George Will:
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Abizaid believes that radical Islam today is roughly akin to Bolshevism in 1890 and fascism in 1920 -- there is time to stop its rise, but it must be stopped. Military success is certain. The enemy dare not mass. In Vietnam, U.S. battalions suffered defeats. In Iraq, there has been no platoon-size defeat, and regular U.S. infantry units perform tasks that would have called for Delta Force skills a decade ago. (Prairiepundit has been making this point for months!)
Abizaid laconically dismisses the idea that U.S. military energies are being depleted by "nation building" duties: "We're doing more fighting than fixing. The enemy gives us ample opportunity to fight." But while almost 3,000 Americans died on Sept. 11, there have been fewer than half that many military deaths in the three years since the post-attack fighting began, in Afghanistan. And one reason why terrorists have killed no Americans in America since Sept. 11 is that, as one officer puts it, "we're so much in their knickers abroad."
Success in Iraq, people here believe, is contingent on three ifs: if Iraqi military and security forces can stay intact during contacts with the insurgents; if insurgents are killed in sufficient numbers to convince the Sunni political class that it must invest its hope in politics; and if neighboring states, especially Syria, will cooperate in slowing the flow of money and other aid to the insurgency. If so, then the United States can -- this is the preferred verb -- "stand up" an Iraqi state and recede from a dominant role.
Abizaid, who speaks Arabic and has studied the region (and in the region, at the University of Jordan), believes that the Fallujah operation begins a 12-month period from which America will learn the parameters of the possible. When a visitor suggests that in two weeks we will know much, another officer tersely replies: "Two days."
That was said on Monday. So far the performance of Iraq's apprentice military, now working with U.S. units denoted by the blue icons on that screen, permits tentative -- very tentative -- optimism.
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