A New European

Warum der Irak die Terroristen besiegen wird erklärt David Frum, der gerade aus dem Irak zurückkam, in der kanadischen National Post.

1) The Iraqis are fighting. Iraqi forces have suffered 2,200 casualties in the past year — a figure that includes killed and wounded. Yet both recruitment and morale remain high. Not a single Iraqi soldier has been taken captive by insurgents. Nor has there been a case since January, 2005, of Iraqis leaving a battlefield without taking their dead and wounded with them.

2) American soldiers increasingly trust their Iraqi counterparts. American trainers are assigned to Iraqi forces often in very small teams, sometimes as individuals. Yet there has been no case of an Iraqi unit betraying an American to the insurgents. And no American serving with Iraqis has ever been captured by insurgents.

3) The trainers expect that the Iraqis will field as many as 10 divisions by the end of 2006, and that Iraqis will assume most of the work of patrol and security. As Iraqis replace Americans, the flow of information from locals to the security forces has quickened.

4) When asked, Iraqi political leaders say they want the Americans to leave — but not quite yet. Meanwhile, personal relationships between the Americans and their Iraqi military counterparts are obviously strong and close. I talked to one officer who had fought in the first Gulf War against the United States — in fact, he had led the only successful Iraqi operation of the whole war. Asked how he liked working alongside his former enemies, he grinned: “Much better now.”

5) If the Iraqi soldiers remain visibly a Third World army, the insurgents are not exactly the Viet Cong either. The old Saddam Hussein regime, terrified of its own people, issued its troops only three bullets a year for live-fire training. The result: Today’s insurgents are lousy shots. I spoke to one six-foot-five officer who told me of standing upright through a firefight at 100 yards. “You’d think they could hit a target my size,” he joked.