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The Petraeus Bargain: Causing Fundamental Shift in Iraq
One of the consistent charges leveled by the Left against the President is that he is inflexible and intractable. Hence, the hue and cry that we need “a change in direction” in Iraq, etc. Well, we’ve had a “change in direction.” It is called The Surge. And it is producing profound results–not just military results, but local political results as well.
Charles Krauthammer describes this “far-reaching and fundamental political shift” as “The 20 Percent Solution.”
Since the formation of their government, we have been waiting on the Iraqis to pass grand national accords on oil, federalism and de-Baathification to unify and pacify the country. Unfortunately, the Maliki government has proved too sectarian, too weak and perhaps too disposed to Iranian interests to rise to the task.
This failure, so say the defeatists, means we should now abandon the Iraqis. Krauthammer responds:
A tempting thought, but ultimately self-destructive to our interests. Accordingly, Petraeus and Crocker have found a Plan B: pacify the country region by region, principally by getting Sunnis to join the fight against al-Qaeda.
This has begun to happen in Anbar and Diyala. First, because al-Qaeda are foreigners. So are we, but — reason No. 2 — unlike them, we are not barbarous. We don’t amputate fingers for smoking, decapitate with pleasure and kill Shiites for sport.
Third, al-Qaeda’s objectives are not the Sunnis’. Al-Qaeda adherents live for endless war and a reborn caliphate. Ultimately, they live to die. Iraqi Sunnis are not looking for a heavenly date with 72 virgins. They are looking for a deal, and perhaps just survival after U.S. troops are gone.
That’s why so many Sunnis have accepted Petraeus’s bargain — they join our fight against al-Qaeda, and we give them weaponry and military support. With that, they can rid themselves of the al-Qaeda cancer now. And later, when the Americans inevitably leave, they’ll be better positioned to defend themselves against the 80 percent Shiite-Kurd majority they are beginning to realize they may have unwisely taken on.
The bargain is certainly working for us. The recent capture of the leading Iraqi in al-Qaeda’s Iraq affiliate is no accident, comrade. You capture such people only when you have good intelligence, and you have good intelligence only when the locals have turned against the terrorists.
The place of his capture — Mosul — is also telling. Mosul is where you go if you’ve been driven out of Anbar and Diyala and have no other good place to go. You don’t venture into the Shiite south or the purely Kurdish north where the locals will kill you.
The charge against our previous war strategy was that we were playing whack-a-mole: They escape from here, they reestablish there. Petraeus’s plan is to eliminate all al-Qaeda sanctuaries.
We are winning the war in Iraq. We now need to win the political battle for the will of the American people here at home.