Bush at the Front
President Bush's decision to go to Anbar province, at the front of the Battle of Iraq, represents a bold stroke in advance of the war for the war that is about to open in Congress. This will commence today, when the Senate Foreign Relations Committee hears testimony from the head of the Government Accounting Office on a report that will be released on the progress in the Battle. That hearing will be followed next week by the testimony from General Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker. If the Democrats keep their promises, a series of votes will then be called to make it appear that Congress is trying to withdraw from a battle that Mr. Petraeus will assure them we are winning.
For Mr. Bush it is a time to let his commanders and diplomats do the talking. He may have failed to acknowledge in 2005 and 2006 that the strategy of rapidly turning over security for provinces and cities to a corrupted, penetrated, and unready Iraqi security force was a recipe for defeat. The battle space in Baghdad was ceded to Al Qaeda and the Iranian sponsored ethnic cleansers of Muqtada al Sadr's Mahdi Army. Our soldiers have paid for this mistake on roads dotted with Iranian made copper disc bombs. Millions of Iraqis have been forced to flee to Damascus, Amman, and internal displacement camps.
All the more remarkable that our generals and GIs have managed, by dint of their daring and success, to put the Democrats calling for retreat onto the defensive. Our forces have been taking back the capital's neighborhoods from the enemy, block by block. This was the logic of Mr. Bush's decision to hold his war council in Anbar, where gains have helped make it possible to quell violence in Baghdad. Anbar was the province that a Marine colonel, Peter Devlin, had said in a classified cable a year ago was increasingly run by Al Qaeda. Mr. Bush's visit to Anbar spoke eloquently to the progress that has been made there
The diplomatic side will have less progress to report. Secretary Rice and Ambassador Khalilzad reasoned in 2005 that those terrorists who were most opposed to the American presence in Iraq also represented the most Iraqis. So former Ba'athists on the Sunni side, like Khallaf al Ayan, and Shi'ia millenarians, like Mr. Sadr, were coaxed, coddled, and tolerated in exchange for their on-again, off-again participation in the fragile government they undermined. General Petraeus ended that policy in February. Insurgents were told that there really was only a final opportunity to abandon violence against civilians, our soldiers, and the government. The new ruling coalition excludes both Messrs. Sadr and al-Ayan.
Both men, who have spent most of Mr. Petraeus' command in neighboring countries, are on the run and weakened. The salvation fronts are acceding. So for the first time on the Sunni side we have a fighting chance. The tribal sheikhs, who started a year ago turning on Al Qaeda all over Iraq, now have the wind at their backs. Men like Sheikh Abdul-Sattar al Rishawi owe a blood debt to the foreign terrorists who command Al Qaeda in Iraq and harbor no desire to remake Saddam Hussein's Iraq. For the first time civilization's side has an army of Muslim fighters willing to chase Al Qaeda back to Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia.
General Petraeus has called the salvation fronts an example of "bottom up" politics. In 2009, when Iraqis will vote again for a new government, these salvation fronts will comprise the Sunni parties that will be not only willing to compromise but also the strongest allies the Shi'ia and Kurds will have against the worst terrorists in Iraq. Not a moment, in other words, when the Congress wants to second guess our commanders on the number of troops to be deployed to the field.
As for the new strategy there is little the Democrats appear willing to say about it. Certainly Senator Clinton will say it is a failure, but she'll do so only to appease those elements of the Democratic Party who are impervious to reason. But what will the Democrats, a party that faulted the White House for four years for failing to listen to our generals, say when the general in charge of Iraq says we can win? And when the president has made such a point of listening to the generals himself. And not only the generals, but the GIs, men and women in our uniform, who were sent into battle by the president and the Congress and who, by dint of extraordinary skill and courage, have begun to turn the tide.
