The Fourth Rail offers an excellent analysis of two critical questions facing the United States in the GWOT. The questions are:
1) What does the escalation of violence in Iraq tell us about the strength or weakness of our foe?
2) How can we tell whether we're winning or losing in Iraq?
The answer given to the first question is that destructiveness always increases in a conflict as the combatants pour more of their resources into the battle in order to keep from losing it. It will continue to increase until one side has exhausted their ability to keep up the fight.
The answer to the second is that the "insurgents" have one hope for victory. They can hope that they manage to tear Iraqi society apart and throw it into civil war. Their current tactics seem to be geared to attempting just that.
The interested reader will want to check out the entire analysis, but here's a particularly interesting aspect of it:
We are not fighting in a battlespace that includes our own society. The enemy has failed to engage us there effectively since 9/11. The political sniping between Blue and Red, left and right, is not warfare. It is politics; and I think it is no nastier now than it was in the 1990s. As far as the GWOT goes, then, here is the important fact: we are fighting it entirely in the enemy's society. Our own society is not changed by the war; if anything, society is reverting to pre-9/11 mores. In the global war, then, I think we are winning -- and winning big.
Because we are fighting in the enemy's society, there are two possible outcomes: we lose the battle for that society, in which case we must try again at some other opportunity; or he loses, in which case he is destroyed. If we were fighting in our own society, the choices would be reversed. The campaign in Iraq must be seen as a battle in this wider war, and one that we have to fight and win for this reason: it keeps us fighting on the enemy's ground. The war can only be won when it is won at the level of a whole society. That means that, if we are to win, we must fight it in his society.
In other words, the worst, most foolish thing we could do would be to follow the advice of those who urge us to pull out of the Middle East in general and Iraq in particular. It would almost guarantee that the war between Western civilization and Islamic Wahhabism would shift to our homeland.
