We've Already Won--and We're Still Winning

[sfc_darrel]

We've Already Won--and We're Still Winning
Quagmire fantasists are no doubt secretly enjoying the recent spike in U.S. casualties in Iraq. The Associated Press reports on the death of a U.S. soldier in a Baghdad grenade attack:

The death brought to 49 the number of soldiers killed in a guerrilla war since May 1, when President Bush declared an end to major combat in Iraq. In all, 163 U.S. soldiers have died in action in Iraq, 16 more than in the 1991 Gulf War.

While every death of an American serviceman is a tragedy, this sort of scorekeeping is silly. After all, World War II claimed the lives of hundreds of thousands of Americans, yet no one claims that war was a "quagmire." The real question is whether these casualties are in a winning cause.

Talk of "quagmire" in Iraq is awfully surreal, given that we've already won the war and ousted the regime. All that remains is to mop up whatever resistance that's left. And a report in today's Washington Post make clear that effort is proceeding apace. "As Iraqi fighters launched guerrilla strikes, the U.S. Army adopted a more nimble approach against unseen adversaries and found new ways to gather intelligence about them," reports the Post's Thomas Ricks:

Thousands of suspected Iraqi fighters were detained over the six-week period, many temporarily, in hundreds of U.S. military raids, most of them conducted in the dead of night. In the expansive region north of Baghdad patrolled by the 4th Infantry Division, more than 300 Iraqi fighters were killed in combat operations, the military officials said. In the same period, U.S. forces in all of Iraq have suffered 39 combat deaths. The continuing casualties--such as the four soldiers killed Saturday--are the direct result of the intensified U.S. offensive, the military officials added.

The best evidence that the evidence is losing: "At the beginning of June, before the U.S. offensives began, the reward for killing an American soldier was about $300, an Army officer said. Now, he said, street youths are being offered as much as $5,000--and are being told that if they refuse, their families will be killed, a development the officer described as a sign of reluctance among once-eager youths to take part in the strikes."