Watch the Spin

The media will spin the news of the terrorist attacks in Fallujah as a defeat. So will every half-witted leftyblog.

And the story sounds gnarly, indeed - many Iraqi police killed, some prisoners released in a classical commando raid:

It was unclear how many attackers there were. But [Iraqi police commander] Hammad and other Iraqi police and military officials said the attacks all began about 8:15 a.m. with a cascade of rocket propelled grenade and machine gun fire at the five different locations. Fighting continued for nearly an hour.

Pretty scary stuff, that.

It's about here that the less informed leftybloggers will start crying "quagmire".

Not so fast, though:

No American troops were involved in the fighting. Officers from the 82nd Airborne Division stationed a 10-minute drive away could hear the battle clearly. They offered help but the Hammad said it wasn't needed. The Americans did provide additional ammunition and weapons, including light machine guns.

After the battle, soldiers at the civil defense base proudly displayed a light machine gun and a pair of rocket propelled grenade launchers they had captured from the attackers. Thursday, insurgents fired a pair of rocket propelled grenades at this same base while Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command, was staging an inspection. Abizaid was unhurt.

The Iraqi police got beaten up. And then they hit back.

They took worse than they gave, but - and this is the important part - they didn't buckle and run. They told the 82nd Airborne to hold off. And they did the job themselves.

And that is a key step toward victory; when the US can leave Sunni towns like Fallujah behind, and the locals will fight the Islamofascist scum as hard as we do.

It's not a victory; you can't win too many victories when your ratio of losses is 5-1 against.

But as the Iraqi cops win a few more, and learn how guerrillas are fought - and remember, only the enemy's first team does these sorts of raids - the body counts will straighten out. And so will the situation.

Belmont Club put it well;

That when dying and bleeding, beset by the flower of terrorism, with pistol to set against automatic rifle and grenade, the Iraqi police did not ask for help from 82nd Airborne. They asked for ammunition.

If John Kerry were president, these men would be human meat in the Hussein sausage machine.

Posted by Mitch at February 16, 2004 05:04 AM