As you may have heard, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed last week. “I just had a brief chat with our David Pryce-Jones, whose spirits couldn't be higher this afternoon (in England),” reported National Review Online Editor Katherine Jean-Lopez on her magazine's blog. “He calls al-Zarqawi's demise both a ‘collassal [sic] morale boost for all of us but says it also has ‘big operational significance.' When you get rid of a leader, it's very hard to replace him. The Israelis have proved this time and time again.”
And so they have, I guess.
But inquiring minds want to know -- if it's so hard to replace a slain leader, how come the Israelis need to prove this lesson so many times? Over so many years? Over and over again for decades?
There's no denying, of course, that the death of an individual leader may have large importance for that group's operational capacity. In the particular case of al-Zarqawi and his organization, however, there are some reasons for doubt. Most experts see his group in Iraq as relatively decentralized and likely capable of moving on without him. What's more, the insurgency itself has always been a diverse phenomenon in which al-Zarqawi played a much less central role than the American government's public statements seemed to imply. Even if his group finds itself temporarily crippled, there are plenty of others in Iraq prepared to soldier on.
But let's return to the Israeli case -- it's an instructive one.
The Israelis know a lot about the tactical and operational aspects of counterterrorism. They're quite good at it. This stuff has been a matter of life and death for Israeli citizens for decades and their security and intelligence forces are very expert at it.
They've gotten so expert at it because, as Jean-Lopez implies, they've had the opportunity to try different things out “time and time again” over the years to see what works. The clear moral of that story, however, is that nothing works especially well. Better tactics, better operational counterterrorism, doesn't alter the strategic situation -- the attacks keep on coming. What's needed to end the war isn't better tactics, but an end to the war, a political settlement of the issues in dispute.
The fly in the ointment, of course, is that a political settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hard to find, which is a big part of the reason the Israelis have had occasion to learn lessons in operational counterterrorism. Time and again. And again.
Iraq is much the same. Zarqawi's a bad man, a very bad man, and in an abstract sense his death surely serves the cause of justice. But an inability to kill or capture insurgents and their leaders has never been the problem in Iraq. We killed Uday and Qusay Hussein. We captured Saddam Hussein. We've killed Zarqawi's lieutenants. We've killed his foot soldiers. Our military is good -- very good -- at killing the guys it's supposed to kill. We've proven that we can do it. Time and again. And we can keep proving it for as long as America's political leaders insist on proving it. Time and again. But it won't produce better results than anything we've seen so far. Victory will always be six months away as operational successes fail to secure tactical gains.
It's noteworthy that the most successful counterinsurgency we've waged in Iraq yet has been against the leader we didn't capture or kill -- Muqtada al-Sadr.
His hand forced by Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, George W. Bush acted out of character and eventually brought America's confrontation with Sadr to an end the only way an insurgency can be stopped -- not by killing its members but by reaching a political settlement with its leaders.
The Sunni Arab insurgency is no different in this regard from Sadr's Shiite one. Civil war is not, at this point, a risk that might occur in the future -- it's a reality. A new Iraqi government run by a coalition of Shiites and Kurds is fighting against a Sunni Arab minority that believes it is being disenfranchised by the new order. Not only are American military successes irrelevant to this dynamic -- the entire American involvement in the situation is largely superfluous. Some day, no matter what Bush or Hillary Clinton or anyone else has to say about it, the United States is going to leave Iraq. The Iraqis -- Sunni, Shiite, and Kurd alike -- don't have that luxury. Either they will find a political compromise that majorities on all sides find preferable to fighting, in which case an American presence would be unnecessary, or else they won't, in which case our forces and their combat skills are essentially useless.
Anyone who claims otherwise is ignoring lessons we and other modern industrial countries have learned time and again.
Matthew Yglesias is a Prospect staff writer.
