Midway, Kursk, El Alamein, The Atlantic, the Election - Part II

Austin Bay on his evidence that we're beating the insurgency.

He discusses an observation made while on active duty in Iraq, in the Joint Operations Center.

Bay describes a bank of monitors in a headquaters:

In the upper right-hand corner of one panel, Fox News flickered silently -- and for the record, occasionally CNN or Al Jazeera would flicker there, as well. Beneath Fox ran my favorite channel, live imagery from a Predator Unmanned Aerial Vehicle circling somewhere over Iraq.

The biggest display, that morning and every morning, was a spooling date-time list describing scores of military and police actions undertaken over the last dozen hours, The succinct, acronym-packed reports flowed like haikus of violence: "0331: 1/5 Cav, 1st Cavalry Division, arrests suspects after Iraqi police stop car"; "0335 USMC vicinity Fallujah engaged by RPG, returned fire. No casualties."

The spool spun on and on, and I remember thinking: "I know we're winning. We're winning because -- in the big picture -- all the opposition (Saddam's thugs and Zarqawi's Al Qaeda) has to offer is the tyranny of the past. But the drop-by-drop police blotter perspective obscures that."

Bay observes how the glut of information may have obsured the real story - at least, for the media:

Collect relatively isolated events in a chronological list and presto: the impression of uninterrupted, widespread violence destroying Iraq. But that was a false impression. Every day, coalition forces were moving thousands of 18-wheelers from Kuwait and Turkey into Iraq, and if the "insurgents" were lucky they blew up one. However, flash the flames of that one rig on CNN and, "Oh my God, America can't stop these guys," is the impression left in Boise and Beijing.

Another key observation:

Saddam's thugs and Zarqawi's klan were actually weak enemies -- "brittle" is the word I used to describe them at a senior planning meeting. Their local power was based on intimidation -- killing by car bomb, murdering in the street. Their strategic power was based solely on selling the false impression of nationwide quagmire -- selling post-Saddam Iraq as a dysfunctional failed-state, rather than an emerging democracy .

It used to be the military that got criticized for "fighting the last war" - but it looks like in this case it's the media that's a war or two behind:

In World War II, destroying Nazi divisions and taking islands from the Japanese provided hard yardsticks to gauge military success. Irregular warfare rarely offers such a clarifying quantitative measure. Over the summer of 2004, I had the benefit of anecdotal measures. Iraqis I talked to would tell me they intended to vote in the January elections.

The elections would be "the big island," the defining moment in the post-Saddam political struggle, and it would be the Iraqi people providing the public yardstick.

That's precisely what happened. The Jan. 30 election provided the broad and deep perspective the police blotter obscures: This is a war of liberty against tyranny, and it's a war we are winning.

Read the whole thing.

I restate my prediction; you'll know the war is won when the left starts trying to either claim credit for it, or claim that democratization in the Middle East was inevitable.

Soon.

Posted by Mitch at March 24, 2005 07:29 AM | TrackBack