Michael states the obvious. More Please

'I’ll be honest here. “Optimism” and “Iraq” in the same sentence sound ludicrous to me unless we’re talking about Kurdistan. Too many times I naively believed the U.S. was “turning the corner” on the insurgency, only to later feel like a sucker. Don’t be a sucker is perhaps the best one-sentence advice I can give to anyone who chooses to engage or even dabble in Middle East politics. I learned that one several times from experience.
At the same time, though, I know that conflict does not equal failure. And lack of victory in the middle of a war doesn’t pre-ordain failure at the end of a war. Otherwise it would not be the middle.
Insurgencies are monstrous things. A few days ago Algerian Minister of Culture Khalida Toum said the Islamist insurgency war in that country, which killed 150,000 people and is only just now winding down, was like “ten years of 9/11 and nobody offered their condolences.”'
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001479.html

I read the first paragraph and thought, Me too! I read the second sentance and thought, I've said that! I read the third paragraph, and its now obvious that Michael Totten lives in my brain. Actually, he helps me believe that my observations and insights from afar are not just little puffs of methane, but may have genuine validity in the world of facts.

Its does worry me though that over and over again in the battle over the perception of the Iraqi insurgency, and the Taliban war, indeed the whole world-wide battle against Wahhabist ideas and deeds, people like Mr Totten have had to point out the completely bleeding obvious. I don't know social history well enough to know the answer to whether democracies always need this amount of arsing around before they gen up on the salient facts, but I really hope not. One of my most intelligent colleagues contradicted me on Friday when I referred to the occupants of Gitmo as non-uniformed enemy combatants. He said there was no war. Try explaining that to the Algerian Culture minister- 150,000 of his countrymen died from what exactly? Its true, Wahhabism has killed a lot less people than Communism, but then they have only really been able to murder people in large numbers since the late seventies. The commies had half-century head start.

To paraphrase Trotsky, "You may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you." Yesterday, if you and your wee bairns had decided to fly off to Malta, and went down to Glasgy Airport to embark, the war would have come to greet you. We have one army fighting Wahhabism in Afghanistan, and another in Iraq fighting Wahhabism (and Baathism, Shiism and a few other isms probably). We are in combat with Wahhabism in a dozen more countries, and more fronts will probably develop over the decades. But I don't know when exactly we'll win. Perhaps when the Chinese and the Indians decide enough is enough. All I know is, the British authorities in India, along with mainstream Sunni clerics, had a much more exact idea of the enemy, and a much more effective and forceful response to it than we seem to have managed so far. We need to be much better at separating the enemy from the populations he hides among. We need to be much better at taking him permenantly out of the loop, rather than deporting him to places he can take up his fight from.