Adios, Al Qaeda

Blowback [Mark Steyn]

The Iraqis step up and the US stands down. An interesting development:

Former Sunni insurgents asked the United States to stay away, and then ambushed members of Al Qaeda in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said yesterday...

Meanwhile, farther east, in Diyala Province, members of another former insurgent group, the 1920s Revolution Brigades, launched a military-style operation yesterday against Al Qaeda in Iraq, the Iraqi Army said...

Afterward, hundreds of people paraded through Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said. Many danced and fired their guns into the air, shouting "Down with Al Qaeda!" and "Diyala is for all Iraqis!"

The al-Qaeda strategy of slaughtering large numbers of fellow Muslims appears to have caught up with them.

"...for all Iraqis!" Al Qaeda is finished in Iraq, and you could see it coming a year ago. Once Al Qaeda lost the ability to recruit locally, it was a dead man walking. The leadership was always foreign, and now they were forced to import their fighters from Jordan, Saudi, etc. Disaster. An insurgency has little or no logistics tail and can only succeed when it lives off the local population and has their support. But these were foreigners in an intensely local tribal society, with the wrong accent and nothing to offer except a nasty version of Islam nobody wanted. The only way they could live off the locals was to terrorize and oppress them, which they did with psychotic enthusiasm. And so, Al Qaeda made itself the hated enemy. Once the Surge gave Coalition troops a permanent presence, the locals couldn't wait to give these guys up, or to try to hunt them down and kill them themselves. Al Qaeda suddenly found itself with no place to be, and folded up like a cheap suitcase.

Al Qaeda deserves some of the credit here, for foolishly showing Iraqis the kind of future they had in mind. Fanaticism is always a disease of the few; the great majority of people everywhere want nothing to do with it.

A few idealist jihadis will no doubt try to go out in glory before they are picked off, but the organization is defeated. From here out, it's mopping up the dead-enders, reconstruction (with outrageous amounts of corruption), lots of exasperating Iraqi political maneuvering, and grinding our teeth while we watch Iraqi national pride push gratitude aside. In other words, about like post-war France, par for the course.

Byron