Ralph Peters has been to Iraq several times and has given us some good insights into the situation there. His latest column is a must-read piece for anyone who wishes to be informed on both the difficulties and the successes that we are experiencing. He looks down the road at what the problems will be several months hence and also at the current state of the war against the insurgency. He tells us, for instance of one officer's rather startling assessment of the military conflict:
One blade-sharp officer, Lt. Col. Doug Ollivant, the 1st Cavalry Division's G-5 Plans officer, even proposes that "our counterinsurgency fight is largely won," with the fading of the Sunni insurgency and the gutting of al Qaeda in Iraq.
Peters goes on to say that:
I've listed the key problems that may lie ahead, but this visit to Iraq further convinced me that we're on a promising track, security-wise:
- Al Qaeda, America's enemy, has suffered a catastrophic strategic defeat and a humiliation - rejected by its own kind - that will resound in the Muslim world.
- That hotbed of insurgency, Anbar Province, has largely come over to our side.
- The surge strategy is bringing peaceful conditions to ever more Iraqi neighborhoods - and street-level Iraqis are grateful. They don't want us to leave.
- Despite Iran's growing involvement, we've limited Tehran's effectiveness - thus far.
Meanwhile, Fox News recently ran an article in which they mentioned a comment by a Lt. Col. Kenneth Adgie. Adgie said he received a report last Monday that Al Qaeda in Iraq beheaded a 12-year-old boy in the middle of the street because his father was cooperating with the Americans. "That's the level of evil we're dealing with here," he said.
Think of the hundreds of thousands of Iraqis who have cooperated with Americans. What would be their fate and that of their children if we were to pull out before Iraq was safe from these cretins?
Those who advocate withdrawal respond with something like, "Well, we don't really know that these people would be massacred when we get out." That response is as stupid as it is pusillanamous. The rational course is to assume that the future will resemble the past, that the people who behead 12 year-old children to get revenge on the parents and who booby trap children's bodies so as to also kill their grieving parents, aren't going to renounce their savagery just because the Americans leave.
What is far more likely is that the horror inflicted upon that 12-year-old boy and his family will be repeated tens of thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of times. It is that expectation, that liklihood, which should inform our policy, not the wishful thinking embraced by those who rely on the desperate hope that our withdrawal will miraculously assuage the hatreds and change the hearts of these most evil of men.
RLC