Southack On Iraq: The Great Poker Surprise
For Iraq, we have a beautiful thing going; the press thinks that we're losing, the armchair ankle-biters think that we're losing, and the terrorists think that we're losing. All that you have to do is to ask them about the impending Iraqi elections and they all exclaim that there will be too much violence to hold them. They're wrong.
What we're losing in Iraq are 1 to 2 Americans per day.
What we've gotten in exchange are the deaths of more than 100,000 jihadis, the vast waste of pro-jihadis funds, the cut-off of Saudi jihadist funds, Hussein in jail, Hussein's money cut off from the Palestinians, control of Pakistani nukes, the end of Egypt's, Lybia's, and Iraq's WMD programs, a strategic base from which to next strike any of Lebanon, Syria, or more likely: Iran...as well as a perfect roach motel in which jihadis come from all over to check in, but they don't check out alive.
Attacks in Iraq are down from 98 per day to 46 per day. Elections are coming up, and more than 120,000 Iraqi soldiers have now graduated from U.S. training.
We're flowing more oil out of Iraq right now than what Hussein managed to do pre-war. We've got more electricity over there, more teachers, more doctors, and better staffed local hospitals for the natives.
It's a thing of beauty.
In poker, the object is to convince your opponents to bet big when they have lousy hands. That's Iraq. The news media, the French, and the Jihadis all have lousy hands in Iraq, yet they believe their own hype and naively think that they are winning.
You couldn't script a war, an occupation, a Reconstruction, and the implementation of democracy into a previously authoritarian land any better than what has been done. Certainly not more craftily. Bush and Rumsfeld have been *brilliant* in sitting there taking the abuse from the critics; that's essential to the poker side of this fight.
The #1 Shi'ite cleric, Sistani, is the *biggest* backer of Iraqi elections. The #2 backer would be the entire Kurdish population, and the #3 backer is the Sunni President Alawhi.
That leaves the Jihadis with recruiting Iraqi Ba'athists and foreign fighters...hardly the stuff of a successful (or even threatening) rebellion.
We'll have the elections, and I predict the "Violence" during the elections to be less than the 110 adults shot dead on the average day in Rio, Brazil. Iraq will come out more like Afghanistan than Lebanon, and this will serve as a major morale-buster for the local "support" of the foreign fighter jihadis.
Likewise, the liberal news media will have to eat crow if the violence turns out to be anti-climatic.
One would have to ask the liberal reporters (and Stratfor) just *why* they were surprised by the subdued violence against the elections. They are all betting that the violence exceeds the hype...that's a bad hand to be playing.
It won't.
