look beyond the headlines

A few years ago, my dad joked (sadly) that the New York Times had become like Pravda: you had to read between the lines to get it. It’s not only the Times, though. I don’t know any MSM news outlet that covered the detailed speech General Abizaid gave after he testified before Congress last week. (That appearance was the main event covered by the MSM, because it offered the newly triumphant Dems an opportunity to question the war in Iraq—they didn’t get what they wanted, though.)

According to the brilliant Walid Phares in “Listen Carefully to General Abizaid,” it’s not just the American people who don’t get it; even the well-informed members of Congress are ill-informed. They just don’t get it.

Indeed, the ultimate objective in this war (at least the counter-terrorist part of it) is to help the Iraqis help themselves. Surely with half a million boots on the ground you can saturate the whole country, but from what? There is no standing army the U.S. is fighting against.

The fight is against a factory that is producing Jihadists, both external and internal. The answer is to build the counter-factory: i.e. an Iraqi military and intelligence force. And to do so, you have to allow it to fight the battle, with all the sacrifices and setbacks that come with it. U.S. forces cannot keep fighting instead of the Iraqis, and win the war for them.

Aware of this reality, General Abizaid (along with his colleagues) was trying to explain to Congress that – in the historical context of it – the war against terrorism in Iraq is one of the centers of the global conflict. …

How can we accomplish this? We must train more Iraqi soldiers. Even more important, we must build the morale and political will of the Iraqi people to join “our” (i.e., Iraq’s) side, not the side of jihad and totalitarian control of Mesopotamia. How do we do that?

If Iraqi citizens “see” their army engaging the terrorists and winning, the tide will turn. It is not about how many new troops or about the statistics of death. It is between al Jazeera convincing Iraqis that the U.S. is defeated and that former Secretary of State Jim Baker (co-chair of the Iraq Study Group) is supposedly negotiating the terms of the surrender, and between al Hurra TV showing Iraqi commanders fraternizing with Shia and Sunni villagers after encounters with terrorists and sectarian militias. It boils down to this: who would the Iraqis send their sons to fight with: The Jihadists of all types or the multiethnic Army?

Phares is brilliant, but he misses one point: people who long for freedom don’t need to be encouraged to fight for it. Indeed, it’s hard to contain them.

I fear there aren’t enough freedom-loving and -demanding people left in Iraq to tip the balance. As Wieseltier said, the Iraqis seem to have rejected the “Foreigner’s Gift.”