Reason For Allies To Remain Willing

At a meeting in Washington, DC, about a year ago, a senior Australian defense official looked weary, as well he might. He had arrived in the capital only a few hours before, but already he had met top officials at the Pentagon, Homeland Security and the State Department. This brief lunch at a think tank had been shoe-horned into a short interval before he had to head over to the White House.

For generations, Americans have referred generically to "the allies": a gathering that included the NATO countries and their Asia-Pacific equivalents: Japan, Australia, New Zealand, South Korea and Taiwan. Since 9/11, that old grouping has been subdivided into two seatings. There's the children's table, at which are found allies who may be full of goodwill but lack the forces and the toughness to do very much. And there's the grown-up table, where sit the countries both able and willing to fight when they need to.

That's the table at which John Howard's Australia now makes its voice heard. And, as the Prime Minister prepares to meet President George W. Bush in Washington next week, it's from that top seat that Australians are demanding to know how exactly things are going in Iraq--and what reason there is for the White House's continuing optimism about the course of the war.

Coalition leaders made one large mistake in their war planning: They did not expect and were not prepared for the tough insurgency that erupted within weeks of the liberation of Baghdad in April 2003. The coalition--which now includes a democratically elected Iraqi government--must now fight a second campaign, this time against a terrorist enemy, at heavy cost in coalition and Iraqi casualties. Terrorism is not a military tactic. It's a psychological technique intended to demoralize a more scrupulous opponent by turning his revulsion against cruelty and violence against himself. To fight back, it is essential to keep in view the whole picture in Iraq, not just the spectacular atrocities and gruesome violence that the terrorists would wish us to see.

We need to keep in view the recovery of the Iraqi economy since liberation. The Iraqi Ministry of Finance estimates that the economy is growing at 17 per cent this year. Unemployment has dropped by as much as 50 per cent, with per capita income rising from less than $US700 at the liberation to a projected $US1200 in 2007. Iraq's schools are educating 4.3 million children. Teacher pay has been raised by up to 2500 per cent over pre-war levels.

An independent media has been born: there are 23 commercial television stations, 80 radio stations, 170 newspapers and magazines. Iraq's environment is returning to life, as US engineers blow up the dikes that drained and poisoned the marshes of southern Iraq and allow the Marsh Arabs to return to their ancient homes. More fatefully for the terrorists, their tactics, horrendous as they may be in the short run are over the longer term turning Arab and Muslim opinion against the extremist versions of Islam that sanction such tactics.

After a group of 26 Saudi imams issued a communique in November 2004 urging jihad in Iraq, a columnist in an official Saudi daily reflected the emerging conventional wisdom in the Middle East:

"Instead of adding fuel to the fire in Iraq, these 26 clerics should have made clear the sharia's stand concerning a jihad of beheadings, the kidnapping of innocent [people], and blowing up booby-trapped cars and roadside bombs against pedestrians--children, women, and the elderly. What is going on today in Iraq is madness that feeds every day on the lives of innocent Iraqis and quenches its thirst with the forbidden blood that flows mercilessly through the streets of Iraq."

When Bush, Howard and Tony Blair describe Iraq as the "central front" in the war on terror, they are not talking only about the material clash of guns and bombs. In Iraq, extremist Islam is waging a war not against Christians, Hindus or Jews, but against fellow Muslims. As the cruelty of the terrorists is broadcast through the region, Arabs and Muslims are being challenged to take sides for or against the ideology of murder.

And every day, more and more choose the right side. Sunni clerics inside Iraq have issued fatwas encouraging young Sunni men to enlist in the Iraqi security forces--and despite the attacks on police stations, the ranks of the Iraqi forces continue to grow.

Progress on the ground in Iraq is hard, but real. But what matters most is something that we are beginning to read and hear and feel: progress in the minds of Muslim men and women. That progress is owed to the sacrifices and achievements of Australian, US, British, and other coalition forces--and to the their voters who have re-elected the men who made the right choices.