Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Troop Surge Results

Dennis Prager, on his radio show, mentioned Jack Kelley's column today in Real Clear Politics, "Is the Surge Already Producing Results?" Kelley's answer is, yes.

Three interesting things have happened since President Bush announced plans to "surge" U.S. troops.

First, al Qaida appears to be retreating from Baghdad.

He explains the documentation showing this is the case, then continues:

Mr. al Masri's [head of al Qaida in Iraq] evacuation order said that remaining in Baghdad is a no-win situation for al Qaida, because the Fallujah campaign demonstrating the Americans have learned how to prevail in house to house fighting, Mr. Miniter said.

"In more than 10 years of reading al Qaida intercepts, I've never seen (pessimistic) language like this," he quoted his intelligence officer source as saying.

Much conservative commentary has made a point of the similarity of language between the American Left and our enemies in Iraq. This looks like one more case. The Democrats, in response to the President's announcement of a troop surge in Iraq started Chicken Little-ing with, "We can't win over there!" And now al Qaeda is saying the same thing.

Second, the radical cleric Moqtada al Sadr, whose Iranian-subsidized militia, the Mahdi army, is responsible for most of the assaults on Sunni civilians in Iraq, is cooling his rhetoric and lowering his profile.

"Mahdi army militia members have stopped wearing their black uniforms, hidden their weapons and abandoned their checkpoints in an apparent effort to lower their profile in Baghdad in advance of the arrival of U.S. reinforcements," wrote Leila Fadel and Zaineb Obeid of the McClatchy Newspapers Jan. 13.

Third, Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki is putting more distance between himself and al Sadr, upon whose bloc of votes in parliament he had relied for political support.

All of these are excellent news.

For those on the Left, who have foreseen only calamity as a result of the announced troop surge, take heart. We haven't even surged yet, and we're reaping the positive results.

Send the troops. Take the gloves off. And let them do their jobs.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

That last sentence is probably the most important. Whether we have 2,000 or 200,000 American military personnel in Baghdad is of no consequence if they are not given a defined military mission and then be ALLOWED TO DO IT!!!

Sound hawkish? Yes to some, I suppose. In reality, just want to see the mission accomplished, the transition to Iraqi control completed, and our VICTORIOUS American forces drawn down (to do further damage to the heinous enemy elsewhere).