Iraq: Good News From Anbar, But Can It Last?
While I have long admired Bill Roggio for being one of the very few people reporting on Iraq and Afghanistan to have the cojones to go there and keep going back, he used to piss me off because he took the long view that the U.S. mission in both countries would prevail when I saw evidence to the contrary.
Well, Roggio is bowed but not broken, to turn around the familiar phrase. While many war pundits are blogging from a Starbucks (and I from a kitchen table with a commanding view of a bird feeder), Bill is currently embedded with U.S. Marines in vast Anbar Province in the heart of the fearsome Sunni Triangle.
Roggio acknowledges that things are not going swimmingly overall (witness the horrible carnage this week alone), but says that
“Lost in the current debate over Iraq — civil war or sectarian violence, success or failure, increasing troops or strategic redeployment, victory or defeat — is the sea-change occurring in western Iraq. The U.S. military has coaxed a large majority of the Sunnis of Anbar province, perhaps one of the most sympathetic groups to Al Qaeda in the Middle East, to turn on Al Qaeda. The choice wasn’t difficult after the tribes saw what Al Qaeda had to offer.”
* * * * *
As a newbie co-blogger at The Moderate Voice (a million thank yous, Joe), I suppose I should be clear about where I stand on all of this:
I reluctantly supported the war in the early days until I realized that The Decider and his neocon cabal were lying to me.As a veteran of another failed war, I took deep offense when Dick Cheney, the Decider’s puppet master, branded me a traitor because I had come to understand that Iraq was the wrong war in the wrong place at the wrong time.
I have followed the war very closely, as longtime readers of my home blog, Kiko’s House, well know. In fact, I have obsessed on it a bit.
I know the names of the spouses, children and parents of some of my fellow Iraqi bloggers, and feel the losses each and every one of these families have suffered. There is a big map of Baghdad over my desk with an overlay showing the neighborhoods where the massive and massively unsuccessful security sweeps were conducted.
I never dreamed that I would know Baghdad’s neighborhoods almost as well as, say, New Orleans’.
I believe that the U.S. lost its tenuous grip on Iraq for good in November 2004 when Marines were routed by insurgents in the first Battle of Falluja, that Iraq has been in civil war since February when the Golden Mosque in Samarra was bombed, and that the civil war is devolving into a national meltdown.
I believe that the U.S. can’t get out of Iraq soon enough and the longer it stays the worse things will get.
I believe that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are war criminals.
I believe that Congress, notably the Democrats, abrogated their responsibility to be a constitutionally mandated counter balance to The Decider’s rogue administration.
I believe that beyond the many thousands of deaths of U.S. troops and Iraqis, the two biggest casualties are the war in Afghanistan (which was the right war in the right place at the right time) and the U.S.’s standing in the world.
Finally, I believe that we ain’t seen nothing yet.
* * * * *
Having said all of that (and I promise to be more short-winded in the future), Bill Roggio’s news out of Anbar is very good.
This is because long after the last Shiite has blown up the last Sunni, Al Qaeda and other terrorist groups will still be doing their thing. You know, the insurgents who were absent from Iraq until Rumsfeld’s horribly botched occupation opened the door to droves of them.
The bad thing is that successes like the one Roggio describes, and there have been some, have a way of becoming defeats because of that momentum thingie:
The focus of U.S. commanders shifts, too often because of political dictates back at the White House and Pentagon, or there simply are not enough troops and other resources.
Roggio did not address this issue — what troops must be able to do to keep the momentum going in Anbar and allow it to spread elsewhere — in his comprehensive report at The Fourth Rail, so I asked him to do so.
Bill got right back to me and this is what he said:
“Increase the number of troops to clean Al Qaeda out of Ramadi and secure Baghdad, take on [anti-American Shiite cleric Moqtada] Al-Sadr, increase the number of the advisers and put embedded military/police transition teams at the platoon level for every unit, and secure the borders, particularly with Iran.”
He goes in depth on the question in a recent podcast with Ward Carroll, the editor of Military.com.
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22 Responses to “Iraq: Good News From Anbar, But Can It Last?”
Sure the Democrats voted for the war in the beginning, but you can’t blame them for that since you agreed with the decision to march into Baghdad.
But since the invasion the Democrats have slowly come around, but they didn’t have the power to make any real changes or provide oversight.
There is a concept known as The Loyal Opposition in politics.
The Democrats could not have legislated changes in Iraq war policy, but they could have spoken out forcefully against the war and associated outrages like the Rumsfeld Gulag of secret prisons.
They did not say squat until much too late in the game and only then because they sensed that the electorate had tired of being lied to and it was safe to come out from under their rock.
Like it or not, the Democrats share some of the blame for the Mess in Mesopotamia.
Sure the Democrats voted for the war in the beginning, but you can’t blame them for that since you agreed with the decision to march into Baghdad.
As a Democrat I’ve blamed them ever since their cynical decision to “take Iraq off the table” in 2002. It didn’t work for them in that election cycle or even the next.
It took until 2006 for them to wash enough of it off to scrape a spare majority together in the legislature.
I was never an anti-war marcher, but from the get-go understood any war to be a dubious undertaking–something I was not hearing from our confident administration. Further, “pre-emptive war” was, to me, un-American on the face of it. We had no strong evidence–especially no publicly available evidence.
I’m curious why Shaun considers the war lost at the first battle of Fallujah, though. That seems surprisingly early.
Good question, Gary.
A better description may be that the first Battle of Fallujah was a key turning point. As noted, the U.S. had more or less kept the lid on through 2003 and much of 2004 as insurgents poured into the country and began hit-and-run strikes against Army and Marine units.
Fallujah is the key city in western Iraq and its long border with Syria and Jordan. In November 2004, the Marines who had more or less held the city engaged in a ferocious street-by-street battle with insurgents. They began taking some pretty serious loses and withdrew. They later retook the city in a second battle, but the lessons of the first battle were clear:
The U.S. strategy was not working. Tactics needs to be adjusted. A major lesson of Vietnam — that the U.S. military needed to train hard in counter-insurgency warfare — had been forgotten and Marines and Army units were flatfooted in facing the Iraqi insurgency.
The central conundrum of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraqi is that the insurgents, while taking pretty heavy casualties, learn from their mistakes and adjust their tactics. Meanwhile, U.S. units are constantly rotating in new troops, many of whom are green and have to learn how to fight insurgents on the fly. That’s a tough learning curve, no?
Shaun- Are you blaming the Democrats more than Republicans like Dick Armey, who caved into pressure from the White House to support the war? I do blame both parties, but some Democrats did vote against the war, while only a few Republicans like Linc Chaffee objected to it. The Republicans have been in lockstep behind Bush calling for “stay the course, until just before this last election, when they were forced to run away from him to protect their own hides. In the House, Boehner refused to allow a bipartisan debate on the war, as recently as this past year.
I do give John Murtha a lot of credit for having the political courage to lead the way for the Democrats and enabling them to take a position against Iraq. Previous to that, many were afraid of being tarred with the “George McGovern anti-war” brush, at a time when most Americans supported the war. Rove would have easily identified them as part of the “Blame America” crowd, and run conservatives who supported the president’s initiatives in Iraq against them. Just look at what happened in the Saxby Chambliss/Max Clelland race, because Clelland voted against the Patriot Act.
Because Murtha was a decorated Marine who sat on the Armed Services committee in the House, his protests bore more weight than traditional liberal voices like a Ted Kennedy or a Dennis Kucinich would have. Even some conservatives took notice at the time.
No where does it seem as if Shaun is blaming the Democrats more than the Republicans. No where in his entry above. He’s clear. It just sounds as if some people are bent out of shape because they want absolutely no blame to go to the Democrats for enabling the way, for no matter what motivation. That’s a historical fact because any account of how the war will launched will note that some Democrats did go along with the administration, up to a point. There may have been varying reasons for this but one reason among some of them most likely was indeed political fear.
Kim,
I’m not sure most Americans supported the war prior to the first bombs being dropped. As I recall, polls showed a majority agreed to war if there was agreement at the UN.
I think there were a lot of fence sitters.
We didn’t start polling any significant majority directly for the war until people rallied around the, uh, president as the first bombs dropped.
In starting a war, I would expect more than a 50.1% majority to be seriously considered. Unless you’re the Bush administration or real evidence of a present danger.
I believe that George Bush and Donald Rumsfeld are war criminals
Jesus, Mary and Joseph.
You call this the Moderate Voice?
George Bush and Rumsfeld war criminals? And you have the miniature cojones to advertise yourself as MODERATE
Take a friggin’ walk somewhere else.
The problem is that Anbar will have to be turned over to the Iraqis once pacified. But turned over to who? The interior ministry is suspect, no Sunni will tolerate a police service that has the power to arrest and interrogate without any meaningful oversight. The military forces are relatively “better“, but they are designed more for combat operations where they are in and out, not long term policing. The only way for the Sunnis to feel safe would be to duplicate the way the Kurdish areas are handled, where the locals are in power, not the national government. The Shiites agreeing to this in predominantly Sunnis areas is debatable, they would be suspicious that a local Sunni police force would be the nucleus for a more organized insurgency later.
Well Shaun, I disagree with much of your excellent post and look forward to civilly jousting!
K. Gregory,
I found the following from a Sept. 2002 Salon article. This is an important point for me, as I hate to see history getting fogged up while I watch it:
Salon article here.
In June, after House Minority Leader Richard Gephardt, D-Mo., endorsed the White House’s call for military action to oust Saddam Hussein, some colleagues considered it crass posturing for Gephardt’s likely 2004 presidential bid. But House Democrats now say Gephardt told them at the time it was also part of an effort to “take Iraq off the table before the [November] election,” according to one antiwar voice in the House.
How would that happen? According to Gephardt’s strategy, agreeing with the administration would effectively make Iraq a bipartisan issue. The subject would be neutralized. It turned out to be a colossal miscalculation: The idea that a preemptive U.S. invasion of Iraq — a subject that has the entire world in an uproar — could somehow be shoved under the rug was optimistic, to say the least.
The real perpetrators of the war were G. Bush and his administration. They are war criminals in my book. No doubt about it. Aided and abetted by their Republican cronies.
I simply found that the Democrats were willing to legitimize the majority with their votes untenable.
Paul, your post is offensive. Ad hominem attacks mean nothing here, except perhaps an inability to marshall facts to support your opinion.
I think a case could be made in court, and may yet be, that in its arrogant contempt for the Geneva Convention, the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes. Unprovoked pre-emptive war is against everything the USA has stood for in international relations.
I can only imagine what your opinion would have been about any American who defended the Viet Cong’s practice of torturing American soldiers. So, give it to us. What gives us the right to blow up a country and torture and kill civilians? What gave the administration the right to lie to the whole world to justify this disastrous war? What about marching unprovoked into a sovereign nation, rounding up anyone a bounty hunter says is a ‘terrorist’ and torturing them? That’s how you think this great nation should behave?
Gary- I agree with most of your post. I can’t absolve the Democrats for at least some of the blame, but I do see the political reality of taking an anti-war stance at a time when the country was still in a post 9/11 patriotic fervor. BTW, I never thought much of Gephardt as a leader, and think he would have been a terrible president—always seemed to go along to get along, and rarely distinguished himself from the pack.
Let’s lance the Republican vs. Democrat, Red vs. Blue, Liberal vs. Conservative, Daily Kos vs. Captain’s Quarters, Us vs. Them boil right now because it is so yesterday and my focus is on today and tomorrow:
With the conspicuous exception of John Murtha, the Democrats fled like lemmings from their responsibility to stand up to the congressional majority and the White House when the lies that glued the rationales for war together were revealed and it became obvious that Rumsfeld had spent 59 minutes on planning the war and a scant minute on the occupation.
In that respect, I blame the Democrats more. I had no expectation that the Republicans would do the right thing, but it was crushing that the Democrats didn’t have the testicles to do the right thing until the electorate gave them cover to begin speaking up, however timidly.
TMV readers are going to have a heck of a time pigeonholing my politics.
I am a registered Democrat so I can vote in my state’s primary, but I typically vote for more Republicans because they field a better candidate at the state, county and local level. I voted for a third-party candidate in two of the last several presidential elections because I thought the Democratic candidate sucked. I voted for John Kerry in 2004 because I couldn’t “waste� my vote a second time although he was without a doubt the most pathetic Democratic candidate since Michael Dukakis.
It is very difficult to lose the partisan mindset. It took me years, but my concerns about a war that I supported reluctantly to begin with and now find to be the single biggest foreign policy blunder in American history rise well above who was wrong and who was wronger.
Blaming the Republicans for the bodies in flag-draped pine boxes that are being vomited from the cargo bays of C-17s almost every day at Dover (Del.) Air Force Base, where the armed forces’ central stateside morgue is located, is short sighted by a third. The Democrats share the blame for the second third and the American people for the third third for being so freaking detached from reality.
That is a big reason why TMV and Kiko’s House and other blogs are so important in this time of crisis and why I will take full opportunity of Joe’s invitation to tell it like I believe that it is.
Calling Bush a war criminal also goes too far for me.
And certainly the Democrats have their problems on Iraq. Their votes in 2002-2004 were sometimes genuine, occasionally cynical, often calculated.
But nobody voted for incompetence.
And I’m pretty sure nobody expected to get it.
K Gregory- I was referring to this- ( I realize he mostly is blaming Bush and Cheney)
I believe that Congress, notably the Democrats, abrogated their responsibility to be a constitutionally mandated counter balance to The Decider’s rogue administration.
As the Republicans have had the majority since ’94, and their voices of dissent have been largely absent in Congress, aren’t they at least as culpable as the Dems? They have abrogated their oversight function, in favor of party loyalty. (this may have been in response to threats from Rove to K.O. their reelection campaigns) Having said that, I also blame Democrats for craving the appearance of bipartisanship.
In short, you’re a concern troll and you were wrong on the war.
Give me a break.
How many more times can you blame the Democrats while pretending to still blame the Republicans? Exactly how were the Democrats going to hold hearings and investigate anything? There were plenty of Democrats that did speak out if you bother to search the congressional record. The problem was that there was virtually no media coverage of said opposition — indeed, the media was extremely pro-war.
I think the Democrats failed pretty miserably in opposing the Bush but I don’t go around harping on that completely secondary issue. The real issue is the Bush Administration. The “Yes, but the Democrats failed also” is the definition of modern political concern trolling and is a particularly meek and opportunistic way to suck up to right wingers.
Shawn–
I appreciate your willingness to come on down and slug it out in the comments. So I’m going to have a whack at you.
I’m not loving the math error you make in THIS COMMENT. Quote:
How many thirds is that? Can you possibly be saying the Republicans only bear one-third of the responsibility? This, after you called Bush and Rumsfeld war criminals?
I do think there’s blame enough to go around, including for the electorate. But the President runs foreign policy. The President runs the war. And he’s run them without much oversight from the majority party of both houses of the legislative branch. That would be the President’s party. And that would be the party that won the elections in 2002 and 2004.
I, too, am more interested in where we go from here. But I am not going to forget who got us here.
BYG:
I really have to paint my kitchen — my goal for today since I don’t seem to be able to end the war — but I’ll take a crack at your comment.
In the partisan context in which my initial comment was framed, my math is just fine. I am not letting The Decider or anyone else off the hook.
Getting back to the substance of Shaun’s post, I find Bill Roggio’s comments to be unpersuasive. Sunnis in Anbar don’t like Al Qaeda? Well, duh, they never did like Al Qaeda. Since 2003, we’ve heard dozens of stories about Sunni tribesmen supposedly standing up to AQ and saying “Enough!” But nothing ever changes. AQ is still very powerful in Anbar. The Sunni tribesmen who try to sand up to AQ get beheaded. This isn’t about public opinion; it’s about power, organization, militancy and organization. AQ has it, the others don’t. And the US exercises virtually no control in the province. Since we pulled out some of our troops to try and pacify Baghdad, we control Anbar even less than before.
I think it takes a lot of forgetting to blame the Dems, at least before the WMD and Iraq/Al Qaeda lies broke down. I watched Colin Powell, a man I respected enormously at the time, give numbers of liters of anthrax and satellite photos of “mobile weapons labs.” This was beyond ‘incompetence.’ Bushco deliberately lied about it, as evidenced by its relentless hiding of intelligence reports TO THIS DAY from the public and Democratic legislators. The investigations of the Downing Street memo and the disclosure of the National Intelligence Estimates, I believe, will show how much was hidden from us.
Elrod:
Thank you for pulling the discussion from the partisan muck.
Your analysis of Roggio’s analysis seems sound to me given the perverse dynamics in Iraq in general and Anbar in particular. People forget that we’re talking about an area the size to Texas with a pourous border. While there is evidence that some tribal leaders would prefer to live without Al Qaeda, this is not the same as saying that they would like to live with the U.S.