Why It Could Work

Within minutes after the President concluded his Wednesday evening speech, I published a post (”It Could Work“) in which I said “the most encouraging part of the President’s speech is that, with the agreement of the Maliki government, U.S. and Iraqi forces will conduct military operations in all—not just Sunni—neighborhoods.” At the same time, I expressed reservations about the reliability of the Iraqi government, stating that the best indicator of the Iraqi government’s intentions “will be whether or not its army takes decisive and sustained action against al-Sadr’s militia.” News reports since Bush’s address have done nothing to ease my skepticism.

On Thursday, a New York Times article reported that the Iraqi government offered only a “grudging endorsement” of Bush’s proposal to deploy more than 20,000 additional troops in an effort to curb sectarian violence and regain control of Baghdad. A government spokesman, according to the Times, said that “What is suitable for our conditions in Iraq is what we decide, not what others decide for us.” This may represent an oblique reference to the Baghdad security plan Maliki announced on January 6. Maliki’s plan would involve American troops and airpower “only when needed.”

By Saturday, however, an AP report published in the Times said that the Iraqi government was “warming” from its initial response and expressing “support” for the strategy Bush articulated. The government spokesman said that Maliki saw the new strategy as representing “a common vision and a mutual understanding between the Iraqi government and the American administration.” No explanation for this apparent change of heart was given.

More disturbing than this who’s-in-charge-here quarrel is word from The Telegraph that Maliki has appointed a “little-known” officer, Lt Gen Abud Qanbar, as his military commander for Baghdad – despite objections from senior US officers and concerns that he may have sectarian ties.

Notwithstanding the uncertain intentions of the Maliki government, there is reason for hope that the new strategy — and, in my view, it is a new strategy — will bear fruit. In my Wednesday post, I said that “It sounds like the U.S. has, at long last, adopted a true counterinsurgency strategy—at least in Baghdad,” and that, after I returned home, I would expand on that thought in a post. I’m home now, and this is the promised post.

In the September/October 2005 issue of Foreign Affairs, Andrew Krepinevich, author of The Army and Vietnam, argued that, in Iraq, the United States needed “a real strategy built around the principles of counterinsurgency warfare”:

To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents. The idea of such operations is to erode the enemy’s strength by killing fighters more quickly than replacements can be recruited. Although it is too early to tell for sure whether this approach will ultimately bring success, its current record is not good: even when an attack manages to inflict serious insurgent casualties, there is little or no enduring improvement in security once U.S. forces withdraw from the area.

Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces should adopt an “oil-spot strategy” in Iraq, which is essentially the opposite approach. Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort — hence the image of an expanding oil spot. Such a strategy would have a good chance of success. But it would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq, albeit at far lower force levels than are engaged at present.

A strategy of “hunting down and killing insurgents” should bring to mind the attrition strategy pursued to disastrous effect by General Westmoreland during the Vietnam war. Shortly before he became Nixon’s National Security Adviser, Henry Kissinger wrote a Foreign Affairs article (republished in The American Encounter) sharply critical of that strategy. The opinions expressed in that article have more than a passing similarity to those proffered by Krepinevich 36 years later. It is worth quoting at some length, as it (1) helps to explain why our military operations in Iraq have been singularly unsuccessful, (2) shows that, in Iraq, the U.S. Army and the Rumsfeld-led Defense Department repeated Westmoreland’s tragic mistakes, and, most importantly, (3) suggests, as I will later document, that the new Iraq strategy improves the chances for a satisfactory outcome for both the U.S. and Iraq.

Here are the key quotes from Kissinger’s article (with my emphases):

American military strategy followed the classic doctrine that victory depended on a combination of control of territory and attrition of the opponent . . . The theory was that defeat of the main forces [the North Vietnam army] would cause the guerrillas to whither on the vine. Victory would depend on inflicting casualties substantially greater than those we suffered until Hanoi’s losses became “unacceptable.”

This strategy suffered from two disabilities: (a) the nature of guerrilla warfare; (b) the asymmetry in the definition of what constituted unacceptable losses. A guerrilla war differs from traditional military operations because its key prize is not control of territory but control of population. This depends, in part, on psychological criteria, especially a sense of security. No positive program can succeed unless the population feels safe from terror or reprisal. Guerrillas rarely seek to hold real estate; their tactic is to use terror and intimidation to discourage cooperation with constituted authority.

. . . As North Vietnamese theoretical writings never tired of pointing out, the United States could not hold territory and protect the population simultaneously. By opting for military victory through attrition, the American strategy produced what came to be the characteristic feature of the Vietnamese war: military successes that could not be translated into permanent political advantage.

Other than the fact that the Iraq conflict does not involve a “main force” and the use of “guerrilla” instead of “insurgent,” this is a remarkably accurate description of the state of affairs in Iraq, as is this:

The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong had another advantage . . . American “victories” were empty unless they laid the basis for an eventual withdrawal. The North Vietnamese and Viet Cong, fighting in their own country, needed merely to keep in being forces sufficiently strong to dominate the population after the United States tired of the war. We fought a military war; our opponents fought a political one. We sought physical attrition; our opponents aimed for our psychological exhaustion.

Clearly, the majority of Americans are now psychologically exhausted. The Iraqi insurgents, as did the Vietnamese Communists, have achieved that objective. It should be clear that all that stands in the way of an insurgent victory is that President Bush has not succumbed to the exhaustion felt by the American public. I hope that this is recognized by all, whether you were for or against the invasion, and no matter how critical you may be of his administration’s prosecution of the war.

The reason for hope is the evidence in Bush’s speech that the attrition strategy criticized by both Krepinevich and Kissinger has been replaced by an “oil-spot” strategy:

The most urgent priority for success in Iraq is security, especially in Baghdad. Eighty percent of Iraq’s sectarian violence occurs within 30 miles of the capital . . . Our troops will have a well-defined mission: to help Iraqis clear and secure neighborhoods, to help them protect the local population, and to help ensure that the Iraqi forces left behind are capable of providing the security that Baghdad needs.

A National Security Council document (”Highlights of the Iraq Strategy Review“) provides further evidence. In what is described as a “major strategic shift,” it says that the primary U.S. mission is to help Iraqis provide security to the population; previously it was on “transferring responsibility to Iraqis with less focus on population security.”

Bush is now talking the correct talk. Whether that talk is translated into walking the correct walk depends on the intentions and actions of the Iraqi government. Skepticism on this score is, as I pointed out earlier, warranted. Talking the correct talk is a necessary but not sufficient condition for turning things around in Iraq. For the sufficient conditions to be realized, the Iraqi government must keep its promises. I’m keeping my fingers crossed.

Cross-posted at American Future.

Earlier today at TMV, Michael van der Galien put up this post on Iraq.