Cause and delayed effect

As the "uprising" goes on in Iraq, and US forces are forced into battles in the cities similar to what they faced a year ago in the march to Baghdad, there is one issue that is almost not discussed: how this "uprising" was caused by US pressure on Israel over the last three years, and that this "uprising" is more proof that the war Israel is fighting is the same that the US is fighting (and the rest of the Western world is trying to ignore). Saul Singer in his National Review article alludes to these points, but focuses more on the commonality of the war, than on the causes of it.

The US has been forced in the last week to fight an "uprising" by the followers of Sadr that in many ways resembles the war waged by Palestinians against Israel over the last three and a half years. While the tactics of Sadr's followers differ somewhat from the tactics of the Palestinian terrorists (there are no mass congregations of US civilians in Iraq to attack), there are many more similarities than differences; both groups are funded and supported by Iran, both supposedly want to evict "the occupiers", both groups consistently violate the rules of war by hiding among civilians and using them as human shields as well as using ambulances to transport weapons, and both are willing to use suicide bombings (as was evidenced by the Marines' finding of a bomb-belt factory and US uniforms in Fallujah).

These tactics are being employed against the US military because they were shown to work in Israel. Sadr compared himself to Hamas and Hezbollah because, in Singer's words, they are "now the closest things the jihad has to winners on the global stage." The response of the US (until the present cease-fire) was to use overwhelming force against the insurgents, employing virtually every conventional weapon system in the US arsenal. Yet, Israel, in a worse situation due to attacks on civilians as opposed to soldiers, was and is constantly held back in responding. Every Israeli counter-terror operation is stopped prematurely by the "international community", and is therefore not nearly as effective as it could be. This has allowed the terrorists to hone their tactics and convinced them that most of the time they will be able to get away with the attacks, and has thus eroded Israel's deterrence capabilities. And so it has also hurt the US in its operations in Iraq by emboldening the "insurgents".

The US, at this point, must completely crush Sadr's forces; the current cease-fire in Fallujah is a horrible idea. If these "insurgents" are not completely destroyed, they will be emboldened and will try to assert their power in the future.