More from The Dungeon of Fallujah

Sergeant Dehaan was comfortable with his mission in Iraq and the flaws of the Iraqi Police he was tasked with training and molding.

“I prefer these small and morally ambiguous wars to the big morally black-and-white wars,” he said to me later. “It would be nice if we had more support back home like we did during World War II. But look at how many people were killed in World War II. If a bunch of unpopular small wars prevent another popular big war, I'll take ’em.”

Unpopular small wars are usually unpopular in America because the objective of these wars is not to defend the American people. Sure, the politicians can claim that these wars are being fought to protect us, but as Lincoln said, you can fool some of the people all of the time, and all of the people some of the time, but you can not fool all of the people all of the time.

The Bush administration sold the war in Iraq as a part of the war against terrorism, and as a way of protecting the world from Saddams proto-nuclear arsenal. Bush, Cheney and the rest of the world did, for the most part, agree that Saddam probably was planning to build up a nuclear arsenal. The rest of the world also agreed that, if Saddam did posess any WMDs, he'd be likely to use them, since he'd used them in the past. Saddam could also use the threat of these weapons to intimidate every other nation in the region, much in the same way as Saudi Prince Bandar uses al Qaeda to intimidate the west. The effectiveness of the weapon sometimes takes a backseat to its effectiveness as a threat. Since the State Department has never abandoned the domino theory or the Carter Doctrine, our government saw Saddams ability to threaten his neighbors as a problem that would imbalance the 'stability' of the region, something leading to a larger war.

Bush and Rumsfeld's idea didn't work out as planned, and our tendency to be intimidated by threats of nukes is still a weak point, but, conversely, American actions in Iraq may prevent a larger war. Not due to Rumsfeld's efforts, but due to Petraeus' efforts and the work that the troops have been doing to support the Anbar Awakening.

According to Bill Roggio's post in the Long War Journal, Sheik Abdul Sattar Al-Rishawi and his allies among the tribes and anti al Qaeda insurgent groups only began forming alliances in the spring and summer of 2006.

John Nagl didn't publish his counter-insurgency manual untill 2005. Before that, the army didn't do counterinsurgency. Apparently they were burned by Vietnam, so they decided to avoid those kind of wars. I can't begin to fathom the logic there, but the attitude is finally changing.

We're only beginning to learn how to deal with terrorism. It will be another few years before we can expect to see any real change, given the intractable nature of our foreign policy and the state department. However, we are finally beginning to move in a positive direction. In our small, unpopular war in Iraq, men like General Petraeus and Sergeant Dehaan have shown the world that, when people refuse to cooperate with terrorism, when they actively fight against it (with the help of the state or army), terrorist militias become the weak horse. We are, slowly but surely, developing effective counterterrorism measures. As we do so, we eliminate the usefulness of terrorism as a weapon of war.