As I’ve been reading the coverage and commentary of yesterday’s election in Iraq in the mainstream media and in the blogosphere, there’s a question that hasn’t received as much attention as I would have thought: why wasn’t there considerably more terrorist violence in Iraq yesterday and the day before? Zarqawi, the terrorist chief, threatened it; many Western pundits predicted it. I’ve asked the question in the comments sections of a couple of blogs today and I’ve seen that the ubiquitous praktike has done the same in a few places but I haven’t seen any answers or much commentary on the subject.
Based on nothing much more than my not-too-well-informed intuition I can think of several possibilities:
- the Coalition and Iraqi defense forces have been successful enough at raising the cost of such incidents for the terrorists that a major incident didn’t materialize (and variants on this theme)
- the terrorists are biding their time until after the elections
- the “resistance” is tapped out
It’s possible that all of these are factors in varying degrees.
Despite the costs in lives among the Coalition and Iraqi police and national guard and Iraqi civilians it does appear that some headway has been made in increasing the cost to the terrorists. Look at the rocket attack the other day on the American Embassy. Within a very short time some pretty likely suspects had been apprehended. And the number of Iraqi civilian casualties over the last several months has made the terrorists look a lot less like a patriotic resistance and more like a competitive occupation force.
On the other hand I can’t imagine why the terrorists would delay their attacks if they had the capacity to execute them. This idea seems a lot to me like the always-predicted but never-materializing rising of the Arab street.
So I suspect that the answer is that the ”resistance” has done as much as they could manage: they’re tapped out. And, if that’s true, barring some new factor it should become progressively less able to mount attacks over time. It certainly seems to me that the terrorist are behaving less like a well-organized resistance and more like very well-armed hooligans without much discipline, organization, or coordination.
Anyone else have any ideas?
UPDATED: Submitted to the Beltway Traffic Jam.
