The Iraqis step up

Victor Davis Hanson:

Iraq for most Americans is now a toxic subject -- best either ignored or largely evoked to blame someone for something in the past.

Any visitor to Iraq can see that the American military cannot be defeated there, but also is puzzled over exactly how we could win -- victory being defined as fostering a stable Iraqi constitutional state analogous to, say, Turkey.

But war is never static. Over the last 90 days, there has been newfound optimism, as Iraqis are at last stepping forward to help Americans secure their country.

I spent last week touring outlying areas of Baghdad and American forward operating bases in Anbar and Diyala provinces, talking to Army and Marine combat teams and listening to Iraqi provincial and security officials.
Whether in various suburbs of Baghdad, or in Baqubah, Ramadi or Taji, there is a familiar narrative of vastly reduced violence. Until recently, the Americans could not find enough interpreters, were rarely warned about landmines and had little support from Iraqi security forces.

But now they are being asked by Iraqis in the "Sunni Triangle" to join them to defeat the very terrorists the locals once championed. Anbar, a province that just months ago was deemed lost by a U.S. military intelligence report, is now in open revolt against al-Qaida.

Why the change?

Officers offered a number of theories. The surge of American troops, and Gen. David Petraeus' risky tactics of going after the terrorists within their enclaves, have put al-Qaida on the run. Likewise, in the past four years, the U.S. military has killed thousands of these terrorists and depleted their ranks.

...

Iraqis told me that their widely held fear that Americans are going to leave soon has galvanized Sunnis to finally step up to secure their country or face even worse chaos in our absence.

The result is that ordinary Iraqis are increasingly willing to participate in local government and civil defense. Such popular engagement from the bottom up offers more hope than the old 2003 idea that a democratically elected government could simply mandate reform top down from their enclaves in the Green Zone.

...

Lost on the political opposition to the war is the importance of what winning will bring. Our ability to dominate a battle space in conventional warfare has made it rare that anyone wants to challenge us in combat persisting warfare. Defeating an insurgency and demonstrating that we can win that kind of war will make it less likely that we will be challenged again with a raiding/insurgency strategy in the future. Winning this war means it is less likely that we will have to engage in this kind of warfare.

If the opponents of the Iraq war prevail it will mean that although those enemies who have been planning on hostilities will continue to oppose us and continue to prepare for their own insurgency. In other words, the anti war forces in the US would be creating the atmosphere for future wars that they will oppose fighting too. Winning will make those wars less likely to begin with and make it much more likely that we can reach a reasonable solution to problems in the future.