It's Not a Civil War, It's a Revolution

One cannot do any better than the incomparable Chris Hitchens when toting up the score at the three-year mark. Or you may want to slide over to Gateway Pundit for a quick summary of some prominent predictions by some of your favorite war critics.

The release of captured Iraqi documents has the potential to be the most earth-shatttering unreported story of this entire episode. For the facts that the Main Stream Media won't report, check out the unrelenting Stephen Hayes who has been virtually a one-man show on telling the story about Saddam's Al Qaeda connections.

People mistakenly thought the first Gulf War put the Vietnam Syndrome to bed. The fact was there has been a giant latent anti-war machinery consisting of old hippies, "artists", the movie business, the music business, and the press, all of whom cut their teeth during Vietnam, who have been waiting a long time to roll out their "I Hate America" schtick one more time. It's hard to be post-modern, ironic, alienated and patriotic. So patriotic has to go.

It's just so, you know, goober to love your country. We all grew up on Vietnam, and Watergate. I mean, who wants to go to a rally and sing "Give War a Chance"? For the most part, people weren't getting high and laid at Young Republicans rallies. Anti-War is just so much more hip.

SO first we were going to lose half a million lives in the war to topple Saddam, then there weren't enough troops to defeat the insurgency, and now the insurgency is defeated so it must mean civil war.

Of course there's sectarian violence right now. The Iraqi's are attempting to form a government. The fact that they're fighting about it shows they take it seriously. Meanwhile, Zarqawi is actively working to foment civil war. Yes, it could all beak down at this late point, but here's betting it won't. In fact, I see the Kurds, Sunni's and Shiite's forming a unity government pretty soon, then uniting to run Al Qaeda out. Pretty good outcome.

As I sit here today, I also see a real possibility for an American defeat in Iraq. If it happens, it won't be because we didn't have enought troops, or because we disbanded the Iraqi army, or because civil war eventually broke out. It will be because the American people never got the whole story.

If the anti-war movement is successful in causing defeat in Iraq, I think they might be surprised at the number and severity of subsequent wars that will lead to. The inevitable conclusion to be reached by our enemies will be--See how easy it is to defeat America.

We have lost 2500 brave soldiers over the course of three years. We lost that many on D-Day. Iwo Jima cost 7000 lives, the battle for Okinawa cost over 20000 lives.

Our threshold for pain seems to have fallen awfully low, yet I don't believe that average Americans would be throwing in the towel yet were it not for an orchestrated, relentless media campaign to undermine the administration at every turn.

Post 9/11, the Bush administration shifted our strategic doctrine to one of pre-emption. I believe many in the intellectual elite have serious issues with that. It would be nice if we lived in a world where no one would use military force unless attacked first. We don't. 9/11 exposed the flaw in our old strategic doctrine. Not only would our enemies attack without provocation or warning, but they would slaughter innocent civilians while attempting to wreck our economic infrastructure.

This is a true vulnerability. If there is a way to take us down, that's it. The great American wealth-making machine makes it all possible. Cripple that, and the whole facade comes tumbling down. We cannot wait to be attacked like that again.

Iraq was to be the test case. Needless to say, not finding WMD, and no conclusive Iraq-Al Qaeda link has put a serious political hole in the policy. But it is still the only sane policy.

Politically, perhaps the only way to salvage the war from Vietnam syndrome will come from some sort of intelligence breakthrough that discovers the remnants of Saddam's WMD, or from the establishment of a definite link between Saddam and Al Qaeda. That's why the release of the OIF war documents is so crucial, and why the press needs to feel pressure to cover them.

We're still the good guys. As convoluted as it may seem, we're still fighting and defeating the bad guys in Iraq. When Iraq forms its government it will represent the greatest triumph of American foreign policy since the end of the Cold War, and will signal the beginning of the end of the reign of Islamic terror that we've been up against since at least 1979.