REVIEW & OUTLOOK
The Enemy in Plain View
Saddam's regime has not yet been defeated.
Washington must seem like a very strange place from the vantage point of Baghdad. While the world's so-called power capital debates whether Donald Rumsfeld has been solicitous enough of U.S. Senators, on the front lines of the war on terror three Iraqi election workers are dragged from their car in Baghdad and murdered in front of the world's cameras.
Do we need any clearer picture of the stakes, and the nature of our enemy, in Iraq than the photo of those assassinations that appeared on yesterday's front pages? The dead Iraqis were targeted precisely because they are trying to build a new, democratic Iraq. Their killers can't abide a free election, or a newly legitimate Iraqi government, because they know it will make it less likely that they can ever return to power. The car bombs targeting Shiite Muslims in Karbala and Najaf are sending the same brutal message.
These events ought to put to rest the canard that what we are facing in Iraq is some kind of "nationalist" uprising opposed to U.S. occupation. The genuine Iraqi patriots are those risking their lives to rebuild their country and prepare for elections. They are being threatened, and murdered, by members and allies of the old regime who want to restore Sunni Baathist political domination. Or to put it more bluntly, we haven't yet defeated Saddam Hussein's regime.
If Mr. Rumsfeld has made a single large mistake as Defense Secretary, it has been underestimating the resilience of this enemy. To be fair, this is a familiar mistake in U.S. history, the tendency to declare victory too soon and let the enemy regroup and fight on. Meade let Lee escape at Gettysburg, while overconfident generals missed the Nazi potential to counterattack at the Battle of the Bulge. In the first Gulf War, Norman Schwarzkopf let Saddam keep the helicopters that allowed him to crush the Shiite and Kurdish uprisings and survive for another decade.
Also to be fair, mistakes are inevitable in war and Mr. Rumsfeld has been far from alone. The CIA seems to have completely missed that Saddam's strategy from the beginning was to disperse his allies and conduct a decentralized insurgency. And we don't recall John McCain predicting today's events. The first person we saw who noted this likelihood was retired Marine colonel Gary Anderson, in an April 2, 2003, op-ed in the Washington Post. His warnings were dismissed at the time, especially by the CIA, which still believed that Iraq could be pacified with a "decapitation" strategy eliminating Saddam and his top aides.
But the more we learn about the insurgency, the more Mr. Anderson's analysis has proven true. The latest evidence comes from a batch of intelligence documents reported in last week's U.S. News & World Report. Reporter Edward Pound cites U.S. documents saying "former regime elements" are behind most of today's terror attacks in Iraq. He quotes one document as noting that Saddam and his allies "appear to have planned for an insurgency before the beginning of Operation Iraqi Freedom." Months before the Coalition invasion, members of Saddam's intelligence service and Fedayeen were planning how to build roadside bombs and to target convoys and such soft targets as water plants and oil pipelines.
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.
This 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.
When these columns endorsed the war in Iraq, we didn't sign up for a short or easy war. We signed up to support whatever it takes to win. No war ever goes as planned, and Iraq is no exception. But surely we can all admit that when we see those enemy assassins on our front pages, we are staring at what would be the consequences of U.S. defeat.
