JAYVEE: Three Months Needed to Rout Islamic State, Iraqi PM Says.

Iraq’s anti-ISIS counteroffensive has already been going on for months and will go on for months more, and yet only six weeks were required to rout Saddam Hussein and his army in 2003. Part of that is due to the professionalism and lethality of the US and British militaries, and (to a lesser extent) the other Coalition forces. The other part is cultural — that modern Arab armies with few exceptions haven’t performed as well in battle as their impressive equipment manifests and even more impressive military histories might suggest they would.

The real danger posed by ISIS may not be from ISIS itself. It may instead be that they have shown the way ahead to a far more effective method for Arab armies to wage war. They’ve combined the lessons learned in Coalition-occupied Iraq (before the Surge) and from the Palestinian intifada, plus the logistical ingenuity of the Viet Cong. They then added in postmodern propaganda and recruiting techniques, and old-fashioned, street-level terror that would have been appreciated by the cruelest among Hitler’s SS or Lenin’s chekists.

This “new” way of war isn’t anything that can’t be defeated by a determined Western military should the need arise. But doing so could prove bloodier — and politically more testing — than anything Western peoples or leaders, at least at the moment, are mentally prepared for.