Pre-Iraq war, I was not a particular supporter of invading Iraq, outside of a general feeling that the world -- especially the Iraqi world! -- would be a much better place without Saddam Hussein. In my opinion at the time, it was better to focus on rebuilding Afghanistan and taking more direct efforts to go after Al Queda. I also, along with most others, believed that Hussein had or would surely eventually get his hands on some very nasty weapons, so removing that threat seemed to have some value if not be enough of a justification for an invasion.
Once we invaded I hoped we would be successful in removing Hussein, bringing some more enlightened form of government that might serve as a model for the region and a supportive bulkhead from which we could actively engage with the Islamic world.
Something that really bothers me in the typical political commentary is the desire for the U.S. to fail if we take an action someone disagrees with. You might not like the Iraq war, but once we are there, why would you want us to fail? Wouldn't any reasonable Western person hope -- however faintly -- that the objectives of removing a dictator and giving a people a government of choice would succeed?
The intervening years were very disappointing to me. Rumsfeld was intent on engaging his philosophy of war regardless of the reality on the ground, and Bush was intent on not being bullied into firing Rumsfeld regardless of how badly he was screwing things up. Lives and resources were lost pointlessly and the nobler goals of our efforts were being sullied by incompetence. Still, as I discussed in a previous post, I wanted us to stick it out until we got it right.
By wanting to stay the course in the face of ongoing failure, was I being no better than Rumsfeld in my inflexibility? Perhaps, but I do at least have some historical precedent to point to...
There was once a war in Vietnam which the U.S. waged badly and often incompetently, seemingly not willing to do what it would take to win, losing public support over time and just making the gorilla opposition stronger while many lives were being pointlessly lost (sound familiar?).
So we finally gave up and left. And what happened then? Per Wikipedia:
Hundreds of thousands of South Vietnamese officials, particularly ARVN officers, were imprisoned in reeducation camps after the Communist takeover. Tens of thousands died and many fled the country after being released. Up to two million civilians left the country, and as many as half of these boat people perished at sea.
On July 2, 1976, the Socialist Republic of Vietnam was declared...
Vietnam began to repress its ethnic Chinese minority. Thousands fled and the exodus of the boat people began.
A lot of people died... Massive numbers of people. Unimaginable numbers.
We can't know the difference if we'd stayed, but we can guess that a lot fewer people would have died and that Vietnam wouldn't have been the economic basket case it became for decades and more or less still is (see South Korea for an example of taking the other course).
Unfortunately, many of those so concerned about the Vietnamese death toll while we were in the war largely ignored the much greater death toll after we left. I'll leave it as an exercise to the reader why that might be, but here is the opinion of one person who was around at the time.
Back to Iraq: Rumsfeld was finally fired, and thankfully Bush, in the face of the opposition of pretty much everyone except John McCain and Joe Leiberman, insisted we stay in Iraq past the tough times and, further, insisted we actually try to win this thing. People like Obama insisted that we pull out and leave the country to its fate and that nothing we could do would make any difference. We stayed, we made a plan (see the Wall Street Journal on "Why the Surge Worked"), we poured more troops in, and we turned the corner.
Per the historically anti-Iraq-war anti-Bush New York Times:
Back in Iraq, Jarred by the Calm
At first, I didn't recognize the place.
On Karada Mariam, a street that runs over the Tigris River toward the Green Zone, the Serwan and the Zamboor, two kebab places blown up by suicide bombers in 2006, were crammed with customers. Farther up the street was Pizza Napoli, the Italian place shut down in 2006; it, too, was open for business. And I'd forgotten altogether about Abu Nashwan's Wine Shop, boarded up when the black-suited militiamen of the Mahdi Army had threatened to kill its owners. There it was, flung open to the world.
Two years ago, when I last stayed in Baghdad, Karada Mariam was like the whole of the city: shuttered, shattered, broken and dead...
These days, the same park is filled with people: families with children, women in jeans, women walking alone. Even the nighttime, when Iraqis used to cower inside their homes, no longer scares them. I can hear their laughter wafting from the park. At sundown the other day, I had to weave my way through perhaps 2,000 people. It was an astonishing, beautiful scene -- impossible, incomprehensible, only months ago...
Violence has dropped by as much as 90 percent. A handful of the five million Iraqis who fled their homes -- one-sixth of all Iraqis -- are beginning to return. The mornings, once punctuated by the sounds of exploding bombs, are still.
It's not over, and we need to tread carefully to ensure we don't lose this amazing but fragile peace either by pulling out completely too soon or by having too much presence. For those who might somehow believe that this all "would have happened anyway" (the first refuge of those proven wrong by history) or that the Surge played no particular part, there is this from the WSJ article:
Gen. Keane wants to make sure people understand why the surge worked. "I have a theory" about the unexpectedly fast turnaround, he says. "Whether they be Sunni, Shia or Kurd, anyone who was being touched by that war after four years was fed up with it. And I think once a solution was being provided, once they saw the Americans were truly willing to take risks and die to protect their women and children and their way of life, they decided one, to protect the Americans, and two, to turn in the enemies that were around them who were intimidating and terrorizing them; that gave them the courage to do it."
He adds that the so-called Sunni Awakening, and the effective surrender of Shia radical Moqtada Sadr and his Mahdi Army, depended upon the surge. "I'm not sure [the Sunni Awakening] would have spread to the other provinces without the U.S. [military] presence. We needed forces that we didn't previously have for the Sunnis to be able to rely on us to protect them." Sadr saw his lieutenants killed in the American push, and didn't want to share their fate.
Looking ahead, Gen. Keane still considers a robust American ground force "the secret to success" in Iraq. "It is a myth for people to assert that by pulling away from the Iraqis, by pulling away from the Iraqi political process, that somehow that becomes a catalyst to do things that they would not do because of our presence. That is fundamentally wrong. It is our presence that is helping Iraqis move forward."
I encourage you to read all of the WSJ and NY Times articles.
Finally, for those like Obama who continue to believe we should have pulled out before the Surge, it is for you to reconcile what it would have meant to deprive the Iraqis of this chance, and to have potentially subjected them to the even greater horrors of a power vacuum being filled by Very Bad People, as we saw in Vietnam.
If I object to any categorizations about The Surge, it's the claim that it was about sending in more troops. And that that is why it succeeded.
Certainly additional troops were required, but solely as a means of implementing The Surge. The Surge was a counter-insurgency whole-country strategy, with many older ideas pulled together into a single coherent strategy. Clear and hold. Deeply embedded community soldiering. Rigorous standards of behavior toward civilians. In short: You are a mercenary force engaged in freeing these people from an enemy. The people are not your enemy, thought he enemy is among them. You'll have to win them over person by person and it is indeed possible to do so, and required that you do so.
It worked. Al Qaeda made it easy on us in Anbar with their extreme brutality and horrors, their "lordship" behaviors toward the locals, their extreme corruption. Thus the Anbar Awakening. It did not occur in a vacuum, not when Al Qaeda was directly compared to us. Imagine: Fellow Muslims repudiated in favor of the infidel. What a shocker that must have been.
The troop increase was necessary. The behavior of all soldiers, exemplary. Isn't that stunning, compared to military campaigns in the past?
It all comes down to leadership. I strongly believe that effective leadership creates the sum that is better than its parts. The leadership of the Surge is transcendentally brilliant to me, and in their case they created a sum that is not just better, but exponentially better, than the parts. Petraeus and Odierno deserve the Nobel Peace Prize for what has been accomplished, though I know they'll never even be allowed in the same room as Al Gore. Brilliant, phenomenal leadership carried through from beginning to end is why the Surge worked, along with a professional army (not draftees or conscripts, which is also crucial!), an incredible army of soldiers numbering more than a hundred thousand, whose dedication and commitment to military excellence in all ways is beyond anything I ever imagined possible.
But it all starts with the crucial element of great leadership. Without great leadership, what you have is Afghanistan. But wait! Petraeus is now in charge of CENTCOM, and Afghanistan now falls in his purview. The dysfunctional NATO command and control structure is a whole different set of thorns for him to solve, and time will tell.
Posted by: Mike Devx | October 01, 2008 at 01:22 AM
If I object to any categorizations about The Surge, it's the claim that it was about sending in more troops.
I agree with what you say about leadership...what bothers me about categorizations of the Surge, it's those who say, "It didn't really do anything! The Awakening started before the Surge! It all happened because of ethnic cleansing!"
To be honest, I haven't looked into the last claim yet to know what the details are behind it (though, whatever the facts, I am always suspicious of arguments that are "Heads we suck, tails we're evil!", which that one strikes me as being) -- however, the claim that because Iraqis were pissed at Al Queda before we imported more troops and therefore the Surge made no difference simply makes no logical sense.
They may have started uprising before we increased troop levels, but clearly they were much more likely to be successful once we poured in troops and engaged in the sort of tactics you mention. In addition, I always like to turn things around...if the awakening hard started and we hadn't done more to support it, and then the Iraqis had failed -- would these same commentators be saying we did the right thing by pulling out?
I will engage in prediction and say: No, they would say our failure to help the Iraqis when they rose up proves how morally bankrupt we are.
In any case, I'm am extremely glad that we did not repeat our moral failure after the first Gulf War, when we let the Kurds get slaughtered after they started to rise up (at our urging) -- this time we were there for the Iraqis when they needed us, and perhaps that does a little to erase our previous crime.
Posted by: Ronald Hayden | October 01, 2008 at 08:06 PM