There’s a dirty little secret about the war in Iraq that the mainstream media doesn’t want to tell you: the US is winning the war there and, what’s more, it’s turned the Battle of Iraq into the central point of the War on Terrorism. Far from a ‘quagmire’, the invasion of Iraq was, within the context of the wider war, a master stroke. Two years ago the enemies stuck us on their terms in our homeland- today the inverse is true. The battle we are fighting in Iraq will ensure that we will not see more battles in our own country. Every terrorist who gets a bullet in the brain in Iraq is a terrorist unavailable to wear his Sunday-best explosive jacket onto the floor of the New York Stock Exchange. Rather than being, as Democrats claim, a ‘distraction’ from the War on Terrorism, the Battle of Iraq has turned into the critical front of the war.

One of the fundamental truths of the present war is this: the United States is too large and requires too much cross-border travel to ever make the country immune to terrorist infiltration. The terrorist will always get through. We may stop some here and there. We might stop 90% of them. But one will always get through and, in this day, one terrorist can kill thousands, or even millions.

What this means is simple: we cannot wait for the terrorists to come to us. Instead, we must invade their countries and kill them where they live or we must draw them into battle somewhere far away from the United States itself. The more of them we kill, the fewer of them there will be- and the fewer people who will sign on to their cause. There are not very many people in this world that will join an organization where membership means nearly-certain death. There are even fewer people who will join when it means a death that is both certain and pointless.

It is very clear that Iraq has become ground zero in a new international Islamic Jihad. “Holy Warriors�, including a large contingent of al-Qaeda members, are streaming into Iraq with the goal of killing Americans and transforming themselves from the slaves of Allah into the martyrs of Allah. In the coming weeks and months we will hear much said on this. Pundits will draw comparisons to both the Soviet war in Afghanistan and the American war in Vietnam. As is so often the case, their predictions will prove to be without basis in fact.

Yes, superficially, the movement of Moslem Jihadists into Iraq does resemble the flow into Afghanistan. However, the primary combatants in Afghanistan were the Afghans themselves (or their co-ethnics in neighbouring nations, notably Pakistan). The international Islamic fighters tended to either not fight at all (one account describes who rich Saudis would fire their rifles into the air a few times in order to claim to have joined in the Jihad) and, when they did fight, they fought spectacularly poorly. The war against the Soviets was won by a combination of American dollars and an Afghan willingness to die in very great numbers. Neither are present in Iraq. Such sponsors as the terrorist do have there could very easily be subjected to military reprisals for their actions. The great bulk of the Iraqi people have shown no inclination to fight Coalition forces within the country. The only people fighting the Coalition are Ba’athist remnant forces and foreign Islamists. The night that Uday and Qusay were killed, the Baghdad skies were filled with gunfire. Not that of battle, mind you, but rather that of celebration: the Iraqi people are not going to rise.

Nor is this war like Vietnam. There is no foreign superpower prepared to supply the enemy with an unlimited supply of arms. Nor does that enemy have any sanctuary which has been rendered immune to attack by a lack of political will. For that matter, the tempo of action is nothing like that in Vietnam. This war would, at the present rate, have to go on for one hundred and fifty years before losses reached levels such as those seen in Vietnam.

In invading Iraq we have adopted a strategy which dates back to the beginning of time. The enemy will not fight us, so we will seize something which will force them to emerge. The terrorists cannot let the United States control Iraq, cannot let Iraq develop into a stable and pro-Western state. Such a situation would undermine their raison d'etre- why go kill Americans if American methods can make the Islamic world peaceful and rich?

Therefore the enemy must come and fight the United States in Iraq. To fail to do so would destroy it- but to do so could destroy it as well. In Iraq the foreign al-Qaeda fighters will be a great disadvantage- they do not know the ground well, nor will they find a very warm reception from most of the Iraqi people. But they still will come: they are already coming in great numbers- and dying in great numbers. In Iraq we have found a place that is as hot as Hell from which it is easy to dispatch the enemies of mankind to Hell.

The Pentagon is not releasing a daily estimate of enemy killed and wounded (a ‘bodycount’) because the fear (quite rightly, I suppose) that it will evoke memories of the Vietnam War. But I think that we need to see those numbers. From most reports I’ve read, I would surmise that the dead amongst the so-called ‘Iraqi resistance’ (the Pentagon should just start referring to all armed groups fighting US forces in Iraq as being the ‘terrorist forces’ as this would be rapidly picked up and used in some segments of the media). This is important, I think, because it will provide some context to US losses in Iraq. This way US losses would be balanced against the losses amongst terrorist forces. Hearing that two US soldiers will killed makes it sound like America is losing. Hearing that fifty-eight terrorists were killed along with those soldiers makes it sound like America is winning.

During the darker days of the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln once said that the Union would win the war when he found a General who understood the arithmetic. The same is true here. There is not an infinite supply of terrorists in the world. The number of people who are willing to live in caves and eat gravel just in order to attack Americans is surprisingly limited. The number willing strap bombs to themselves and to fly planes into buildings is still less than that. Recall that, in a Palestinian population of millions where so-called ‘martyrs’ win massive rewards for their families and get streets named after them, the combined power of a half-dozen of the world’s most powerful terrorist organizations has yielded only a few dozen suicide bombers. The kind of people who strap a semtex vest to themselves before they get on a bus are the kind of people who we’re are killing in Iraq right now. These people are irreplaceable to the enemy. Their deaths will not cause other to replace them but, rather, will drain the pool of the most fanatical terrorists.

Yes, there is a war in Iraq, and yes- the enemy is crossing into that country in great numbers. Good, I say: I wish there were more. The terrorists will come to Iraq, but they will not leave it. It is, really, a matter of math. The more terrorists we kill, the fewer there will be. The gestation period for new terrorists is measured in decades. By forcing them to fight on their home turf, we can wipe out the scum long before they ever get close enough to kill Western citizens.