Two days after Iraqis and Poles began Operation Peninsula to apprehend fifteen dozen suspected terrorists and take control of a few truckloads of ordnance south of Baghdad, Iraqi and multinational military leaders convened in the Iraqi capital on Saturday, May 21st — in part to assess the enemy's shape and direction but also to prepare the public for a drive to fleece the city of its recent terrorist infestation. Most interesting was an Iraqi commander's reduction of the enemy. Terrorists have often been described as highly adaptive; tactics and habitation have indeed modulated over the past two years but this seems to be less ingenuity than continual attrition that has robbed loose and naturally adversarial bands of Ba'athists, criminals and foreigners of uniformity. Despite a fluid alternation of targets and hideouts, the enemy's strategy has remained the same, simple and remarkably unfruitful: to sabotage civil structures and murder Allied soldiers or Iraqi democrats for a cause only occasionally rising to a pretense above rank bloodlust. Even al Qaeda tough Abu Musab al-Zarqawi forfeited Islamist terrorism's political and pseudo-religious creed, that which had spared it regional and global revulsion for decades, declaring last week that the infidel was whomever his bombers chose on a given day; Muslim or not. Terrorists are not fighting on behalf of the Iraqi people; what leverage a fire-and-murder headline held in Western elections has dissipated, the near-exclusive killing of innocents no fodder for a Western leftist's trademark self-loathing. The enemy is single-minded and he is loathsome, and according to the Iraqi military man the enemy is a slave to compulsion:

One Iraqi general provided some observations he has made about vehicle bombs. He said citizens need to be on the look out for vehicles with tinted windows; vehicles riding low or tilted to one side due to carrying a heavy load of explosives; religious writing on the side of a vehicle, so a terrorist photographer will be able to recognize the vehicle; vehicles with usually only one occupant; and vehicles driving very fast.

The Iraqi general said actions by security forces alone are not enough to defeat the terrorist threat. "It is important for the citizens to report suspicious persons or vehicles to the police and army. This is not something the Iraqi security force can do on its own," he said.

The Good Citizen is as much a hero in free Iraq as the policeman and soldier. Iraq's nascent civil society has made possible hundreds of raids, the gangster surviving only by sliding into places and — sometimes with the help of the local toughs — smothering neighborhoods into silence. Trust makes a town vulnerable but if a constable and his ward keep to their roles of enforcer and informant, fear is worthless:

Coalition Forces, in conjunction with the Iraqi Army and Ministry of Interior Forces, have detained 285 suspected terrorists in the western Baghdad district of Abu Ghraib in less than 24 hours. The massive joint-combat operation involves two battalions from the 3rd Brigade, 6th Iraqi Army Division, two battalions from the 1st Brigade, 1st Iraqi Intervention Force, three battalions from the 2nd Brigade Special Police Commandos, and Soldiers from Task Force 2-14, 2nd Brigade Combat Team, 10th Mountain Division.

Task Force Baghdad officials said the purpose of the operation is to hunt down, kill or capture terrorists who have been staging attacks in the Iraqi capital.

Operation Squeeze Play is the first of the counterterrorist series promised on Saturday; even before vetting, the number of detainees is staggering. What must have been intended as a pointed terrorist response only exposed the enemy's diminishing and debased prospects: bombs outside of cafes, mosques; double-bombs at the door of residences to kill helpful passerby. One year ago, the American military took pains to stamp out a pair of insurrections. Yesterday, terrorists could only answer the loss of nearly three hundred accessories to murder and sabotage with a running slaughter that, given Iraqis' resistance to intimidation, will have no direct impact on the operational strength of native and Allied forces.

2004's Bloody April marked the failure of the authoritarian Near East to stifle Iraqi democracy with violence and doubt. In twelve months since terrorists have descended into a terrible but rattled aimlessness. Hate and killing is all that they understand. In time the enemy will not surprise on any scale and, if some commentators are correct, that last stumble will push terrorism and its attendant culture into total collapse. To whatever end, that moment is approaching quickly.

EYE ON BAGHDAD: Jeff Medcalf provides links and comment.