Uday and Qusay are ead-day.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, newly in charge of operations in Iraq, called the ongoing fighting there “a classical guerrilla-type campaign. … It’s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms, but it’s war however you describe it.” This candor is not grounds for despair. Americans remembering Vietnam, jihadists remembering Afghanistan, and Democrats running for president imagine that guerrilla fighters always win. In fact they generally lose, as Communists from Greece to Malaya to the Philippines found, if the proper combination of isolation, suasion, and force is applied. Gen. Abizaid made that point too: “It’s not a matter of boots per square meter. It’s a matter of focused intelligence, and then troops that are agile enough to carry out missions in a manner that can cause surprise and take down the targets precisely.” Accordingly, he plans to shift the force structure from armor to lighter forces. Meanwhile, the Americans and the British have begun training Iraqi militia, with the approval of the new Iraqi Governing Council. If ambitious troublemakers like Moqtada Sadr, the Shiite cleric who summoned a demonstration in Najaf, want to play, they will have to play along. We have in Iraq what our ill-fated sorties in Lebanon and Somalia lacked, a clear and vital mission: Our security demands that we keep the country out of the hands of Baathist brutes and their well-trained scientists. This demands time, intelligence, and valor.
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