14 June The American Prospect commentary - Déjà Vu in Iraq - What the Israelis Can Teach Us About the Death of al-Zarqawi by Matthew Yglesias.

... The Israelis know a lot about the tactical and operational aspects of counterterrorism. They’re quite good at it. This stuff has been a matter of life and death for Israeli citizens for decades and their security and intelligence forces are very expert at it.

They’ve gotten so expert at it because, as Jean-Lopez implies, they’ve had the opportunity to try different things out “time and time again” over the years to see what works. The clear moral of that story, however, is that nothing works especially well. Better tactics, better operational counterterrorism, doesn’t alter the strategic situation -- the attacks keep on coming. What’s needed to end the war isn’t better tactics, but an end to the war, a political settlement of the issues in dispute.

The fly in the ointment, of course, is that a political settlement to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is hard to find, which is a big part of the reason the Israelis have had occasion to learn lessons in operational counterterrorism. Time and again. And again.

Iraq is much the same. Zarqawi’s a bad man, a very bad man, and in an abstract sense his death surely serves the cause of justice. But an inability to kill or capture insurgents and their leaders has never been the problem in Iraq. We killed Uday and Qusay Hussein. We captured Saddam Hussein. We've killed Zarqawi’s lieutenants. We've killed his foot soldiers. Our military is good -- very good -- at killing the guys it’s supposed to kill. We’ve proven that we can do it. Time and again. And we can keep proving it for as long as America’s political leaders insist on proving it. Time and again. But it won’t produce better results than anything we’ve seen so far. Victory will always be six months away as operational successes fail to secure tactical gains...