My great-grandfather Anton Navarra was murdered by gangsters. Anton ran a grocery store in Madison, Wisconsin's ten-block Greenbush district, an Italian "enclave of cobblers, carpenters and barbers; of bricklayers, painters and common laborers; of grocers, butchers and restaurant owners; and of clubhouses, pool halls and neighborhood taverns," as narrated in the historical and anecdotal cookbook A Taste of Memories from the Old "Bush." With humble immigrants, according to the story my mother was told, came Old Country toughs who brought to the New World their own profession. Anton, who spoke good English, kept his neighbors from being swindled — going so far as to translate for them in court. The Sicilian was singled out for his helpful deeds. One evening in 1924, at closing time, a man entered the grocery store and shot Anton dead.
The loss of good men is not, unfortunately, remarkable. But the story's end is instructive. What happened to the small-time mafiosos? Dead, gone. "They eventually turned on each other," my mother was told.
Before the Allies returned to Fallujah nine months ago, gangs inside the city were found to have fractured and weakened. Though contention appeared to be over little more than methods of subjugation, we glimpsed the volatile company that thugs keep: driven by a desire not shared but incidental, they are ordered by strength and arranged by mutual fear. Strained, those bonds produce a contest of cannibals. A catastrophic dissolution — as opposed to a mutinous reshuffling — will only occur as a response to poor fortunes. But reviewing the abrupt ends of strongmen, from Greenbush gangs to puppet dictators of the former Eastern Bloc, shows that it is quite natural. Like all men whose currency is the lie, terrorists reveal far more through what is not intended for broadcast, and three intercepted messages over eighteen months telegraph the end of the enemy in Iraq.
The first message, believed to have been written or dictated by Abu Musab al-Zarqawi himself, was seized in January 2004. Its author was contemplating defeat by stubborn armies and flight from an unsympathetic, if diffident, country. In spite of attempted Ba'athist and Khomeinist insurrections two months later, a second battle with Muqtada al-Sadr's street brawlers that August and the reclamation of Fallujah in November, and the specter of continued gangland killings and bombings well into this year, the author's conditions for losing against Iraqis and their foreign allies remain.
Terrorists are permanently incapable of constructing a popular front in Iraq, having forgone the subtleties of politics or rhetoric and instead resolved to simply frighten, murder and coerce locals as necessary. Iraqis are promised no better life or material transcendence, are offered no appeal to tranquility — pluralities have been cleverly seduced into accepting tyranny as liberation before, but here the would-be usurpers have made no effort. This enemy's propaganda is the mimeography of predation: You are slaves and we are your masters.
Suffering under Saddam Hussein's refinement of the modern totalitarian state produced more actuating shame in Iraqis than wounded resignation, and the very people targeted by shootings and bombings are less disheartened than those watching anachronous and distorted footage of the crimes from the other side of the world. Faced with living another nightmare or risking death for self-determination Iraqis have chosen accordingly — leaving the enemy a single element, doubt, with which to force a collapse of American electoral will and Allied retreat.
President Bush's reelection confirmed Allied presence for the next four years, underscored by two Congressional votes of confidence this past June — each carried by a two-thirds vote. In May, the second message in question fell into Allied hands, with repeat laments: far fewer terrorists on hand than expected, those present listless and uncooperative. Before a third message was captured in Mosul, Marines in al Anbar Province witnessed the first of several skirmishes between terrorists. The captured letter from Mosul is as bleak as the first two and considered by Task Force Olympia Captain Duane Limpert, Jr., completing his tenth month in theater, as "a measure of effectiveness for our efforts here." Two hundred miles south, Allied forces trace the downward arc of a slow coup de grace.
What an elucidative privilege to conduct an autopsy of the Ba'athist-Islamist combine: How many times was the enemy forced not only to reorganize but to reinvent himself? With gangs, safehouses and stashes disrupted every week for two years, were persistence and tactical adaptation his finest attributes? How quickly did the Ba'athists devolve completely into free-wheeling street thugs? Combatants identified as "fedayeen" deployed car bombs, a terrorist hallmark, in the last weeks of major combat operations. Hussein acolyte Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri was reportedly untroubled by leaving behind his erstwhile party's "unity, freedom, socialism" for the muddled grandiloquence of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. How quickly did the murderous flux tear apart — when did a terrorist hate his partners as much as Allied soldiers and Iraqi democrats? How many fled the country and how many quietly settled as underworld riffraff? For the countless bearings, the many months, the misery sown, terminus will have a single cause: the enemy eventually turned on himself.