Rollin' On The Rivers

"Rollin' On The Rivers
Hat Tip: Powerline

MAY was a costly month in Iraq: 700 Iraqis and some 80 Americans died, making it one of the bloodiest months of the war. While bombings in Baghdad decreased over the last two weeks as the result of a major sweep by some 40,000 Iraqi soldiers and policemen, backed up by 10,000 troops (Operation Lightning/Operation Thunder), insurgent attacks against Iraqi civilians and police have resumed.

The continuing attacks have generated the usual sort of stories in the U.S. press: America is mired in a Vietnam-style quagmire. Thus a recent Boston Globe report began by claiming: "Military operations in Iraq have not succeeded in weakening the insurgency."

But the Globe is wrong. Coalition operations in Iraq have killed hundreds of insurgents and led to the capture of many hundreds more, including two dozen of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's top lieutenants. Intelligence from captured insurgents, as well as from Zarqawi's computer, has had a cascading effect, permitting the Coalition to maintain pressure on the insurgency.

Vice President Dick Cheney's recent claim that the insurgency was in its "last throes," however, was clearly an overstatement. But while the outcome in Iraq is far from certain — and even a favorable one won't come overnight — evidence suggests the United States and the new Iraqi government are on the right track to ultimate success. To understand why, it is necessary to grasp the essentials of the current U.S. strategy in Iraq and how it seems to be playing out.

The Globe's problem, one shared by most of the American press, is the tendency to see events in Iraq as isolated. They fail to see the overall campaign: a series of coordinated events — movements, battles and supporting operations — designed to achieve strategic or operational objectives within a military theater.

No force, conventional or guerrilla, can continue to fight if it is deprived of sanctuary and logistics support. Accordingly, the central goal of the U.S. strategy in Iraq is to destroy the insurgency by depriving it of its base in the Sunni Triangle and its "ratlines" — the infiltration routes that run from the Syrian border into the heart of Iraq.

One ratline follows the Euphrates River corridor — running from Syria to Husayba on the Syrian border and then through Qaim, Rawa, Haditha, Asad, Hit and Fallujah to Baghdad. The other follows the course of the Tigris — from the north through Mosul-Tel Afar to Tikrit and on to Baghdad. These two "river corridors" constitute the main spatial elements of a campaign to implement U.S. strategy.

This campaign began last November with the takedown of Fallujah.

Wresting Fallujah from the rebels was critically important: Control of the town had given them the infrastructure — human and physical — necessary to maintain a high tempo of attacks against the Iraqi government and coalition forces.

In and of itself, the loss of Fallujah didn't cause the insurgency to collapse, but it did deprive the rebels of an indispensable sanctuary. Absent such a sanctuary, large terrorist networks cannot easily survive, being reduced to small, hunted bands.

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