don't panic

Yesterday was a grim one for US forces in Iraq, with a total of eighteen dead. And—if your news sources are the usual suspects—chances are the message you've garnered is that the country is in total meltdown.

If so, then the inestimable David Warren is required reading.

The project, from the U.S. and allied entry into Iraq, was to leave it, if not a full-fledged bourgeois democracy, at least a “normal” country under the rule of some sort of law, a place which has ceased to breed threats to civilization far beyond its borders.

The great majority of Iraqis would be mightily pleased with such a result, after living many decades through the hell of totalitarianism. They will quietly cheer if the U.S. military and its principal ally, the new, large, and still quickly expanding Iraqi police force, ruthlessly suppress the chief threats to the new order. They are horrified by the spectacle of the Saddamites in Fallujah, and the fanatic Shia “Mahdi's Army”. Not horrified so much by what they are doing to Americans, as by what they are already doing to fellow Iraqis who stand in their way.

But at the first sign that, instead of ruthlessly exterminating these people, the Americans may cut and run, “average” Iraqis will change sides. They will begin to accommodate themselves to the fanatic likeliest to emerge with power. Personal safety will require it. […]

Therefore, if the Americans and their friends want to create a constitutional order, they must be the most ruthless. They cannot possibly “negotiate” with the fanatics, the only practical option is to slaughter them. It is also the only moral option, for the alternative is to leave Iraq 's innocents to be ploughed under fresh killing fields.

[emphasis added]

Warren assesses that the opposition in Fallujah doesn't rise to the level of an uprising: it is merely an attempted uprising. More worrisome, however, is the bearded adolescent Moqtada al-Sadr.

al-Sadr himself is despised by the legitimate hierarchy, and almost certainly in the pay of Iran's revolutionary ayatollahs. They, in turn, have taken advantage of the opening of Iraqi society to Muslim charities and religious festivals to smuggle weapons and Revolutionary Guards into the country. […]

But this “uprising” — which has emphatically not been joined by the Shia masses — is that enemy's best shot. The good news is that they came out shooting now, rather than waiting until after the handover of power to the Iraqi provisional government on June 30th. They have exposed themselves, at a time when the full strength of U.S. and allied military power can be applied to them.

In sum: both the Shia radicals and the Sunni Ba'athists have made strategic, and hopefully fatal, errors. (For more on why, see Steven Den Beste's analysis from Monday.)

There is reason to be cautiously—very cautiously—optimistic, even as we mourn the losses suffered by our soldiers and Marines. But Warren also exhorts us to beware those in the press that seem intent on making US defeat a self-fulfilling prophecy.

He might have extended that warning to cover certain senior Democratic Senators as well.

UPDATE: More analysis here and here.