Michael Ledeen, laying it down:

You cannot have it both ways. If Zarqawi is indeed the deus ex machina of the Iraqi terror war, it cannot be right to say that the "insurgency" is primarily composed of Saddam's followers. Zarqawi forces us to think in regional terms rather than focusing our attention on Iraq alone. Unless you think that Iraqi Defense Minister Shaalan is a drooling idiot, you must take seriously his primal screams against Iran and Syria ("terrorism in Iraq is orchestrated by Iranian intelligence, Syrian intelligence, and Saddam loyalists"). Indeed, there has been a flood of reports linking Syria to the terror war, including the recent news that the shattered remnants from Fallujah have found haven and succor across the Syrian border. Finally, the Wahabbist component carries the unmistakable fingerprints of the quavering royal family across the border in Saudi Arabia.

The terror war in Iraq was not improvised, but carefully planned by the four great terror masters (Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Saudi Arabia) during the infuriatingly long run-up to the liberation. They made no secret of it; you have only to go back to the public statements of the Iranian mullahs and the Syrian Baathists to see it, for top Iranian officials and Bashir Assad publicly announced it (the mullahs in their mosques, Bashir in a published interview). They had a simple and dramatic word for the strategy: Lebanon. Assad and the mullahs prepared to turn Iraq into a replay of the terror war they had jointly waged against us in Lebanon in the 1980s: suicide bombings, hostage-taking, and religious/political uprisings. It could not have been more explicit.

The contention that terrorists in Iraq are primarily local, ethnic, tribal and/or Ba'athist serves both leftists who wish to prove Iraqis want nothing of democracy or American guidance, and some traditionalists and pragmatists on the right who believe their own intellectual investments are at stake.

The enemy as a force organized in advance by Saddam is a political cudgel against the military and sociopolitical optimism of progressive moral rightism in the American Enterprise Institute and much of the senior Bush administration, particularly Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. The enemy as a response to an American presence is a tool for anti-Americans, totalitarian sympathists, and petty critics of the liberation, who tend to project disdain for the freedom they enjoy onto those who are obviously struggling to hold and keep it themselves.

As the face of an ancient rivalry, the enemy fulfills the theories of traditional rightists like the otherwise cogent Charles Krauthammer, who stubbornly believes in sectarian rigidity; while supportive of the liberations of Afghanistan and Iraq and prospects elsewhere, he remains fashionably skeptical of our ability to inject pluralism into dictatorial societies, notwithstanding the prime nation-building examples of Germany and Japan. A year ago he considered Afghanistan a matter of preventing the return of Islamist rule and little more, a cautious appraisal I initially entertained before firmly discarding it as the Taliban grew visibly weaker and weaker while Kabul liberalized. His response to the country's electoral triumph in October was that "factions were exhausted," when in fact they were active until driven into obscurity by Allied and Pakistani forces. Now he contends that Iraq is currently in a "civil war," one driven by Sunni statists. While Krauthammer's faith in democracy remains comparable to pro-liberation rightists, his insistence on other personal theories — like the specious argument for preserving the dysfunctional hammer of terror known as the old Iraqi army — in effect endorses a fanciful "better than awful" standard that undermines the case for and implementation of assertive democratization.

The "civil war" case is a shoddy one. Despite the geographical location and ethnicity of most terrorists, there is neither an internecine crisis nor a political one. Sunni parties that were no less terrorist faceplates than Sinn Fein departed Baghdad's consensus during operations in Fallujah but many more remain a part of the accelerating election process and threats of boycotts have been weak when not quickly rescinded. Even the United Nations believes electoral non-participation to be insignificant. One cannot have a civil war without an organized secession led by a rival established power; in Iraq, there is nothing of the sort, but instead reasonably broad polity across the country. And what of the Sunni element in terrorist acts? It is believed that the enemy has numbered more than 10,000 and active terrorists no more than three thousand. Counting all 10,000 as Sunnis, who comprise one-fifth of Iraq's population, but two-tenths of one percent of Sunnis are represented — whereas the American Confederacy enrolled twelve percent of the South's total population. The standard for which Krauthammer's argument requires is low, though certainly reaching a level of the absurd.

True reactionaries (Krauthammer is not, thankfully, included here) further hesitate to see in Iraq an assembly of opportunist criminals and professional killers left over from the Saddamite regime fused to a non-statist invasion — one that is nevertheless led by states like Iran and Syria — because it confirms that Iraq's liberation is a beachhead and the proper beginning to a showdown with authoritarians who are indeed at war with us, rather than a sideshow or a distraction.

The counter to terrorism in Iraq as regional war is anecdotal evidence that shows a majority of captured and killed terrorists to be Iraqis. Possibly, but then why the anecdotal evidence showing measurable support and primary direction from Islamofascist-supporting regimes whom Iraqis — especially Sunnis — should despise? And even if members of the terrorist invasion were once Ba'athists, wouldn't they, by virtue of joining with those judged to be vermin by the tenets of Arab Socialism, cease to be Ba'athists? The only functioning Ba'athist regime in the Near East is Syria's — how I intend the word when I use it — which only strengthens Ledeen's point.

The good people of Iraq are very deliberate when they condemn the killers and saboteurs around them as "no Iraqis."