How the Baghdad Security Plan is Frightening the Anti-War Crowd

The Baghdad Security Plan - referred to distastefully as "The Surge" by anti-war protesters at first which has caught in because of the fact that an increase in active military personnel in Iraq was a part of the plan - will receive it's progress report on September 15th. From the time that this article is written that is ten days - four days after the horror that awakened America to Islamic extremism and several months after the announcement of the Plan. Already the paranoia coming from the plan is beginning to show face, even on such sites as Associated Content.

As a brief recap, the Iraq Conflict stooped dramatically during the 2006 year because of a decrease in direct American involvement. With America taking more of a general policing role and the Iraqi government fundamentally trying to take over (a task for which it was ill prepared) an explosion of violence ensued following the bombing of the Askariya Mosque. Even with Islam's slew of self professed "holiest sites" and its inability to remain numerically consistent (with several Imams referring to Mecca and Medina both as the "first most important sites" in Islam, followed by Jerusalem which is the second), the Askariya Mosque is a particularly important site to Shi'ites.

In Shi'a beliefs this is where the father and grandfather Imams of the Mahdi are laid to rest - and it is thanks to him that the Islamic apocalypse (that Ahmadinejad suggested would have been last year around August) will usher in, destroying all non-Muslim governments only to replace them with a centralized Caliphate. Of course there is the great rift between Sunnis and Shi'a who dispute over which sect exactly will rule over this Caliphate.

The United States continued to take an inactive stance on the conflict that continued to grow between Shi'ites and Sunnis as the "war" shifted and lost its initial focus - insurgencies were replaced by Militias, militias begat Death Squads who in turn produced new insurgency groups. In the chaos of all of this, the Mahdi Army was allowed to establish itself as a major, threatening power, even dominating blocs of government similar to the terrorist Hezbollah in Lebanon.

In all of this, al-Qaeda in Iraq continued to establish itself as a valuable and viable alternative government. In the chaos that was the nation, a semblance of order in Diyala and Anbar would be sufficient, even if under the strict Sharia interpretations of these neo-Taliban adherents. As time progressed however, and mass graves continue to pile, teachers continued to disappear, and the usually secular Iraqis continued to voice their protest to Sharia, the back of the camel was proverbially broken by the Baghdad Security Plan's straw.

In effect, the Plan called for a redrawing of the Rules of Engagement, no longer requiring the Iraqi government's permission to neutralize hostile targets, increasing American activity in taking down terrorist networks, and the allowance of actual military force rather than a policing action. Seemingly the first step of this plan appeared to be the partitioning of Baghdad - fully understanding what parts constituted what forms of "districts" to better allow American forces to select their targets. From there, American forces continued to press into Anbar, considered the "wild west" of Iraq where it was all but a no-man's land for non-al-Qaeda forces.

With new soldiers arriving and a shift in the rules of engagement, American forces swiftly swept across the region and picked apart the frail insurgencies, which in turn began discussing reconciliation with the Iraqi government under Nouri al-Maliki. Imams and sheiks who once openly protested the American government urged their followers to pick up their weapons and aid the government in policing areas. Attacks were down, firebrand speeches were down, and thus rose the Anbar Salvation Council, which has effectively demolished al-Qaeda in Iraq's most important foothold in the nation.

Among the other crippling losses to al-Qaeda in Iraq was the loss of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the despotic leader who himself helped to unite the Iraqi factions and was named "emir of Iraq" by Ayman al-Zawahiri. Nevertheless, it is still widely believed that the sectarian rifts driven by Zarqawi led to a schism between him and his al-Qaeda leadership, who may very well have sold him out. Zawahiri, acting as leader of Iraq with Osama bin-Laden's mysterious disappearance, then replaced Zarqawi with the so far less than competent Abu Ayyub al-Masri, a little known Egyptian who timidly took up his new job and showed little influence on the national scale.

His inability to do little more than act as a puppet for Zawahiri demonstrated the tragic state of al-Qaeda in Iraq - something the secularists and nationalist insurgents pounced upon. Ranging from the Anbar Salvation Council to the 1920s Revolutionary Brigade to the Ba'ath Party itself, a fundamental rejection of al-Qaeda in Iraq became common place and in desperation the faction merged with its umbrella groups to make what it calls the Islamic State of Iraq.

Meanwhile sectarian violence is down, insurgents are continuing to be killed, and terror networks continue to abandon their ways in favor of reconciliation - thanks to David Petraeus and the Baghdad Security Plan. And this is why even on Associated Content there's an apparent panic amongst the anti-war crowd. Last year was the one thing one could latch onto for major support, thinking that most Americans thought like them, that "losing the war" would be just punishment for disobeying their wishes and invading Iraq anyway.

Normally liberal, anti-war messages have transformed into direct attacks on the President, as though they were holding a form of dialogue with the commander-in-chief. Information that is so baseless it would be laughable if it weren't in the context of an armed conflict is being propagated, a furor has begun - and it all revolves around the fact that the Baghdad Security Plan is working.

And in 10 days, that's exactly what General Petraeus is going to say.