The "Tipping Point" in Iraq

When a poor simple country boy living in the big city who is just trying to make a living writes a post that eerily anticipates an Op-Ed piece by a Pulitzer prize winning globally recognized journalist.... I gotta tell you it feels good.

Thomas Friedman is an individual with whom I sometimes disagree but he is unquestionably one of the most informed and well connected American journalists who cover the Middle East. His book "From Beirut to Jerusalem" is a must read for anyone who wants to understand recent Middle Eastern history. The Saudi Crown Prince disclosed the Saudi peace initiative for the Palestinians to Friedman at a dinner and gave Friedman permission to write about it before formally launching it a couple of years ago. That is how plugged in this guy is.

Recently he has been considerably less enthusiastic about our prospects in Iraq than the Sheep but hey... he works for the NYT.

As usual of late I think he paints too negative a picture with respect to his conclusion but the facts he offers from his recent visit to Fallujah and his recognition of the importance of what has been accomplished there is of great value.

As a reader of the Sheep you will know that the U.S. military is gathering enormous intelligence and has now come to understand the nature of the 'insurgency', their leadership and so forth. As I said recently :

It has been my expectation for several days that our forces were finding extensive information during their sweep of Fallujah and that given the high number of murderous cowards captured there would likely be much beneficial information gleaned.

Iran and Syria are stirring this pot. Lower taxes, more dead terrorists.... fewer terrorist supporting regimes.

Yesterday, after a fairly long discussion of facts on the ground in Iraq I made the following comments:

I believe there will soon come a 'tipping point' at which the 'insurgents' will begin to hit serious manpower, funding and supply constraints. I believe that as the non-insurgent Sunni Iraqis increasingly realize that we mean business, that the elections are going to be held and that there is no chance the 'insurgents' are going to prevail more accurate and more timely information will be forthcoming that will enable us to crush this bunch of thugs once and for all.

Imagine my surprise today to find an Op-Ed piece in the NYT by Friedman titled.... you guessed it "Iraq at the Tipping Point" which is based on Friedman's recent visit to Fallujah with General Myers the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

Guess that offers Friedman a bit closer look at what is happening on the ground than I am getting here in beautiful metropolitan Dallas, Texas. However, I remain far more convinced that we are going to prevail in Iraq than Friedman. I note that as recently as a couple of weeks ago he was still saying that we have so badly managed things in Iraq that we were doomed to failure. His visit to Fallujah and his understanding of the enormity of what has been accomplished there have clearly forced him to concede that we are at the 'tipping point.'

I am going to quote extensively from Friedman's piece but I do so in an attempt to induce you to go read it yourself:

Every time I visit Iraq, I leave asking myself the same question: If you total up all the positives and negatives, where does the balance come out? I'd say the score is still 4 to 4. We can still emerge with a decent outcome. And the whole thing could still end very badly. There's only one thing one can say for sure today: you won't need to wait much longer for the tipping point. Either the elections for a new governing body happen by the end of January, as scheduled, and the rout of Saddam loyalists in Falluja is consolidated and extended throughout the Sunni triangle, or not.
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I came out to the Falluja front in a small press pool accompanying the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, Gen. Richard Myers, who flew in to inspect the toughest problems in Iraq firsthand. Most of the fighting in Falluja was over by the time we arrived at this headquarters compound, although the tom-tom beat of 155-millimeter howitzers, still pumping rounds into the city, was constant.
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How important is taking Falluja? Huge. Falluja was to the Iraqi insurgency what Afghanistan was to Osama bin Laden. It was the safe haven where militants could, with total impunity, plan operations, stockpile weapons and connect the suicide bombers from abroad with their Iraqi handlers. That's gone. One arms cache alone found here had 49,000 pieces of ordnance, ranging from mortars to ammo rounds. Another arms cache blown up last week kept exploding for 45 minutes after it was hit, a senior U.S. officer said. [The Sheep noted this same 45 minutes of secondary explosions yesterday]
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What have we learned from the many insurgents captured in Falluja? A vast majority are Iraqi Sunnis, with only a few foreign fighters. This is an Iraqi Sunni rebellion, but a senior Iraqi official told me that they had discovered Saddam loyalists who were using Aleppo, Syria, to regroup and plan operations.
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The insurgents' strategy is intimidation. The U.S. strategy is Iraqification. This is the struggle - and the intimidators are doing way too well. Without a secure environment in which its new leadership can be elected and comfortably operate, Iraq will never be able to breathe on its own, and U.S. troops will have to be here forever.