I’ve been terribly delinquent in not writing more about the Iraqi elections this week, but I didn’t have anything new to add. Smash and Steven den Beste discuss the implications for terrorism in Iraq: Smash says Al Qaeda has to know it is finished, while den Beste cautions that Iraqi Sunnis will continue to use terrorism as a political tool.
Only the former, of course, is our problem; the difficulty of managing the ethnic and sectarian tensions within Iraq was inevitably going to be a problem once Saddam was gone whether we invaded or not, as was the case in the former Yugoslavia. By establishing democratic institutions and training Iraqi forces, we have given the Iraqis the tools they will need to deal with the problem in the future.
This week’s elections represent, in a real sense, the last milestone to political victory in Iraq. We already had military victory in the broad sense when we conquered Iraqi territory and overthrew the old regime. Military victory against the insurgency, particularly the foreign terrorist element, has been slower in coming, and it’s not done yet, not until we can complete the job of training Iraqi forces that can do the job themselves (a job that’s a good deal further along than it was a year ago) and take down the bulk of the remaining foreign fighters. But on the political side, there’s really nothing left to do except what Iraqis have to do themselves.