HunterByrd

Democratic senator Joseph Biden, who is a senior adviser to Kerry and rivals Ambassador Holbrooke in TV time advancing the Kerry campaign, has perhaps put the Democratic critique most forthrightly. "We have to help train up their [Iraqi] forces. That's the key. That's the ultimate exit strategy, and the secretary of defense said in February [2004] that we have trained 220,000 Iraqi military. . . . That was malarkey." Biden, like Kerry, wants to see a more rapid, massive deployment of Iraqi military and paramilitary police units, and the Bush administration has so far failed to deliver this supposed sine qua non for American success.

But this bipartisan position is likely to be our undoing. Basic point: The United States is engaged in a revolution in Iraq. We have toppled Saddam Hussein, the Baath party, and the Sunni Arab dominion over the country. We have promised to help the Iraqi people establish a democracy, which means that we are the midwife of a political system that will empower the Shia, who constitute at least 60 percent of Iraq's population. This is an enormous shock to Iraq's Arab Sunnis, who may represent as much as 25 percent, but quite possibly no more than 15 percent, of all Iraqis. Many in the Muslim Middle East hate and fear the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. One of the principal reasons is Sunni antipathy for the American-delivered Shiite new order.

The situation is worse in 2004 because American officials and soldiers have become even more attached to the idea that Iraqi forces are the key to our salvation. Consider the symbolism of what we are doing. Do Sunni militants, ex-Baathists, and ordinary Iraqis think American soldiers, who come out now only in heavily armed convoys and rarely spend the night, look like troops that have the will to beat diehard Sunni fundamentalists? How does it look when the Americans hunker down in their heavily armored vehicles while the Iraqi security forces voyage out in easily obliterated pick-up trucks? The Iraqis are getting pummeled much worse than we are. For whom does this inspire confidence? For whom fear? And the worst is still to come.

Time is critical now. Secretary Rumsfeld may be right that elections in "three-quarters or four-fifths of the country" are better than no elections at all in January. Any significant delay of elections would quickly force Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's preeminent Shiite cleric, to stand against the United States. If he were to do so, he would win, we and Prime Minister Allawi would lose, and the chance for a nationwide insurrection would skyrocket. But it will be much better for us all if elections happen everywhere, more or less at the same time.

In any case, we should plan on the worst: The Sunni triangle will probably become much more savage, and Moktada al-Sadr may well again come at us and Grand Ayatollah Sistani, his primary foe, when we are stressed by battles with Sunnis. We should assume, as Senator Biden fearfully predicted, that we will inherit the wind in Iraq, and we should meet that wind head on. The president should transport all the Marines he can to Iraq, and then take and hold the centers of the Sunni insurrection, starting with Falluja. The administration shouldn't fear the Arabic satellite TV networks' broadcasting the horrors of the American offensive. Bin Ladenism grew by preaching the gospel of American weakness, not strength. The Ottoman empire, the greatest of Islam's holy-warrior states, attracted vastly more jihadists from its realms and beyond when it had Europe's Christian kingdoms on the run. If the Americans win--and win we will--these TV networks will not be able to camouflage defeat.