The ebb and flow of warfare

NY Post Editorial:

'Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on the strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter."

So wrote Winston Churchill in 1930; he could just as easily have been taking note of America's mission in Iraq.

Yesterday marked five years since the start of the invasion that toppled Saddam Hussein's brutal Ba'athist regime.

Certainly the invasion's planners underestimated the ethnic and sectarian tinderbox they were igniting by removing Saddam from power - not to mention the toll in American blood and treasure the effort would extract.

On the other hand: Who would have thought, not two years ago, that al Qaeda's decision to engage American forces in Iraq would leave the group on the verge of a strategic catastrophe?

Clearly, Churchill's "hurricanes" blow in both directions.

Indeed, it's hard to survey the still-unsettled Iraqi landscape without seeing the gains that American grit has won.

Sectarian violence is down 90 percent since January 2007 - a figure that's held basically steady since October. The once-fearsome al Qaeda in Iraq, meanwhile, is under siege in the northern city of Mosul, its sole remaining base of power.

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If you study warfare you rarely find events going in a straight line. That is one of the differences between warfare and manufacturing. In manufacturing you are molding products and assembling them to a design.

In warfare you are attempting to mold a situation to your design, but the raw material of the design resists and fights back and as your change your design to meet his resistance, he changes the form of his resistance to meet your new design.

That is why it is ignorant to suggest that a plan developed before contact with the enemy will not have to be adjusted as events move forward. Al Qaeda's adjustments to our war effort have posed some difficulties, but we have largely overcome them. They have been driven into a desperate position where their best hope for survival is that Democrats will bail them out with a premature retreat. Right now that is the only way they can win in Iraq.