The Half-Won, Half-Lost War

Real Clear Politics ^ | May 1st, 2008 | Victor Davis Hanson

[The_Republican]

The gloomy election-year refrain is that America is mired in Iraq, took its eye off Afghanistan, empowered Iran and is losing the war on terror. But how accurate is that pessimistic diagnosis?

First, the good news. For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback when his gunmen were routed from their enclaves.

This rout helped the constitutional - and Shiite-dominated - government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki renew its authority, and has encouraged Sunnis to re-enter government. Two great threats to Iraqi autonomy - Iranian-backed Shiite militiamen and Sunni-supported al-Qaida terrorists - have both now been repulsed by an elected government and its supporters.

Our armed forces are stretched, but Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, and his colonels are quietly transforming a top-heavy conventional colossus into more mobile counterinsurgency forces.

Petraeus' recent nomination to Centcom commander suggests that, like the growing influence of Gens. U.S. Grant and William Tecumseh Sherman in 1863, or of George Marshall when he reconfigured the Army in 1940, we at last are beginning to get the right officers in the right places at the right time.

The despairing enemy seems to sense this as well. The more al-Qaida mouthpiece Ayman al-Zawahiri threatens the West, the more he sounds like Hitler's shrill propagandist Joseph Goebbels in his bunker as the Third Reich was crumbling.

In his latest desperate rant, a suddenly "green" Zawahiri was reduced to appealing to environmentally conscious Muslims to fault the United States for our supposed culpability for global warming! No wonder polls across the Middle East show a sharp decline in support for his boss, Osama bin Laden.

[pepsionice]

I’m not a gloom and doom fellow...but the title kinda fits...it is half-won/half-lost, and in five years...we will likely say the same thing. The general public in Afghanistan may be pro-US, but I just don’t see the end to this episode.

[Philo-Junius]

One more time, for the record:

Tet was a colossal disaster for the Viet Cong and the NVA, betrayed only by Westmoreland’s self-promotion beforehand and media sedition afterwards.

We should be so lucky as to engage the Iraqi insurgents in a repeat of Tet.

[oneolcop]

FYI some heavy fighting is still going on in Sadr City. The area is in the North of Baghdad. Our guys are getting killed there daily.

[ThanhPhero]

For all the talk of a recent Tet-like offensive in Basra, the Mahdi Army of radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr suffered an ignominious setback

It was Tet-like in that Communists were pretty mucy destroyed in Tet-68 just as the Mahdists are losing it this time around. It was not Tet-like in that it was localized to a city and part of a city in Iraq. Whether the proffered analogy holds depends on whether we now pull back and pull the Iraqi army back so as to allow the bad guys to get some R&R and time and space to rebuiled as we so magnanimously did for the Communists in Viet Nam.