Score one for Wretchard

The most compelling debate going on in blogistan over the conduct of the campaign in Iraq is in my opinion between Andy Sullivan and Wretchard, proprietorr of Belmont Club. To me this debate is telling because it's between an early and loud cheerleader for the war effort---who can ever really forget Sully's fond posting defending Dubya by comparing him to Sam Gamgee?---and the pseudonymous Wretchard, he of the sophisticated analysis that mixes the keen insights of Claustewitz with the big picture view of a young Alfred Thayer Mahan.

Anyhoo, as we all know, Sully has gone South on the War and on Dubya since the late spring, and has gotten rather frenetic in his analysis, particularly in his continued (and in my opinion highly innacurate) use of the ghost of Winston Churchill. I've begun to delve into why Sully's repeated invocation of Churchill as a club to beat Dubya with is incorrect,, and I have a much longer piece in the works that will lay out the whole argument. (For example, how would Sully's criticisms of Dubya stand when applied to Churchill's decisions involving the bombings of Dresden and Coventry? Not very good, as we'll see. We'll also ask the extremely politically incorrect question of whether the problems of occupation that we are experiencing now in Iraq what we would have seen if we had went through Operation Olympic---the planned invasion of the Japanese home islands? In other words, absent Nagasaki and Hiroshima, would the occupation of Japan followed a similar script as we are seeing today? We'll double down on the political incorrectness and examine the last time you had ethnic Irish pols from the Democratic Party rooting against American Occupation and in favor of "domestic insurgents"----when the Democratic Party pulled out all the stops to end Reconstruction. Is there a moral or ethical difference between the left of the Democratic Party rooting for the Klan in the 1870s and the left of the Democratic Party rooting for Moqtada today? Or, is there really all that much of a difference between Birth of a Nation---and its glorification of the birth of the Ku Klux Klan---and Fahrenheit 911?

Ooooooo-oooooo-oooooo!

Yes, Horshack?

Noooooooo, Mister Kotter!

But I digress)

Anyhoo, this latest news from Iraq points to the wisdom of the analysis that Wretchard has been providing as of late: the key to this stage of the fight is the coming of the Iraqi Army to be able to hold and secure places like Fallujah. The weakness in the strategy of the Sunni guerillas (and it is a mistake of the first order to group all the groups together as one insurgency) is for their campaign of car bombings and beheadings to alienate other Iraqis before it has the chance to turn public opinion in America against the war.