Do or die in Iraq: where we've been; where we should go

National Review, Jan 29, 2007 by Bing West

IT is difficult to determine precisely what is new about President Bush's new strategy toward Iraq. Exhortations about lowering unemployment, sharing oil revenues, and reconciling with the Sunnis are already part of the strategic repertoire of Gen. George W. Casey Jr., who is being replaced as commander of coalition forces in Iraq.

What are the additional American soldiers expected to do? Increasing their numbers is a temporary input. Every surge ebbs. Keeping U.S. forces in very large numbers in Iraq is an approach that probably can't be sustained for longer than a year. We are simply running out of time in Iraq, because the American public has already seen our soldiers dying for almost four years, without progress. Economic incentives, meanwhile, of the kind that alter people's perceptions and draw support away from the insurgents, require multiyear persistence. Political reconciliation requires refractory Iraqi politicians to reach reasonable compromise--again, a multiyear task.

Strategy in Washington is only tenuously connected to the realities of the violence in Iraq. The U.S. manages crises from the top down: The White House, the diplomats, and the generals seek to motivate Iraq's political leaders, who will presumably cajole the shadowy leaders of the Sunni insurgency and the Shiite militias. This is the model of the Washington policymaker: Power speaks to power, based on rank. Our best and brightest will craft a strategy calculated to persuade Nouri al-Maliki, the prime minister of Iraq, who putatively influences those below him.

The insurgents and the death squads, on the other hand, have no such hierarchical pyramid. An insurgency grows from the bottom up. A guerrilla who doesn't know his neighborhood stands out as though he were wearing a uniform. Indeed, if the insurgents did wear uniforms, the war would be over in a week. A few years ago, when Qaeda leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi bumped into a checkpoint near Ramadi, he asked his driver what tribe controlled the area. He then leaped from his car and escaped via a local contact. Only later did our intelligence cells in Baghdad learn what had happened in that remote city. Insurgent militias survive by putting down local roots.

To put it bluntly, the philosophical convictions of 60-year-old executives have no point of contact with the tribal nihilism of the 20-year-old killers embedded like ticks in local villages and city neighborhoods. The latter don't give a tinker's damn what the Gucci politicians cluck about in Baghdad. Maliki, coddled in the Green Zone, is a party politician installed by American force of arms. Unlike our Founding Fathers, he and his ilk were handed a democracy they did not fight to establish. The streets outside the Green Zone are controlled by their enemies: killers whose souls have been corroded, and who will continue to murder, because that's what they do. They're not going to be won over by jobs cleaning streets or promises of oil-revenue sharing. Like the mafia, they have tasted power and they're not giving it back. They have to be put down, in jail or in the earth.

That's the role of our soldiers. They're the ones out on the streets. Putting aside the economics and the politics, what is "new" about what they will be told to do? The starting point is to examine where we stand today, and how we got there.

THE MAKING OF A MESS

Our military troubles began in May 2003, when Gen. Tommy Franks, the overall commander in the region, applauded the president's decision to fire Franks's deputy in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, and to appoint L. Paul Bremer to administer Iraq in his stead. The White House gave Bremer control over the mission, structure, and budget for Iraqi security forces, while Central Command remained responsible for security until the Iraqis were ready to take over. Thus President Bush, cheered on by General Franks, abolished the core principle of unity of command in war. Bremer brusquely dissolved the Iraqi army, dismissed most Baathist officials, and antagonized both the Iraqis and the U.S. military at all levels.

In July 2003, Gen. John Abizaid, who had taken over regional command after Franks retired, declared that Iraq was in the throes of an insurgency. But Abizaid permitted his deputy in Iraq, Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, to persist with offensive operations that alienated the population and contradicted the basic tenets of counterinsurgency.

Iraq boiled over in April 2004. The president, angered by the horrific pictures of the lynching of four American contractors in Fallujah, ordered the Marines, against their advice, to assault the city. At the same time, Bremer moved to arrest a deputy to the radical Moqtada al-Sadr, who then told his Mahdi Army militia to rebel. Thus the Americans ended up fighting both Sunnis and Shiites.

Several days later, faced with adverse Iraqi political actions, Bremer and Abizaid reversed course. President Bush ordered the astounded Marines to stop, when they were just two days from concluding the battle. When Sadr was trapped in mid-April, the American civilian and military commands could not bring themselves to order him either killed or captured. By the end of April, the Iraqis believed the Americans had lost decisive battles against both the Sunni insurgents and the Shiite radicals.