... "I'm certain that the nationalist
Iraqi part of the insurgency is very much fed up with the Jihadists grabbing
the headlines and carrying out the sort of violence that they don't want
against innocent civilians."
The nationalists want to make a deal with the Americans, while al Qaeda
wants to fight on, the UN official told Tavernise.
When the bad guys are shooting each other, it's hard to say the insurgency
is worsening, but Democrats are escalating their rhetoric:
Iraq is "a seemingly intractable quagmire," said Sen. Ted Kennedy (D-Mass)
at a contentious hearing Thursday.
Disaster in Iraq "is a real possibility," said Sen. Joseph Biden (D-Del)
after announcing his intention to run for president.
"There is rising concern that everything seems to be going the wrong way,"
said Sen. Dianne Feinstein, (D-Cal).
People who've actually been to Iraq recently see things differently:
"To represent the situation in Iraq as a quagmire is a misrepresentation of
the facts," the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, told
Kennedy.
"Iraq is producing new police and military forces that are gradually
winning the confidence of the people they serve — so much so that the
public is providing more and more valuable information on insurgent
activity," wrote A. Heather Coyne in the Christian Science Monitor June 7th.
A former Army officer, she heads the Iraq office of the U.S. Institute for
Peace.
Austin Bay was in Iraq last year as an Army colonel. He came back in June
as a journalist:
"Last year, Haifa Street (in Baghdad) was a combat zone where U.S. and Iraqi
security forces showed up in Robo-Cop garb," Bay said. "(Brigadier Gen.
Karl) Horst (of the Third Infantry Division) told me that he and his Iraqi
counterpart now have tea in a sidewalk cafe along this once notorious
boulevard."
Suicide bombings continue, as the news media make sure you know. But they
haven't slowed recruitment for the Iraqi army or police, and have turned
even most Sunni Muslims against the "insurgents." The blowback is so fierce
that al Jazeera has stopped referring to the terrorists as "the resistance,"
and is now calling them "gunmen" or "suicide bombers."
"The fact that Iraqi civilians are the main victims of attacks is
increasingly being stressed," reported the BBC in an analysis of broadcasts
by al Jazeera and another Arab network, al Arabiya.
Karl Zinsmeister of the American Enterprise Institute was embedded with U.S.
troops in April and May. He'd been in Iraq in 2003 and 2004. He said
neighborhoods in Baghdad which were war zones a year ago are safe to walk in
now.
Zinsmeister's declaration of victory is premature. But I suspect the
increasingly over the top rhetoric by Democrats is motivated by fear there
are only a few months more in which a precipitous American withdrawal from
Iraq could lead to a Vietnam-like defeat.
Six months from now, after an Iraqi constitution has been adopted and a
permanent government elected under it, and after more Iraqi army and police
units have been fielded, it may be too late to prevent an American/Iraqi
victory. A year from now, it almost certainly will be.
It is hard to say which is sadder, that Democrats are lost in a Vietnam
time warp, or that they regard our abandonment of an ally in 1975 as a
precedent to be emulated
"With the exception of periodic flare-ups in isolated corners, our struggle
in Iraq as warfare is over," Zinsmeister said. "Egregious acts of terror
will continue...But there is now no chance whatever of the U.S. losing this
critical guerilla war."