Strategy Page says maybe:
The death of al Qaeda leader Abu Musab al Zarqawi was not as important as the capture of his address book and other planning documents in the wake of the June 7th bombing. U.S. troops are trained to quickly search for names and addresses when they stage a raid, pass that data on to a special intelligence cell, which then quickly sorts out which of the addresses should be raided immediately, before the enemy there can be warned that their identity has been compromised. More information is obtained in those raids, and that generates more raids. So far, the June 7th strike has led to over 500 more raids. There have been so many raids, that there are not enough U.S. troops to handle it, and over 30 percent of the raids have been carried by Iraqi troops or police, with no U.S. involvement. Nearly a thousand terrorist suspects have been killed or captured. The amount of information captured has overwhelmed intelligence organizations in Iraq, and more translators and analysts are assisting, via satellite link, from the United States and other locations.
There is this, too:
The damage done by the post- Zarqawi raids has spurred the Sunni Arab amnesty negotiations. These have been stalled for months over the issue of how many Sunni Arabs, with “blood on their hands”, should get amnesty. Letting the killers walk is a very contentious issue. There are thousands of Sunni Arabs involved here. The latest government proposal is to give amnesty to most of the Sunni Arabs who have just killed foreigners (mainly Americans). Of course, this offer was placed on the table without any prior consultations with the Americans. Naturally, such a deal would be impossible to sell back in the United States. But the Iraqis believe they could get away with it if it brought forth a general surrender of the Sunni Arab anti-government forces.
I heard a lot of bloviation from Capitol Hill last night on the news on this subject. Many of our lawmakers are seemingly outraged (or at least feigning outrage) at the notion that soldiers who have been making war on US troops should get amnesty. But isn’t this the way of every war? During a war, soldiers try to kill each other. After the war, they go home. At least that’s been the tradition with the US.
Regardless of their unorthodox (and some say cowardly) means of killing US soldiers (e.g., IEDs), there’s nothing illegitimate about it, per se (though the lack of uniforms and command structure is troubling). We are supposedly in a “War on Terrorism.” It seems to me that we should be encouraging the enemy to at least stop waging war on innocent civilians, which this should do. And there are no doubt many who planted IEDs that were sincere in their belief that the US was an occupying power, and its soldiers a legitimate target. Certainly we’d do the same, if we had to.
If the war is over, then the soldiers on both sides put down their arms, and no harm, no foul. If making that offer results in an end to the war, then why do we complain? We didn’t, after all, punish the ordinary soldiers of the Wehrmacht after we defeated Germany. It may in the end be difficult to really make the necessary distinctions between attackers of troops and attackers of civilians, but the principle seems sound. All of this outrage on the Hill seems more emotional than reasoned, to me.
[Update a few minutes later]
Great (OK, well, some kind of) minds think alike. Jonah Goldberg has a similar rant, which is even tougher on the posturing, “get out now” Democrats (and Republicans, where it applies).
His point is mine. Amnesty is a consolation prize for losing the war. What many in the bug-out brigade seem to want is for them to win.