The Long War

It's a new rule of Wall Street Journal editorials (subs. req'd, alt. free link) on Iraq: there must be a reference to Sinn Fein or the IRA:

These Saddamists can't be coaxed into surrender by political blandishments because their goal isn't to share power but is to dominate Iraq once again. Or if they do play in the political process, it will only be in the Sinn Fein sense of doing so as cover for their real terror strategy.

This is just another pointer to how far the WSJ has shifted even from the Pentagon strategy in Iraq; in the same week that they see evidence of Saddam's master plan -- a long-planned alliance with foreign terrorists to maintain an extended insurgency after he had fallen -- we learn that the US is (again) having negotiations with "moderate" terrorists groups, and the latter (the most obvious descendants of Saddam's regime) are themselves fighting with al Qaeda in Iraq.

Indeed, the strategy of negotiation -- which sends Christopher Hitchens and Dan Senor to the nearest keyboard to fulminate -- mirrors one British strategy in Northern Ireland. As it happens, mid-1970s NI Secretary Merlyn Rees died recently, and his obituary was a reminder that the British saw two gains to negotiation with the IRA. They might actually agree to something, but at least their capacity would degrade or could be monitored while negotiations were going on. But the WSJ can only see some monstrous conspiracy between Osama, Saddam, and Jacques Chirac that must be crushed before it destroys all of Western civilization. Just as well these people aren't running anything besides a newspaper.