Roderick Reilly said,
“I’ve always maintained that there are limits to the powers and endurance of fanaticism, and events in Iraq and elsewhere have proven me right.
The notion that terror and insurgent groups can sustain the heavy losses they incurred at the hands of the U.S. military in particular indefinitely is bogus. The notion that the “Anbar Awakening” could happen without U.S. military might is also nonsense. The insurgents who turned on Al Qaeda were well-aware of the fire power and capabilities of U.S. troops, having suffered much higher losses than they inflicted, even with their effective use of IEDs.
They had to have weighed in casualties, equipment, and property losses into their equation to switch sides. Also, where does the notion that the Anbar sheiks did this conversion spontaneously and independently without first being contacted by U.S. and Iraqi authorities come from?
And what’s with giving the likes of Moqtada Al Sadr more credit than he deserves for supposedly “holding back” the Mahdi Army?
What kind of petty, twisted, resentful minds does it take to: 1) Deny that U.S. military power was necessary to affect this outcome in Iraq, 2)or that, similarly, to deny that the war was more than half-won militarily in Vietnam because of Tet, 3) first insist that the Iraqi Army was a formidable foe in the lead-up to the Gulf War, and then turn around and call them “rag-tag” and “3rd-World” when they lost decisively, or 4) that no credit should be given to Reagan and George H. W. Bush for the collapse of the Soviet Union.“
