In the linked article, Austin Bay writes for TCS Daily of the recent Iraqi victory over the Jund al-Samaa, or ‘Soldiers of Heaven’, a radical, fundamentalist Shi’a group dedicated to the armed support of the return of the Mahdi, or Shi’a messiah. This group apparently believed that other Shi’a in Iraq were apostate because they did not support an armed insurrection in support of the Mahdi and because they support the current government of Iraq, and as a result, they planned to massacre Shi’a pilgrims on their way to Najaf for the celebration of the Shi’a festival of Ashura.
Instead, the Iraqi military, supported by US airpower, massacred the Jund al-Samaa, ironically giving them their sought after martyr’s death, preventing them from carrying out their plan to derail both the Shi’a pilgrimage and the Iraqi Shi’a progress toward a democratic Iraq. Austin Bay focuses on how this victory is also a victory for Shi’a modernism in Iraq, but it is also a victory for Iraqi independence from US support.
What we see in the Battle for Najaf 2007 is the model for what the ‘New Way Forward’ in Iraq can be if it is allowed to succeed. Instead of US Forces engaged in a fight with an Iraqi enemy hiding almost indistinguishably among the general populace, it was an Iraqi force, supported by Iraqi intelligence, Iraqi will, and US support in the form of combat capability they cannot provide themselves that directly engaged the enemy and destroyed them.
As the troop surge gathers steam, more and more of this style of engagement can happen. US forces can take a supporting role to Iraqi forces, who are allowed to engage the enemy and gain that experience while still having the confidence that US forces are available if they get into trouble. Until the surge, one of the problems has always been that there are not enough US forces to support all of the Iraqi forces, so as a result many Iraqi forces simply do not engage.
This success is not to say that it will all be success or that the Iraq surge does not have problems, but with so much negative press about this Iraq strategy, it is important to note exactly the kind of success the President of the United States promised the American people as part of his plan.
Americans should cheer such success and take it to heart. The more Americans hear and understand such things, the more likely they will be to reverse their current slide toward defeatism and embrace the only policy that matters in Iraq, that is the policy of winning.
DLH
