I was the lone voice on the right against invading Iraq. The recent events in Iraq made even leftists supportive of the Iraqi affair. They are mistaken.

The reduction in the number of casualties and roadside bombs in Iraq looks awesome until we realize that further improvement will be much harder. The US Army made security progress in Iraq by three measures: buying the short-term allegiance of the Sunni tribal elders, flushing some guerrillas out of their convenient urban strongholds, and convincing Iran to step down its support for the guerrillas. Now the list of macro-level solutions is exhausted. The residual guerrilla warfare represents the activity of small, semi-independent groups without state sponsors or fortified towns. They planted a whopping 1,560 roadside bombs in October.

The Mahdi Army, part of which suspended its military activity, is a militia rather than a guerrilla group. That is, the Mahdi Army is a large, relatively organized, and thus targetable force. The guerrillas who are attacking in Iraq now are small and loose, a target as formidable as drops of mercury in the grass. The excellent US Army did everything which could be done in military terms. Further improvement is only possible through painstaking police work, or more realistically, through Saddam-style wide-scale terror against the supportive population.

The Israeli example is instructive: it is possible to prevent 95-98 percent of terrorist attacks, but the 2-5 percent which take place eventually break the popular resistance and force major concessions. Iraq can never achieve a prevention ratio on par with small, totalitarian Israel. One market bombing a week somewhere in Iraq is a rate sufficient to bring the government down. Terrorism is cheap, simple, and its resources are inexhaustible.

On the fundamental level, what would constitute an American victory in Iraq? Substituting a friendly strongman for Saddam is a rational answer, but not one the US media would embrace. The politically correct Americans would prefer a democratic government in Iraq too weak to brutalize its people. Such a government would either have to rely on Shiites and suppress the Sunnis or try balancing the rival groups like in Lebanon. The best Iraq the US can hope for will be made in Lebanon’s image, and will be equally unstable. Given the Kurds’ separatism and the foreign Arabs’ support of the Iraqi Sunnis, the Lebanese model won’t last for long.

Republicans desperately need victory in the Middle East before the elections. They befriended a devil—that is, the ayatollahs. The Iraqi militia depends on safe havens and considerable financing, and Iran provided both. The easy way to reduce the fighting in Iraq was to convince Iran to desist. Iran agreed to desist. In return for what? A likely answer is that the US Administration compensated Iran for its help in Iraq with security guarantees. America will push for new sanctions but not attack the Iranian nuclear facilities.

The Administration probably worked on an agreement with Syria to limit the infiltration of guerrillas into Iraq, and resented an Israeli strike against Syria’s WMD facilities. Anyway, the US channeled considerable funds to Syria to strengthen its border security. Syria’s acceptance of the offer certainly hinged on additional demands, such as the Golan Heights.

The Annapolis peace conference serves both to soothe the US Administration’s Arab friends and as a stand-alone PR measure for the Bushies.

The purported discovery of Saddam’s documents, implicating him in everything from the attacks on America to terrorism to WMD came in suspiciously handy. Saddam’s connections with Al Qaeda are of the same stock as an average American’s connection to McDonald’s: like it or not, one day you eat there. Al Qaeda is a vague franchise, not an organization. Everyone in the Muslim world is linked to someone in Al Qaeda. The US, too, is linked to Al Qaeda through its support of the Afghan mujahedeen and the Iranian insurgents in Baluchistan. Pakistan, the US ally, was heavily involved with Al Qaeda. Syria works with Al Qaeda-affiliated Fatah al Islam in Lebanon. Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and Qatar openly accommodate well-known Al Qaeda cells. Saddam’s intelligence operated throughout the world, from Pakistan to Czechoslovakia to America. Sure it had some dealings with some groups affiliated with Al Qaeda. No need to translate any documents to guess that. That’s not, however, corpus delicti by the standards of international intelligence services.

The documents reportedly implicate Iraq in the anthrax mail attacks in America. So what? The United States bombed Iraq, humiliated it, patrolled it with aircraft, imposed sanctions on it—and expected no retaliation? The anthrax affair, if true, was the mildest response imaginable on the part of Iraq.

Iraq’s plans for purchasing precursors for chemical weapons are no surprise, either. Iran and Iraq used chemical weapons, and both countries clearly stocked them after the war. It is surprising that the documents only show Iraq’s intent to procure the precursors rather than actual production. Iraqi chemical weapons, if there are any, are a negligible threat to Israel compared to hundreds of Syrian mid-range missiles, or worse still, Pakistani nuclear bombs. Iraqi WMD did not threaten America at all.

The touted transfer of Iraqi nuclear material to Syria is a sham. Syria reportedly received the uranium only enriched to a very low grade, not very different from nuclear waste available elsewhere. The transfer apparently arranged by the Russian military intelligence GRU already after the American invasion, is a shame to US intelligence. GRU likely moved the uranium to Syria for purely commercial purposes, but it is also possible that the enriched uranium was Russian. In that case, GRU needed to clear the evidence. The Iraqi uranium’s origin can easily be traced from the radioactive signature of storage bunkers. The translated documents show that Iraq collected nuclear know-how—a far cry from developing nuclear weapons.

There is no honorable end to the Iraqi war, but America needs to end it.