Iraq: Quagmire for the terrorists

Glenn Reynolds, MSNBC:

Despite pouring in military resources, and staking a good deal of their global prestige on success in Iraq, they've failed again, and people are talking quagmire.

No, not Bush, Rice and Rumsfeld, who are looking pretty happy -- I'm talking about the forces of Islamic terror.

Military blogger Bill Roggio, who more than any of the talking heads on TV actually understands what's going on, puts it this way:

The Iraqis have voted on the referendum.

Turnout is reported to be high in many areas of Iraq. Saddam's own hometown in Tikrit is estimated to have had a 78% turnout. Dr. Fareed Ayar, a member of the Independent Electoral Commission of Iraq, estimates over 11 million particpated in the ballot, almost 70% of the registered voters. The much touted "Ramadan Offensive", designed to disrupt the election process and bring the Iraqi people to their knees has failed.
...
Either al Qaeda did not have the resources to conduct such attacks, could not penetrate the security of the Coalition, or did not have the will to attack Iraqis exercising their democratic rights. No matter what the reason, this is a victory for the Iraqi people and another strategic defeat for al Qaeda. When given a choice between the vision of the Islamists and the ideal of freedom, Iraqis brave the jihadi's threats of violence and reject al Qaeda's hateful ideology. Every time.

Yet many in the "anti-war" camp would rather see the Iraqis lose, so long as that means that the hated George W. Bush loses too. Whether Iraqis die or suffer under tyranny doesn't matter -- just as it didn't matter to them under Saddam -- because all they care about is scoring political points.

British blogger Norm Geras comments on those rooting against success in Iraq:

The paragraph as a whole is a nice illustration of the anti-war system of accounting, which some of us who favoured the liberation of Iraq find hard to stomach (once stomachs is what you're talking): everything bad that has happened since the war is a result of the war; anything good that has happened is... why, something else entirely. But there are people who are capable of seeing the trick here, of seeing that the phrase 'the way its dictator was overthrown' includes the phrase 'its dictator was overthrown'.

It's really hard to avoid concluding that many on the left just don't care what happens, so long as it makes Bush look bad. That's pathetic, but it seems to be inescapably true.

Meanwhile, the Islamic Republic of Iran is starting to worry that Iraq might be a quagmire -- for its side:

This regime-run site in this report explicitly demanded that the Islamic Republic cease and desist from further meddling in the internal issues of Iraq and wrote: "To establish our aims in Iraq is a very difficult and labor-intensive process; we should not act in a way such that in a few years from now we would end up regretting those choices and be left wondering how we lost Iraq as well."

Heh. They don't know the half of it.