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The enemy's unsuccessful strategies

Ralph Peters:

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Terrorist and insurgent activity is down by half, free elections succeeded and a multi-ethnic government has been formed in Baghdad. The enemies of the new Iraq have failed to achieve a single one of their goals. They must be shocked and embittered.

Not one extremist strategy worked. The Coalition couldn't be dislodged, voting couldn't be stopped and the terrorists have had to watch supportive regimes in the neighborhood totter. All that our enemies have left is the dwindling hope that they can outlast America — that we'll succumb to impatience, our greatest national weakness.

Consider the many unsuccessful strategies the terrorists and insurgents have tried:

After the old regime's fall, Islamist terrorists rushed to Iraq, confident that Osama bin Laden had been correct when he cited Mogadishua and declared that, if you kill a few Americans, the rest run away. But the master of terror was wrong: The Americans and other Coalition forces remained steadfast. And engaging U.S. troops head-on cost the terrorists and their allies severe losses.

They began avoiding engagements with the Americans, relying on roadside bombs while attacking Iraqis locally and striking less-resolute Coalition members internationally. Blasts ravaged Kurdish political offices. Assassins stalked Shi'a clerics. Iraqis working with the Coalition were murdered in front of their families. The terrorists hoped to break the Coalition. The insurgents longed to start a civil war.

The civil war never happened, although the Madrid train bombings did convince Spain to withdraw its troops. The Spanish election upset was the terrorists' greatest Iraq-related success. Yet even that failed to dissolve the Coalition.

Our enemies gained another — temporary — success when inadequate numbers of U.S. troops, election-year caution in Washington and propaganda broadcast by al-Jazeera allowed them to rebuff the first attempt to pacify Fallujah last April. The city briefly became the world capital of terror. But a second, more-powerful attack on Fallujah in November found the terrorists and insurgents over-confident and unprepared for the ferocity of the blow.

Nor could they muster international support any longer. Their campaign of videotaped beheadings had alienated Muslim moderates not only in Iraq but throughout the Islamic world. One of the greatest unremarked developments of 2004 was that Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, who had appointed himself as his god's executioner, came to seem more threatening to Islam than the American "infidels" did.

Deprived of their Fallujah haven, the extremists tried to seize control of other Sunni Arab cities. Each time, they were repelled. The best they could do was to disrupt the business of everyday life for Iraqis of every ethnic group and faith. That strategy backfired, too.

With national elections looming, the extremists went on a rampage, pulling out all the stops to derail the voting. Politicians, professors, doctors, teachers, policemen and security-force recruits were murdered in cold blood — en masse, whenever possible.

It was a desperate, foolish tactic to employ against Iraqis. Blinded by rage, the terrorists and insurgents proved more naive by far than Western generals. In a clan and tribal society, the murder of one innocent schoolteacher or municipal worker makes you hundreds of enemies. Iraq's "occupiers" looked pretty good in comparison.

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The media hailed the recent assaults on the Abu Ghraib compound and a Marine base on the Syrian border as proof of the terrorists' growing sophistication. In fact, the attacks were relatively crude attempts, impressive only in comparison to previous ineptitude. And they failed disastrously, costing our enemies dearly yet again.

Such attacks are a forlorn hope. They grasp at the only strategy left to those who oppose a free Iraq: a renewed effort to kill enough Americans to make Washington throw in the towel. Islamist terrorists, especially, dream of one dramatic, catastrophic strike. They don't know what else to do.

The insurgents appear to be flopping from one losing strategy to another. While they would like to create a Mogudishu event or Beirut barracks bombing, th US military is much more prepared to deal with these attempts and the administration is much to determined than to be moved by them. So, they go back to bombing Iraqis in acts of impotence. The inurgents are demonstrating this impotence with each attack and even they aer strating to realize it.