Mario Loyola, writing in the Weekly Standard, argues that Al Qaeda in Iraq is being “demolished” by a combination of clear, control and retain operations on the one hand, and lightning strike air assaults on suspected jihadi bases of support on the other.
Those latter operations are intended to keep Al Qaeda from staging any of their bloody little dramas designed less for military effect than to prejudice US public opinion leading into the Petraeus report.
These are offensive operations, which should be pleasing to those engaged in them and they’re forehanded, which should be pleasing to the rest of us. It also sounds like they’re meeting with significant success:
Many al Qaeda fighters appear to have had just enough warning to make good their escape. But in so doing, they were forced to abandon their new “operations center” north of Baghdad–a command post, medical clinic, scores of rockets and mortars, dozens of IEDs, and even their personal weapons.
The prospects for these fighters are not good. The north and south end of the valleys are blocked, as is the valley’s western border. The eastern escape from the valley is open for them, but that leads them into a bowl of farmland that is regularly scoured by patrols from FOB Caldwell, and is ringed to the northeast by the Kurdish “wall,” to the south by the Shiite “wall,” and to the southwest by coalition forces operating in strength between Baghdad and Baquba. Their only solution is to travel without their weapons and explosives–the things that make them dangerous.
Best not to get too pleased with ourselves. We’ve got to be good all the time, the bad guys only have to be lucky a little.
And I was listening to Victor Davis Hanson on the Hugh Hewitt show from a few days ago talking about the fact that there really is not an inexhaustible supply of suicide bombers, which is one of the reasons that those attacks have tailed off. Good news all around…’bout time too.
Props where they’re due:
Meanwhile, not beset by the force limitations that constrain General Lynch south of Baghdad, General Benjamin Mixon’s Multi-National Division-North has orchestrated the Lightning Hammer attack as a CCR on the pattern developed by the Marines in Anbar. Close behind the American units came units of the Iraqi Security Forces, aiming to stay, and behind them, government officials and technical advisers meant to levee the population into the organized neighborhood watch programs that have proven fatal to al Qaeda in Anbar. Planners told me that the coalition forces were greeted warmly, and locals pledged to help, as the Sunni tribes have in Anbar.
And the ultimate conclusion:
In the words of one soft-spoken coalition planner in Baghdad, “We are demolishing them.” After four long years, the coalition has finally grasped the keys to victory. Al Qaeda has begun to lose the staging areas it needs for attacks in Baghdad. Just staying alive and avoiding capture is becoming a full-time occupation for them. As security envelops Baghdad, and calm spreads along the river corridors that extend out from the capital to the furthest reaches of the country, what is already clear to many people here in Iraq will become increasingly impossible for the rest of the world to ignore.
Casca, me hopes it’s true, but I’ve heard those words regularly since 2005. It’s one of those granular thingies. As for the impending shortage of suicide bombers, there are many, many other factors involved, but denying them staging areas in Iraq has been the goal for years, let’s hope it’s true and not some PAO’s dreamsheet.