Fw: [Peace-discuss] Things are getting better

[C. G. Estabrook]

On Mon, 27 Oct 2003, Lisa Chason wrote:

> Carl -- can you send out the Washington Post op-ed piece (don't see it
> at their website)? Can't be believed if we can't read it... L.

[I rather hope you won't believe it when you do read it -- and I hate to
spread these guys' stuff any further, but since you ask...  --CGE]

	washingtonpost.com
	The Right Fight Now
	Counterinsurgency, Not Caution, Is the Answer in Iraq
	By Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt
	Sunday, October 26, 2003; Page B01

Americans have debated a lot about Iraq: whether the war was justified,
whether the administration lied about Iraq's weapons programs, whether
sufficient postwar planning was done, and whether the coalition, the
United Nations or the Iraqis themselves should be put in charge of
reconstruction. In short, we have debated virtually every topic possible
-- with scant attention to the one most relevant to what is happening
daily on the ground there: Does the United States have the right military
strategy in place to defeat what its own generals admit is an increasingly
sophisticated insurgency?

It's an urgent question, because American servicemen and women -- along
with cooperating Iraqis -- are coming under attack virtually every day.
The number killed and wounded is rising. Yet the debate has focused on
whether we have enough troops, rather than whether we have the right
forces, in the right places, using the right stratagems to defeat the
amalgam of hard-core Baathists, Iraqi opportunists and radical Islamists
from outside the country who continue to wage unconventional war against
the U.S.-led occupation. Although the Bush administration can rightly
point to successes in reconstructing Iraq since Saddam Hussein's regime
was toppled, the fact remains that unless the security situation in Iraq
is brought under control and the insurgency there decisively defeated,
those successes can never be made permanent and the president's larger
hopes for a stable, democratic Iraq will never be fulfilled.

Developing and executing a successful counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq
is a challenge, to be sure, but far from an insurmountable one.

For one thing, the conditions for a successful American counterinsurgency
campaign are good. The vast majority of Iraq is not "a sea" in which
insurgents can hide and find ready support. The de facto American defense
of Iraqi Kurdistan over the past decade has created an increasingly free
and stable northern Iraq. And the war itself has liberated the Shiite
"silent majority." This long-repressed community and its mainstream
leaders have, contrary to many predictions, proven to be relatively
reliable partners, despite bombed mosques, assassinated imams and the
machinations of radical clerics such as Moqtada Sadr. Whatever grievances
Iraq's Shiites, Kurds and other repressed minorities have among themselves
or with the occupying authority, there is no sign that these disputes are
either metastasizing or bringing those groups together with the Sunni and
Islamist guerrillas. In short, the good news is that the insurgency is
largely localized in the Sunni regions and it appears the insurgents are
few in number.

Our foes in Iraq also lack a leader to rally around. There is no Mao
Zedong, no Emilio Aguinaldo capable of summoning citywide, let alone
nationwide, support. Saddam Hussein is too discredited even among Iraqis
to become a hero to ordinary people there.

On the military side, U.S. post-combat stability operations in Iraq have
made progress. After the immediate postwar pause, U.S. and British forces
regained the initiative with a series of sweeps -- operations such as
Peninsula Strike, Planet X, Desert Scorpion, Sidewinder and Soda Mountain
-- that dealt heavy blows to the reorganizing Baathists in May, June and
July. Other military operations struck the camps of foreign terrorist
organizations. In all, thousands of suspects were detained and large arms
caches seized.

Yet the Bush administration can't rest easy. Military sweeps and follow-up
strikes by special forces are not enough for a successful
counterinsurgency campaign. The insurgents have plenty of guns and more
than enough money to pay people to attack a wide variety of targets -- not
just Americans, but Iraqis or anyone else working to create a different
future for Iraq.

Moreover, to be effective, these military operations require precise
intelligence -- which commanders themselves say is in short supply.
Without that intelligence, sweeps apply a broad military brush to a
discrete set of adversaries. Even with the best of planning, they may
result in arrests and casualties of non-belligerents, potentially
spreading opposition to the United States instead of marginalizing it.
Right now, we are not facing a full-blown Sunni ethnic rebellion. The
majority of Sunnis in the Baathist-dominated areas are probably trying
their best to keep their heads down, fearing both the insurgents in their
midst and the American military's incredible firepower. The last thing we
want is a backlash among these fence-sitting Sunnis, seeking revenge for
what they perceive to be the indiscriminate application of U.S. military
power.

As currently employed in Iraq, the American military can prevent the
insurgents from winning. But the insurgents do not have to win; they
simply have to avoid losing. Their goal is not to change the facts on the
ground as much as to change American perceptions of the viability of the
president's vision for Iraq. That country's rejectionists are aiming at
what they perceive to be the greatest U.S. weakness: sensitivity to public
opinion, especially with a potentially bitter presidential campaign
looming. Hence, a successful counterinsurgency strategy must aim to win,
and not just to hold on.

Winning is a political matter as well as a military one. The commitment of
Iraqis to democratizing their country is based upon the belief that
coalition forces will make it safe to conduct this unprecedented
experiment. For them, an end to Hussein's regime must also mean an end to
fear. If they don't see the coalition winning decisively against the
insurgents, they will start planning for their own security by creating or
expanding their own existing militias. If that happens, a stable, unified
Iraq might become a very distant goal indeed.

Talk of counterinsurgency strategies inevitably summons up the trauma of
Vietnam. It tends to paralyze analysis by turning every American small war
into a replay of Vietnam and every casualty into a quagmire. But it
shouldn't. Even in Vietnam, classic counterinsurgency strategies and
tactics proved successful -- when given time and effort. There is no
reason to believe they cannot work in Iraq where the insurgency problem is
not as large or difficult, where there is no country like North Vietnam
providing major assistance to guerrillas.

Make no mistake: The United States knows how to fight such wars. It even
has a how-to guide -- the Marine Corps' Small Wars Manual, a classic study
first published in 1940. The manual emphasizes the difficulty of
distinguishing what is strictly military from what is political in such
struggles. It recognizes that "the initial problem is to restore peace,"
but also that "there may be many economic and social factors" involved,
and that "the efforts of the different agencies" -- meaning not just
elements of the American government but "local government and the civil
population" -- "must be cooperative and coordinated to the attainment of
the common end."

These are hardly revelations. But the American military experience
distilled in the Small Wars Manual was largely forgotten in Vietnam.
Instead, the United States pursued the big-unit, search-and-destroy
approach of Gen. William Westmoreland that many officers knew could not
prevail. While Marine Gen. Victor "Brute" Krulak pushed for a pacification
strategy, and the so-called COORDS program -- for Civil Operations and
Revolutionary Development Support -- was the kind of coordinated
all-agency effort envisioned in the Small Wars Manual, the Army's "war of
attrition" won out over traditional counterinsurgency strategy.

Can such a strategy work in Iraq? Yes, if applied correctly. One lesson:
Pacification and counterinsurgency campaigns are manpower-intensive. As
military analyst Andrew Krepinevich argued in "The Army and Vietnam" --
yet another part of the counterinsurgency canon -- the effort "should be
organized primarily around light infantry units" that must "patrol
intensively in and around populated areas," interposing themselves between
insurgents and the people.

Active patrolling is also essential for developing the human intelligence
needed to distinguish the good from the bad. Only when pacification of a
given area is well underway will the military get the human intelligence
needed for larger sweeps and raids. Until local residents believe they
will be secure over the long term, they will not be forthcoming with
information.

In Iraq, that would mean that coalition forces, assisted by newly trained
Iraqi police and soldiers, would have to swamp a given area in order to
root out insurgents and their supporting infrastructure. In doing so,
coalition forces would provide a shield behind which reconstruction can
take place. To win the "hearts and minds" of the uncommitted Iraqis,
security, political and economic reconstruction must go hand in hand.

Once a particular city or area had been pacified, the military and
reconstruction teams could move on to the next hot spot, leaving behind
adequate local Iraqi forces, with small teams from U.S. special forces, to
maintain security. Gradually, whole regions would come under control and
the "safe havens" for the insurgents would dry up. Like oil drops that
strike a cloth, security would seep out to cover a wider and wider area.

However, a real counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq entails risks. It would
concentrate forces in the Sunni regions that are the hot spots. Rather
than reducing the U.S. presence, it might require putting an even greater
American face on the war in those places. That could mean that, in the
short term, the Pentagon might have to put on hold its plans to reduce the
number of troops in Iraq to lessen the burden on the Army. The Marine
Corps also might need to send fresh units back into Iraq.

A successful counterinsurgency campaign also would require American ground
forces to carry out tasks and operations that today's "transforming"
military, which increasingly is trading manpower for precision firepower,
finds hard to perform. As one Army colonel in Iraq recently said to a New
York Times reporter: "We are not trained to fight a war like this. We're
training to fight an army face to face, to engage in direct combat, an
enemy we can see." But that's not the kind of enemy we now face in Iraq.

Yet these risks pale in comparison with the risk of failure to defeat the
insurgency in Iraq. Dissatisfied with the pace of Iraq's reconstruction,
President Bush has recently given his national security adviser,
Condoleezza Rice, responsibility for overseeing that effort. But he cannot
stop there. He should ask whether his Pentagon has a plan to win the
conflict.

Author's e-mail:tdonnelly at aei.org

Tom Donnelly is a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute.
Gary Schmitt is executive director of the Project for the New American
Century, a Washington-based think tank.

© 2003 The Washington Post Company