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| YON: Let's 'Surge' Some More |
| 2008-04-11 |
| It is said that generals always fight the last war. But when David Petraeus came to town it was senators – on both sides of the aisle – who battled over the Iraq war of 2004-2006. That war has little in common with the war we are fighting today. The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about "GoArmy.com." Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have. Some people charge that we have merely "rented" the Sunni tribesmen, the former insurgents who now fight by our side. This implies that because we pay these people, their loyalty must be for sale to the highest bidder. But as Gen. Petraeus demonstrated in Nineveh province in 2003 to 2004, many of the Iraqis who filled the ranks of the Sunni insurgency from 2003 into 2007 could have been working with us all along, had we treated them intelligently and respectfully. In Nineveh in 2003, under then Maj. Gen. Petraeus's leadership, these men – many of them veterans of the Iraqi army – played a crucial role in restoring civil order. Yet due to excessive de-Baathification and the administration's attempt to marginalize powerful tribal sheiks in Anbar and other provinces – including men even Saddam dared not ignore – we transformed potential partners into dreaded enemies in less than a year. The huge drop in roadside bombings is also a political success – because the bombings were political events. It is not possible to bury a tank-busting 1,500-pound bomb in a neighborhood street without the neighbors noticing. Since the military cannot watch every road during every hour of the day (that would be a purely military solution), whether the bomb kills soldiers depends on whether the neighbors warn the soldiers or cover for the terrorists. Once they mostly stood silent; today they tend to pick up their cell phones and call the Americans. Even in big "kinetic" military operations like the taking of Baqubah in June 2007, politics was crucial. Casualties were a fraction of what we expected because, block-by-block, the citizens told our guys where to find the bad guys. I was there; I saw it. The Iraqi central government is unsatisfactory at best. But the grass-roots political progress of the past year has been extraordinary – and is directly measurable in the drop in casualties. This leads us to the most out-of-date aspect of the Senate debate: the argument about the pace of troop withdrawals. Precisely because we have made so much political progress in the past year, rather than talking about force reduction, Congress should be figuring ways and means to increase troop levels. For all our successes, we still do not have enough troops. This makes the fight longer and more lethal for the troops who are fighting. To give one example, I just returned this week from Nineveh province, where I have spent probably eight months between 2005 to 2008, and it is clear that we remain stretched very thin from the Syrian border and through Mosul. Vast swaths of Nineveh are patrolled mostly by occasional overflights. We know now that we can pull off a successful counterinsurgency in Iraq. We know that we are working with an increasingly willing citizenry. But counterinsurgency, like community policing, requires lots of boots on the ground. You can't do it from inside a jet or a tank. Over the past 15 months, we have proved that we can win this war. We stand now at the moment of truth. Victory – and a democracy in the Arab world – is within our grasp. But it could yet slip away if our leaders remain transfixed by the war we almost lost, rather than focusing on the war we are winning today. |
| Posted by:Nimble Spemble |
| #2 Not a bad idea. I remember the ROK Marines as having an excellent record in Vietnam. Sometimes folks really close to a problem can avoid being blinded by teh propoganda and nonsense that blinds others. |
| Posted by: rjschwarz 2008-04-11 17:48 |
| #1 I suggest something even better. Iraq has a whole bunch of young men and boys who have seen the US military way of doing things and like it a lot. So why not create a bunch of (temporarily) US-run military training academies, *parallel* to those who train the Iraqi military, but whose purpose is to create an Iraqi "force projection military" as well. That is, there are demands all over the world for well-trained light infantry personnel for all kinds of important missions, such as peacekeeping, disaster response, disarmaments, etc. Especially in Muslim countries that have a serious problem with non-Muslim foreign troops. The Iraqis have both Shiites and Sunnis, so they would be perfect for such duties. The jobs would be well paying, often with UN command, and would have something akin to lateral duty transfer with the Iraqi military. That is, it would be led by Iraqi officers, and directed by the Iraqi government, but would be oriented to conducting operations *outside* of Iraq, instead of defending Iraq. This has tons of advantages. First of all, the appeal would be of Iraqis helping other, mostly Muslim, nations, which would be a major ego boost to not just Iraqis, but Arabs as a whole. Second would be that they would be doing it the "American-International" way, to high quality standards of professionalism and performance. Third, it would be good employment in respectable jobs, a way for an ambitious young man to climb the social ladder. And for some of their missions, Iraq might be paid handsomely for their use as well. Right now, several small countries rent out their military to the UN, strictly for the money. But these are just small handfuls of soldiers. Iraq could provide brigades or even a division of more soldiers at premium prices. The US is pushing Iraq to have 300,000 men in uniform as soldiers and police. Upping that number by another 10-20,000 would be relatively easy. The big advantage to the US is that even we could pay these Iraqis to do jobs that we would otherwise have to do ourselves, but the Iraqis would cost only a fraction of the amount, and with a lot less acrimony if it was in a Muslim area. So everybody wins. |
| Posted by: Anonymoose 2008-04-11 13:52 |