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June 23, 2006
Smells Like ... Victory
It looks like we may be on the verge of a fairly complete victory in Iraq. The Iraqi government seems to be prepared to offer amnesty to insurgents in Iraq. Since November of 2004, and the river war that followed it, broke the back of the insurgency (organized operations by the enemy above the squad level have since been essentially non-existent), it has been clear that the insurgents could not drive out the US or Iraqi government militarily. The elections that have followed have shown that the insurgents cannot defeat the Iraqi government politically. The failure of terrorism to spark civil war, and the increasingly-evident revenge attacks by Sunni and Kurd groups embedded in Iraq's Interior Ministry, have made abundantly clear lately that the Sunni insurgents (2 or 3 distinct types, actually, including criminals, ex-Ba'athists and so on) have to settle, leave or die. And now we are in the end game: wars end either in the annihilation of the enemy, or their surrender on terms. This amnesty, however spun, amounts to nothing more than a surrender of the major Sunni groups on terms.
Certainly, there are some tenets of the proposal, assuming the media reports to be correct, that are questionable as stated, and I hope our government officials are on top of these. For example, including a halting of coalition anti-terror raids in insurgent strongholds only makes sense if we can resume those raids if there is any terrorist or insurgent activity in those strongholds, and if the Iraqi military and police are able to take control of those areas as a condition of stopping coalition operations. I'm content to give the administration the benefit of the doubt on this, given how well they've done in handling the war to date both militarily and politically.
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