Retired Marine and daily commentator W. Thomas Smith, Jr. returned this week from Fort Jackson with photographs. Under an open South Carolina sky, Army recruits marched to a site furnished with instruments and obstacles, and followed drill instructors through tactical exercises. In one picture a file of young men, ungainly in accoutrement, squinting at the sun; in another, a squad inside a beige transport truck. Particularly, Smith caught a simulation at Anzio Range, "where basic-trainees learn how to fight and survive a convoy ambush." He noted that a supervisory lieutenant colonel had participated in the deposition of Saddam Hussein — little question, then, where the surprise attack might be meant to take place, and against whom.
It has come to be a performing art to renounce the Iraqi campaign or those conducting it on grounds that it has lasted this many years and claimed this many soldiers' lives because a master stroke was not delivered. Against that is a justification for Western unpreparedness in reproof: in Iraq and Afghanistan are the wars Washington refused to fight as long as it could defer, and in the thirty years after the betrayal of Saigon, neither the GI nor his commanders would have any idea as to what form the enemy assumed. Years of fighting would need to pass before apposite men were granted the proper materiel.
Widely understood is that the terrorist — the transnational criminal — cannot stand up to the modern, freeman soldier. What he does instead is deprive that soldier's army of a neat victory, and compound homefront impatience with horror through licensed and inventive killing. Existentialist traces are touched off, goodness of purpose depreciates, and pretty soon majorities consider enjoining a war, if at least to end its disappointments.
That is how the enemy intends to succeed, anyway. Americans and allies have learned much of the Eastern thug since 2001, even more since 2003. They have an eminent advantage in resources and, miraculously, martial confidence. Decaying dictatorships produce radicalism, and Iraq's outcome is pivotal in judging whether an infusion of civility can — against a centrifugal, information-age threat — be defended.
What if hardships delivered a prevailing understanding of the enemy? And the enemy realized that winning lessons in Iraq were to be shared with the Lebanese, the Israelis, the Afghans, the Pakistanis, the many besieged Africans? That adversary might work to thwart any practice of diligence.