Not content with losing the logistics war, now al Qaeda is just plain losing the war. And this is a new wrinkle:

BAGHDAD (AP) — Former Sunni insurgents asked the U.S. to stay away, then ambushed members of al-Qaida in Iraq, killing 18 in a battle that raged for hours north of Baghdad, an ex-insurgent leader and Iraqi police said Saturday.

The Islamic Army in Iraq sent advance word to Iraqi police requesting that U.S. helicopters keep out of the area since its fighters had no uniforms and were indistinguishable from al-Qaida, according to the police and a top Islamic Army leader known as Abu Ibrahim.

Abu Ibrahim told The Associated Press that his fighters killed 18 al-Qaida militants and captured 16 in the fight southeast of Samarra, a mostly Sunni city about 60 miles north of Baghdad.

“We found out that al-Qaida intended to attack us, so we ambushed them at 3 p.m. on Friday,” Abu Ibrahim said. He would not say whether any Islamic Army members were killed.

Much of the Islamic Army in Iraq, a major Sunni Arab insurgent group that includes former members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party, has joined the U.S.-led fight against al-Qaida in Iraq along with Sunni tribesmen and other former insurgents repelled by the terror group’s brutality and extremism.

Those who’ve cared to know learned months ago that the vast majority of Sunnis in Iraq have turned against al Qaeda, though Sunni Baathist “dead enders” and anti-Shia insurgents had mostly allied themselves with al Qaeda to fight US forces not long after the Coalition’s invasion in the spring of 2003. Before the middle of 2005, the first cracks in the Sunni’s affiliation, and sometime alliance, with al Qaeda had started to appear. Not many months after that, there was occasional combat between some AQI formations and Sunni militias.

Understand that the Islamic Army in Iraq is not pro-American. It was the largest Sunni anti-coalition insurgent group in Iraq after Saddam’s fall, and was devoted mainly to regaining power for the Baathists. Despite its name, the IAI is not especially hardline Muslim in character and would be mischaracterized as Islamist, though it did openly ally itself with al Qaeda in Iraq for a long time. But AQI’s harsh brutality in taking over Sunni towns, executing townspeople (and even beheading children) who wouldn’t toe the hardcore Islamist line, finally turned IAI against AQI early this year, and it began fighting AQI. However, AQI and IAI soon came to a ceasefire agreement under the proposition that they each alike were bound first to fight the Americans. Even so, IAI never signed on to AQI’s version of Islam and never agreed to help al Qaeda in its goal of instituting the Islamic State of Iraq.

Evidently, the ceasefire has broken down. At this stage of the war, for al Qaeda to lose 18 fighters to death with almost as many captured is a serious loss for them.

The Islamic Army in Iraq cannot be counted as friendly to the US or to Iraq’s central government. However, it now appears that they are no longer enemies, either.

There’s bad news for AQI elsewhere, too.

Meanwhile, farther east, in Diyala province, members of another former insurgent group, the 1920s Revolution Brigades, launched a military-style operation Saturday against al-Qaida in Iraq there, the Iraqi Army said.

About 60 militants were captured and handed over to Iraqi soldiers, an Army officer said on condition of anonymity because he was not allowed to speak to media.

Afterward, hundreds of people paraded through the streets of Buhriz, about 35 miles north of Baghdad, witnesses said. Many danced and fired their guns into the air, shouting “Down with al-Qaida!” and “Diyala is for all Iraqis!”

Well, when it rains, it pours.

Not even a year ago the Democrats in Congress and others of their allies vehemently charged President Bush for not listening to the military. They criticized the civilian leadership of our defense establishment for creating a culture of fear wherein generals were afraid to challenge military policy. The capital sin, said they, was failing to listen to and heed General Eric Shinseki when he testified before Congress that we would need several hundred thousand troops to secure Iraq as opposed to the 100,000-plus that Rumsfeld wanted to send.

Congress said they were listening and accused the administration of willfully deaf ears and further accused the administration of being married to a strategy of defeat.

Within this last year the Democrats in Congress got their wish. They won control and Bush listened as he sent Rumsfeld packing and appointed a man in Secretary Gates who promised to listen to the generals. The administration also replaced the generals who had gone along with the failed policy (or so as the Democrats had accused them) and replaced them with generals who preached a new strategy and whom Congress overwhelmingly approved. Enter General David Petraeus.

In the same vein as General Shinseki – previously hailed as a sage by the Democrats (and who did happen to be correct as was former CENTCOM commander General Anthony Zinni at the same time) – General Petraeus asked for more troops. Bush, who had been reluctant to send overwhelming force before, agreed to send a surge of the bare minimum – but send them he did. And Congress squealed. Why? Hadn’t they been the ones who were listening all along? Bush was finally listening!

And the military continues to speak its needs to those who will listen…and to those who won’t. Recently General Petraeus stated that while generals would always like more troops, what he really needs is time. Major General Rick Lynch, commander of thousands of US and Iraqi troops south of Baghdad states that we need time to capitalize on the success of the surge to date. He tells us that the first question he gets from Iraqis is “Are you going to stay?” That’s the same question Afghans asked me during my own tour in Afghanistan. Time is the precious commodity needed.

And the surge is working. The latest report comes no less from the New York Times in an essay written by leading members of the left leaning Brookings Institution. Regular critics of the war effort, this time Michael O’Hanlon and Kenneth Pollack proclaim that “there is enough good happening on the battlefields of Iraq today that Congress should plan on sustaining the effort at least into 2008,” exactly the minimum time that the military is asking for.

The conventional wisdom is that al Qaeda only needs to outwait the US. Time is on al Qaeda’s side, we are told. Well, al Qaeda has no more time than we do. Why would we cede a strategic advantage to our enemies by imagining that we have less time to accomplish our objectives than they do? We have as much time as we are willing to take. Away with electioneering when lives are at stake!

President Bush is willing to stake the remainder of his presidency and indeed his entire legacy on giving Petraeus what he needs - time. The military is speaking. Bush is listening. The skeptical Brookings Institute is no less listening. And even the Bush-hating New York Times is listening inasmuch as they are willing to publish such essays and reports of surge success. The momentum has shifted in our favor in Iraq. Nothing is lost so long as we don’t give it away. So is the Congress – anti-war Democrats and weakening Republicans alike - listening? Who is now married to a strategy of defeat?

Here is the lead sentence from Time mag’s latest story from Iraq:

There is good news from Iraq, believe it or not.

What are they, Ripley’s? Believe it or not? Anyone who’s been following the non-MSM-reported news from Iraq over months or years already know that there is no shortage of good news from Iraq, never has been a shortage.

It’s Time’s editorial staff that can hardly believe this. After all, “the war is lost,” according to a senator. So, grudgingly, Time does report some good news, but let’s you know in the very first sentence you can believe it … or not.

That apparently is Time’s standard of “objective” reporting, believe it or not.

Britain’s Prince Harry, third in line to the throne (behind his father and older brother) has reportedly told the British Army that if it prevents him from taking a front-rank assignment in Iraq with his unit, he’ll resign his commission.

“Prince Harry’s deployment to Iraq, as we have always said, is under constant consideration,” a defense ministry spokeswoman said. “It is still our intention that Prince Harry will deploy as a troop leader.”

In this role, the 22-year-old red-haired prince would be leading 12 people in four Scimitar armored reconnaissance vehicles.

But the best-selling Sun tabloid reported that army chiefs had ordered an 11th-hour review of his planned deployment.

The move would likely end up with Harry being banned from going near the front line, the Sun cited unnamed senior sources as saying. …

The prince, who as a Second Lieutenant has the rank of Cornet in his regiment, had reportedly threatened to quit the army if not allowed to serve on the front line.

Good on yer, Harry!

Mudville Gazette quotes Michael Yon, a former Army Special Forces NCO and now almost certainly the most experienced and perceptive war correspondent working. Writing of troop morale, Michael observes: “If their morale could be bottled, it would probably sell like crack, then be outlawed.”

Douglas W. Kmiec, considered to be a conservative Catholic, recently wrote an article “Time to face the error of Iraq,” carried by The Tidings (publication of the Archdiocese of Los Angeles) and carried by the Catholic News Service. In it he states that he used to support the war in Iraq:

I did support the war. Indeed, in the weeks leading up to the war my pastor in Washington, D.C., where we were then resident, asked me to present the case for intervention before the parish community. I agreed, though it was no easy task, as Sen. Ted Kennedy and his wife were fellow parishioners.

Things have changed for Mr Kmiec:

But it is 2007, and we know the justifications for the war were illusory. Whatever Saddam’s motivations for bluffery, the weapons of mass destruction were not to be found. The 9/11 commission established the absence of a connection to al-Qaida. As for humanitarian intervention, well, the insurgency long since has wiped out the humanity of our assistance.

The president’s justification for escalating the Iraq war with an additional 22,000 troops is unconvincing. More, it is deeply disappointing. It manifests little respect for public sentiment and makes no genuine effort at convening a diplomatic summit with European and Middle Eastern nations that share the desire for a stable, peaceful Iraq.

And he offers this solution:

However well-intentioned the initial intervention in Iraq may have been thought to be, and however noble the sacrifice made for those original intentions shall remain, the time for American troops to leave Iraq is now.

I supported the war four years ago and unlike Mr. Kmiec I remain steadfast in my support for the need to win it.

The question that haunts me most from my service in Afghanistan nearly four years ago came from Haroun, the mid-twenties Afghan man who managed the safe house we lived in. He asked then, as many Iraqis have also asked friends of mine serving in Iraq, “How long are you going to stay? Because they know who we are.” The days we are now experiencing in Washington and in the media are the days that many Afghans and Iraqis feared would come: the day that we turned our backs on them when the going got tough.

They knew from suffering under decades of institutionalized evil that the Baathists, Taliban, and al-Qaeda would not just simply succumb after a few years; that Shiites and others would seek revenge if they found our sense and means of justice too slow or inadequate. Unfortunately, we were too naïve to realize what they knew.

Mr. Kmiec claims that the justifications for originally going to war have proven to be “illusory” - that we have found no WMD, that there was no Iraqi connection to al-Qaeda, and that the insurgency has “wiped out the humanity of our assistance.” The facts are not that simple. Unfortunately they somehow seem to get lost in emotional angst, today’s debate and in the press. Let’s look at factual counterarguments to Mr. Kmiec’s points through the context of the generally recognized conditions necessary for a Just War.

The threat must be grave and certain and other means to quell it found insufficient.

We know from the Iraqi Survey Group that in the years after 1998 - after UN inspectors were kicked out - Saddam was within 1 week of producing bio-weapons, days to weeks away from producing chemical weapons such as mustard gas, and had given his nuclear scientists a 10 fold raise in salary as a sign of his intent to be back in the WMD business. What we did not find in 2003, he maintained the capability to reproduce on extremely short notice. The 12 year embargo that was intended to prevent this capability was being undercut by the very nations that were to enforce it. After 12 years it was getting weaker and Saddam was getting stronger and merely biding his time with his profits from Oil-for-Food. Clearly the threat from Saddam remained grave and other means to remove that threat had not only failed but had enabled his threatening posture.

We also know from intelligence exploited by the Iraqi Survey Group that the Iraqi intelligence service had contacts with al-Qaeda representatives in 1999. Iraq had developed an intelligence sharing and training relationship with the Taliban in 1999 including Iraqi trainers in al-Qaeda training camps in Afghanistan in the use of poison gas (no doubt from the their own experience in poisoning Kurds and Iranians). We know that Saddam had been seeking to expand his influence in the jihadist movement – efforts that were being well-received. Saddam’s developing links to al-Qaeda and expansion of his support to jihadis was grave and indeed certain and on the increase.

A likelihood for success and proportionality.

As to the value and success of our humanitarian assistance, too many of us are failing to look at this war through the lens of history. In previous wars we have experienced tens of thousands of military deaths and millions of civilian deaths on all sides. It is amazing that we can fight a war such as we are fighting in Iraq with the current comparatively low casualty figures after four years. Today we are not only fighting but reconstructing simultaneously. It took nearly 5 years of full scale combat (called Total War) and an additional decade or more of reconstruction for the Civil War and WWII each and we consider those to be almost undisputed successes and moral wars. It’s been much tougher than we anticipated in Iraq and with setbacks, but we have also made impressive achievements to date with far less human cost across the board than previous wars.

The only moral course we have today among many poor choices is to successfully finish what we started. We have the technology. We have the military and industrial resources necessary. The question is do we have the will – the question asked of me personally in Afghanistan and of my comrades in Iraq. If we leave now as Mr. Kmiec demands, make no mistake that there will be a bloodbath of proportions we have yet to acknowledge or realize. It will make the casualty toll of the current insurgency look like a schoolyard fight. That, if for no other reason, should cause us to exercise our responsibility in Iraq. Anything less would be inhumane. We will succeed if we have the will to succeed.

Many people question the proportionality of our war in Iraq asking if we’ve done too much damage. However, it is the other side of the proportionality coin that should be questioned. Have we done enough to win? For just as we are morally obligated not to wage war more than necessary, we are equally obligated to do what is necessary to win it. A surge of 22,000 troops at the very least is needed to fight this war with proper proportion for victory.

This war was a just war in 2003 and still is in 2007. Being a tough war doesn’t make it less just. Abandoning Iraq to assuage our emotions while leaving the Middle East to a blood bath and/or return to institutionalized terror would be a vicious and immoral thing to do. As Christians and in the tradition of Aquinas, and Calvin for that matter, we are just to wage this war and we are morally obligated to win. Fortitude and perseverance are the gifts that are needed today – the fortitude to win and the wisdom to recognize our moral obligation to persevere.

Welcome friends from Down Under! I think this is the first time an Australian media outlet has linked to my site. Thanks for following the link.

So wrote Europe’s premier war theorist, Carl von Clausewitz, which he amplified thus, “Without killing there is no war.” This should seem self evident, but its truth is easy to lose, and easiest for the civilians who (rightfully) finally command our military. Even senior military officers, removed by distance and time from personal battle experience, can fail to remember that truism.

Of all the failings of the previous “strategy” in Iraq, directed by the commanders whom Gen. David Petraeus will very soon replace, the main failing was not keeping the main thing the main thing. In counterinsurgency, as with any other kind of fight, the main thing is killing the insurgents, for which civil assistance to Iraqis must play the supporting, not primary role.

Hence, the “surge” of 21,500 more soldiers and Marines being sent to Iraq does in fact represent a new strategy in the recent history of this war, though not new in the history of warfare. Gen. Petraeus, asked recently by one of the Congress’ armed services committees whether 21,500 was enough new troops, replied that how the new troops are used is more important than the number sent.

And lethality is the focus now, as we saw from the release of an unclassified version of the strategy by the plan’s authors themselves, which I analyzed on Dec. 17. Retired General Jack Keane, a former vice chief of staff of the Army, and Frederick W. Kagan, former West Point professor, wrote (and briefed President Bush) that,

We must change our focus from training Iraqi soldiers to securing the Iraqi population and containing the rising violence. Securing the population has never been the primary mission of the U.S. military effort in Iraq, and now it must become the first priority.

“Securing the population” = “kill the insurgents.” And that is what the troops in Iraq, reinforced by the “surge,” are already doing, says Nibras Kazmi (also posted at Blackfive).

Last October, my sources began telling me about rumblings among the insurgent strategists suggesting that their murderous endeavor was about to run out of steam. This sense of fatigue began registering among mid-level insurgent commanders in late December, and it has devolved to the rank and file since then. The insurgents have begun to feel that the tide has turned against them.

In many ways, the timing of this turnaround was inadvertent, coming at the height of political and bureaucratic mismanagement in Washington and Baghdad. A number of factors contributed to this turnaround, but most important was sustained, stay-the-course counterinsurgency pressure. At the end of the day, more insurgents were ending up dead or behind bars, which generated among them a sense of despair and a feeling that the insurgency was a dead end.

The Washington-initiated “surge” will speed-up the ongoing process of defeating the insurgency. But one should not consider the surge responsible for the turnaround. The lesson to be learned is to keep killing the killers until they realize their fate.

For some reason, this is a lesson that the US seems to have to learn anew every war. It wasn’t until 1863, for example, that the Union Army finally came to understand that the army of the CSA would not be defeated until it had been vanquished in the field one time after another, over and over again. U.S. Grant was the first Union general to understand this fact, for which President Lincoln rewarded him with command of all the Union armies in the field. “I can’t fire this man,” Lincoln told critics, “he fights.”

But I digress. The major, and unsurprisingly unheralded, accomplishment in Iraq in recent months was to squeeze the life (literally and metepahorically) out of the domestic Iraqi insurgencies. That means the Sunni insurgencies, who were mainly oriented toward the preservation of Baathist party and Tikriti tribal power. The Shia militias weren’t really trying to overthrow the central government (PM Maliki was in their pocket, so what’s the point?) but until the end of 2006 the Sunni insurgents entertained the notion that could could wield majority power again.

What changed their mind, at least most of them? Well, Saddam’s short drop and sudden stop had a lot to do with it. But mostly it sank in to them that they cannot win. US and US-led direct action against them (that is, killing them) unintentionally combined with the ruthlessness of the Shia militias made them come to reality, says Kazmi.

The wider Sunni insurgency — the groups beyond Al Qaeda — is being slowly, and surely, defeated. The average insurgent today feels demoralized, disillusioned, and hunted. Those who have not been captured yet are opting for a quieter life outside of Iraq. …

The enormous carnage the media report daily in Iraq is the direct result - in fact, the actual intention - of al Qaeda in Iraq, whose now-dead chief, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, made plain early in 2004 that killing Iraqi Shiites was his only means of finally defeating the US in Iraq. After tacitly admitting that al Qaeda cannot defeat America militarily in Iraq, Zarqawi wrote that al Qaeda must turn to terrorism against the Iraqis in order to destabilize the country so much that its return to sovereignty that summer would not be effective.

“So the solution, and only God knows, is that we need to bring the Shia into the battle,” the writer of the document said. “It is the only way to prolong the duration of the fight between the infidels and us. If we succeed in dragging them into a sectarian war, this will awaken the sleepy Sunnis who are fearful of destruction and death at the hands” of Shiites. …

“You noble brothers, leaders of the jihad [meaning other al Qaeda leaders - DS], we do not consider ourselves people who compete against you, nor would we ever aim to achieve glory for ourselves like you did,” the writer says. “So if you agree with it, and are convinced of the idea of killing the perverse sects, we stand ready as an army for you to work under your guidance and yield to your command” [emphasis added].

Zarqawi went on to write that al Qaeda fighters in Iraq must wage war against the Shiite Iraqi majority (i.e, the “perverse sects”) and that the war on them must be well underway before the US returned sovereignty to the country. That way al Qaeda could propagandize that the Americans are responsible for the sectarian violence.

Like so much that Zarqawi planned, this tactic backfired. The Shia majority in Iraq did not turn against America (in the main), as Zarqawi thought they would, but against the Sunnis, and ferociously so. Kazmi again:

Sunni sectarian attacks, usually conducted by jihadists, finally provoked the Shiites to turn to their most brazen militias — the ones who would not heed Ayatollah Sistani’s call for pacifism — to conduct painful reprisals against Sunnis, usually while wearing official military fatigues and carrying government issued weapons. The Sunnis came to realize that they were no longer facing ragtag fighters, but rather they were confronting a state with resources and with a monopoly on lethal force. The Sunnis realized that by harboring insurgents they were inviting retaliation that they could do little to defend against.

Sadly, it took many thousands of young Sunnis getting abducted by death squads for the Sunnis to understand that in a full-fledged civil war, they would likely lose badly and be evicted from Baghdad. I believe that the Sunnis and insurgents are now war weary, and that this is a turnaround point in the campaign to stabilize Iraq.

The upshot of this is that now there is no significant insurgency in Iraq except al Qaeda. This is a huge accomplishment, though not entirely the doing of American action. Now the focus in Iraq has swung toward two main goals: bringing destruction upon al Qaeda there and bringing to heel the Shia militias, especially the Mahdi militia of Ayatollah Moqtada al Sadr. About these ends PM Maliki spoke to parliament yesterday. As you read this account by Iraqi blogger Mohammed Fadhil, remember the first of “15 rules for understanding the Middle East:” “What people tell you in private in the Middle East is irrelevant. All that matters is what they will defend in public in their own language. … In the Mideast, officials say what they really believe in public. …” So here is Mohammed’s account:

PM Maliki spoke to the parliament to explain the goals and strategy of his new plan and to hear their feedback, suggestions and reservations.

Maliki’s speech was sharp and straightforward. He stressed that the Baghdad plan was not directed against one faction over the other. He called it a plan “enforce the law” and said it would use force to apply the law against those who kill Iraqis and displace them from their homes.

Maliki didn’t forget to criticize the media that accuse the plan of being impartial and he asked the local media to support the plan and encourage the citizens to cooperate with the authorities.

Maliki’s most important warning was when he said that no one and no place would be immune to raids. Mosques (Sunni or Shia), homes or political offices will all be subject to searches and raids if they are used to launch attacks or hide militants.

There was considerable parliamentary, ah, discussion about the PM’s presentation, but it would seem that Maliki has put his personal honor on the line by saying his government will crack down on sectarian death squads. On a b-roll I saw on the news, Maliki emphasized to parliament that these operations were Iraqi led and that coalition forces were in a supporting role, although my guess is that it all depends what “supporting” means.

So can al Qaeda be defeated in Iraq? Most definitely. As more and more Sunnis realize they will never rule Iraq again, they will distance themselves increasingly from al Qaeda, whose leaders and ranks are mostly non-Iraqi. The alliance between Iraqi Sunnis and al Qaeda was only one of convenience for the Sunnis, whose politics remain mostly Baathist secular rather than Islamist religious. Al Qaeda has bungled that relationship, too, over the past few years, by attempting to terrorize Sunnis into supporting them. But murdering Sunni sheiks and other dastardly deeds brought open reprisals from Sunni clans. Now I think that Sunnis will increasingly turn against al Qaeda because they realize there is nothing al Qaeda can do for them in Iraq anymore.

The main task now before us is simply to kill al Qaeda, top to bottom. What I wrote last December is still true: this new tactic “is the final roll of the dice in Iraq that this administration, or the next, can make there. Either we crush the enemy, various as they are, or we lose the war.”

Update: Further evidence of the new focus on lethality is the President’s approval of killing Iranian agents inside Iraq.

For more than a year, U.S. forces in Iraq have been catching Iranian agents, interviewing them and letting them go. The Post says the administration is now convinced that was ineffective because Iran paid no penalty for its mischief.

As one senior administration official told the Post, “There were no costs for the Iranians. They are hurting our mission in Iraq, and we were bending over backwards not to fight back.”

I think this development buttresses the claim that our strategy is indeed different than before. I also think that US political and domestic opinion will “wait and see” no more than six months whether Gen. Petraeus can turn things around, and the general probably knows this. So I expect that al Qaeda is going to have a very rough six months ahead of it, and Maliki will be squeezed even more to clean up his own house.

Update: This kind of focused lethality is working well in Afghanistan, too.