THE FALLUJAH FLY-TRAP

It’s now conceded even by the appeasement-addicts at the State Department that their stopping the Marine assault on Fallujah (after the butchery of four Americans) was a disaster. Fallujah has become the sanctuary for all varieties of terrorists in Iraq.

Pastrana was scandalized. As a liberal invertebrate, it had never even occurred to him to be Machiavellian. State’s appeasement-addicts are the same – yet in spite of them, Fallujah has become a Fujimori Fly-Trap for both foreign Al Qaeda and Baathist Iraqi terrorists. We are winning in Iraq – but since good news in Iraq is good for Bush, the Pogo Press will only emphasize the bad. – Jack Wheeler

Silver Lining in Iraq by Jack Kelly

The big news out of Iraq this week, according to the liberal media, was the capitulation by the Philippine government Tuesday to the demands of terrorists, and the explosion of a massive car bomb Wednesday outside the "Green Zone" in Baghdad.

What the liberal press won’t tell you is the astoundingly good news coming out of Iraq now. An example is a series of raids by the Iraqi police in Baghdad last week that netted at least 525 criminals. Since Saddam Hussein emptied his jails of some 70,000 hard-core criminals on the eve of the war, the Iraqi police have a long way to go to restore law and order. But the skill with which the raids were pulled off, and the courage displayed by the cops indicate they are off to a very good start.

But best of all is that foreign jihadi terrorists who have come to Iraq in response to al Qaeda’s call are giving up and going home.

StrategyPage.com, a Web site run by James Dunnigan, one of the keenest military analysts, reports that:

Iraqis have become increasingly hostile to al Qaeda’s suicide bombing campaign. Religious leaders, which al Qaeda expects to get support from, have been openly denouncing these bombings. Iraqis, aware that they are more likely than American soldiers to be victims of these attacks, are providing more information on where the al Qaeda members are hiding out. Most of the al Qaeda in Iraq are foreigners, and easy for Iraqis to detect. As a result of this, many of the al Qaeda men have moved back to Fallujah, which has become a terrorist sanctuary.

Local leaders in Fallujah, out of a combination of sympathy for the terrorists and fear of them, have so far been unwilling to back a military attack to clean out various al Qaeda, criminal and Ba’ath Party gangs, StrategyPage said. But if the leadership is intimidated, many residents of Fallujah are not, so the U.S. has been getting timely intelligence on when and where foreign fighters gather, which has made possible several successful air strikes.

"Al Qaeda has found the atmosphere even more hostile elsewhere in Iraq, and many of the terrorists have returned home. This is especially true of those who came from Saudi Arabia and Syria," StrategyPage said.

The Christian Science Monitor reported July 12 that factional fighting has broken out in Fallujah among the various terrorist groups. The Monitor story challenges the conventional wisdom that the failure of the Marines to crush the resistance in Fallujah in April (after the grisly murder of four U.S. contractors) was a setback for the United States.

"The city west of Baghdad is no longer a sympathetic rallying place for a unified Iraqi resistance," the Monitor said. "It is now seen as run by intolerant and exclusivist Sunni imams who are seeking to turn it into a haven for al Qaeda ideologues."

The formation of a mini-Taliban in Fallujah, coupled with rising hostility toward them elsewhere in Iraq, has caused foreign jihadis to concentrate there, where they can more easily be destroyed once Iraqi public opinion supports military operations against them.

It’s becoming clear that Abu Musab al Zarqawi, the al Qaeda chieftain in Iraq, was correct when he wrote in February: "If, God forbid, the government is successful and takes control of the country, we just have to pack up and go somewhere else again, where we can raise the flag again or die, if God chooses us."

Jack Kelly, a syndicated columnist, is a former Marine and Green Beret and a former deputy assistant secretary of the Air Force in the Reagan administration. He is national security writer for the Pittsburgh (Pa.) Post-Gazette.