MICKEY KAUS continues to argue for elections sooner, rather than later, in Iraq. I think he’s right. The captured Zarqawi memo suggested that the terrorists fear an elected Iraqi government more than anything else we can accomplish, and their recent efforts seem to support that thesis. Their goal, at which they’ve so far been spectacularly unsuccessful, is to turn it into an Iraqi-nationalists-against-American-occupiers struggle. But that becomes impossible if the American occupiers aren’t occupying. The collection of Baathist holdovers and Syrian and Iranian rent-a-terrorists has little support now, and will have far less when it’s attacking an elected Iraqi government. That won’t stop them from blowing up things now and then, but it will stop them from actually mattering.

Meanwhile, their sponsors need to worry about this observation from Belmont Club: “The political storm over prisoner abuses at Abu Ghraib and, to a lesser extent the decapitation of Nick Berg, has effaced the really important story in the Iraqi campaign: the US has just beaten back a major counteroffensive by Syria and Iran. . . . While both inflicted some damage, neither stroke has come close to seriously hurting the US position. It would be natural and not in the least surprising, if Rumsfeld and Myers were considering what the American riposte should be.”