MICHAEL YON: IRAQ'S NEW DAWN

Flames still burst from various sources and wild cards remain, such as the potential that Muqtada al-Sadr might stomp his feet and encourage his diminished militias to attack us. Yet support for Sadr among Shia is hardly monolithic. In fact, many Shia view him as a simpleton whose influence derives strictly from respect for his father. Others cite the threat from Iran, but the Iranian participation in the fighting here remains overstated.

Nobody knows what the future will bring, but the civil war has completely ended.

The Iraqi army and police grow stronger by the month, and even the National Police (NP) are gaining a degree of respect and credibility.

As recently as last year, the NPs were considered nothing more than militia members in uniform who murdered with impunity. To go on patrol with NPs was to invite attack. But the Americans worked to help alleviate the disdain.

On one occasion, US soldiers peacefully disarmed a local militia that was apparently about to ambush NPs who had harassed it the same morning, and the soldiers sent the NPs to their station and later gave the locals back their guns. The next day, we were at the NP station as the US commander, Lt-Col. James Crider, gave professional instruction to the NP commanders.

Over time, the extremely frustrating process of mentoring the NPs worked. Last week, I went on foot patrol with US forces and NPs in the same Baghdad neighborhood. Kids were coming up to say hello. And the same people who used to tell me they hated the NPs were actually greeting them.

Similar dynamics have occurred in places like Anbar, Diyala and Nineveh. Tour after tour of US soldiers carried the ball successively, further down the field.

The whole “hate Bush” attitude was fabricated by the liberal media as ‘Iraq is a failure’ or ‘Iraq is unwinnable’ etc.

I made the mistake of thinking that this was a huge risk that the liberals were taking...what happens when we win the Iraq war? Will these people who hate Bush so much have to admit they were wrong?

Well, I was wrong. Iraq has been a huge success, but the ‘hate Bush’ attitutde remains. A lot of liberals aren’t really sure why they hate Bush, or its morphed into an economic issue (which of course is plainly due to Clinton era policies), or they blame a natural disaster on Bush (the failure of the New Orleans water control was due to local Democrat leaders). I made the mistake of thinking that rational individual thought would take over, but instead irrational groupthink remained in place.

So we won the war and lost the election. I would not have thought that possible even a year ago.

I suspect we are going to see something interesting, and soon.

The military is still enraged at the Democrats in congress for abandoning Vietnam to invasion from the Russian backed North, betraying our allies, and having many of its friends in the ARVN, and their families, put into reeducation camps to suffer and die.

From day 1 of the Iraqi occupation, they were determined that no matter what else happened, that would not happen again. The expectation was that bitter partisanship would again turn against our allies and the US military.

They were right. As such, there is no way the US military wants the Democrats to even have a chance to betray the Iraqis, which they would probably go to great lengths to do.

The key is what is happening right now. If the Iraqi parliament does not sign the Status Of Forces Agreement (SOFA), when the UN mandate ends on January 1st, the US military will have to leave immediately.

And while, had John McCain been elected, we and Iraq could have looked forward to several more years of supporting their reconstruction, with Obama, it is better for both the US military and Iraq if we now leave.

Both the military, and hopefully the Iraqis, knew this the moment Obama was elected. However, had the Iraqis just rejected the SOFA right then, the US military would have had a month and a half to pack up and leave, taking billions of dollars of equipment with us.

But if Iraq’s parliament rejects the SOFA closer to the end of the year, we will have to turn over the majority of that equipment to the Iraqis for their use. All sorts of weapons systems that the Democrat congress would never approve the sale of to Iraq will be theirs.

We will also leave them a shopping list of anything else they need to be at 100%. Remember how there was great whining several months ago, when it was discovered that Iraq had billions of dollars that hadn’t been spent?

Now they can spend it on weapons purchased on the open market, and if Iraq’s biggest enemy, Iran, attacks, the Iraqi military will clean their clocks.

And after January 1st, there is not a damn thing the Democrats can do to stop it. Iraq will survive and prosper. It will not be thrown into chaos and ruin and civil war, its people suffering and dying, all because the Democrats hate them just as much as they hated the Vietnamese people.

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