“The Meaning of Our Victory in Iraq”

Those aren’t my words or the words of some rightwing, neo-con newspaper columnist but of the American diplomat leading the Provincial Reconstruction Team in Anbar Province, John Matel.

You may remember Mr. Matel from last fall’s dust up at the State Department over a then lack of volunteers for duty in Iraq (a shortfall that was subsequently met). He wrote on the State Department’s own public blog essentially that his colleagues needed to suck it up and get to work.

During his time in Iraq he’s also kept a personal blog and he has some thoughts on the situation there and what’s been accomplished to date.

It may take a while for the magnitude of this to sink in. I can walk around in the same places where heavily armed American & Iraqi forces could not safely walk only months ago. Here the debate has shifted to providing everyday services such as sewer, water and electricity. Marketplaces where insurgents dumped headless bodies last year are now crowded with shoppers. Children are returning to school instead of being abused by terrorists and coerced into deadly activities. What a difference a year makes!

Sometimes you just have to win. Some conflicts just need to run their courses and some bad guys just need killing. Nazi ideology was not discredited UNTIL it was defeated on the battlefield. No amount of peaceful persuasion or appeasement worked. People thought communism was a viable alternative to the free market UNTIL it ignominiously collapsed. Massive economic evidence and even the presence of a very large and deadly wall running down the middle of Berlin did not convince the believers to abandon their failed ideology. Earlier forms of terrorism from the Barbary Pirates to the Bader-Meinhof didn’t go away until they were defeated. We tried appeasement in the 1930s and we tried ignorance in the 1990s. These things did not work.

As they say, read the whole thing and check out his other posts for a look at life in the new Anbar Province.

posted by DrewM. at 11:20 AM

| Access Comments