Yes, it’s really fun to snigger and sneer, but Iraqi soldiers are dying in large numbers trying to pacify their country.
And if you notice, part of the reason the strategy was changed was precisely because it was recognized that the old strategy wasn’t working - the Iraqis simply weren’t ready to handle a full-scale insurgency. So the Americans would clear an area, turn it over to Iraqi troops, and leave. Then insurgents would attack the Iraqi soldiers and drive them out of the area, repopulate it, assert control over the population again, and the U.S. would have to go back in again. THis was the ‘whack a mole’ strategy that was obviously a failure, but which Rumsfeld refused to change for several years.
“Small Wars Journal” is not some guy’s blog. It’s the web site of a magazine that is like a professional journal for soldiers. Most of the people who write for it are either civilian defense specialists or military officers. I think it’s hilarious that you would categorize Dave Kilcullen as just another Blogger, while holding up Glenn Greenwald as some sort of authority. Let’s compare their bios:
From this Bio:
He has also been highly critical of the Bush Administration and of the previous failed policies in Iraq.
Glenn Greenwald, on the other hand, is a civil rights litigator from New York. He appears to have no training at all in military matters. Furthermore, he appears to be a lousy lournalist, because the facts don’t bear out any of his criticism about the ‘propaganda shift’ of calling insurgents al-Qaida.
In fact, as this thorough debunking shows:
But hey, you don’t have to take my word or his. Just go to the presside for the Multi-National Forces Iraq and peruse their archive of press releases yourself. No secondary sources required.
And if you’d like to know what’s actually been going on in Baqubah, you could try reading Michael Yon’s dispatches. He’s an independent reporter embedded with U.S. forces, and he’s been going on combat patrols with them and reporting what he sees. He’s no shill for Bush, but he is an excellent photographer and reporter. If you’ve seen that well-known picture of an American soldier cradling an injured Iraqi child, that’s his. It’s been on the cover of many magazines and news articles.
There is no question whatsoever that al-Qaida had a heavy presence in the area. From the article:
On of the reasons the local insurgencies have turned to helping the MNF with al-Qaida is because al-Qaida has behaved like the radical fanatics they are whenever they’ve gained any sort of local control and alienated the population. Iraqis aren’t ignorant peasants - they’re educated, sophisticated people. No matter how much the Sunnis hate the Shias, exposure to al-Qaida in power is toxic to their continued existence.
And despite the sneering here about ‘panglossian blogs’, there’s nothing on any of the sites I linked that could be called even remotely panglossian. The Small Wars Journal article admits that it may be too late in Iraq, and that there are no guarantees of success. It notes that counter-counterinsurgency is a given, and the enemy will certainly shift tactics. It’s a difficult fight, no one is pretending it isn’t. That’s different than saying it’s lost and there’s no hope, however.
One of the commenters on the SWJ cite was dead-on when he said that the real tragedy here is the Bush Administration’s refusal to learn the lessons of previous counter-insurgencies. The ‘protect the population’ strategy that is finally taking place now was well known as the most effective way to stop an insugency well before the war broke out, but Rumseld’s ‘smaller, more agile’ doctrine ran counter to that, so it was ignored for years, despite the complaints of experts like Kilcullen.