A Smarter Fight
By Will Marshall
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The public is fast losing confidence in President Bush's ability to quell the Iraqi insurgency. At the same time, Americans are leery of bailing out before the job is done -- and risk turning Iraq into Jihad Central. Is there a Third Way on Iraq?
A band of progressive strategists thinks there is. America can still win in Iraq, they argue, but only by switching from military tactics aimed mainly at killing insurgents to classic counterinsurgency warfare, which seeks instead to protect the Iraqi people and give them economic hope.
That's the case made by such national-security heavyweights as Andrew Krepenivich, Kenneth Pollack, James Dobbins, and Steven Metz. All believe Iraq is the right fight, but that it's being fought the wrong way. The Bush administration has tried to hammer a stubborn Sunni-al Qaeda insurgency into submission with overwhelming force. That is how you win conventional wars, but it's not how you win hearts and minds -- as America learned the hard way in Vietnam.
Or so we thought. As Pollack argues, the Bush administration seems determined to replay the "search and destroy" tactics that produced high enemy body counts -- but not victory -- in Vietnam. During the past two years, we have killed a lot of rebels, but the insurgency seems more virulent than ever. Meanwhile, more than 1,900 U.S. troops and many thousands of Iraqi civilians (estimates range from 20,000 to 100,000) have died since May 2003. Small wonder that Americans are growing impatient with White House assurances that the insurgency is on its last legs.
Ignoring a stack of studies on successful counterinsurgencies, the Pentagon's strategy aims at eliminating insurgents faster than they can be replaced. The problem is that aggressive U.S. military tactics often backfire, stiffening resistance in alienated Sunni communities where there is no shortage of idle young men willing to plant roadside bombs or fire mortars for cash. Seen through the distorting lens of al Jazeera and other Arab media, America's "shock and awe" tactics become recruitment videos for the seemingly endless supply of foreign jihadis flowing into Iraq.
Counterinsurgency warfare seeks, first and foremost, to win over the civilian population. It recognizes that Americans can't defeat the insurgency; only Iraqis can. It subordinates military muscle to political and psychological steps aimed at building trust and encouraging Iraqis to switch allegiance from the "resistance" to the Iraqi government. It emphasizes that safer streets, more jobs, a steady supply of electricity, and other basics would give more Iraqis a stake in the new political order.
Krepenivich, a former Army officer who heads a defense-oriented think tank, calls for a drastic change in U.S. tactics. Instead of chasing insurgents around the Sunni Triangle, he proposes concentrating U.S. and Iraqi forces and reconstruction dollars in relatively calm areas and in strategically vital spots -- such as major cities like Baghdad and Mosul. Krepenivich likens them to "oil spots" that would spread gradually into hostile Sunni territory and eventually join other such spots. As more Sunnis trade chaos for stability and economic opportunity, they will be less inclined to harbor terrorists. And the coalition would reap the grand prize of successful counterinsurgency -- the tactical intelligence about insurgents' whereabouts and plans that can only come from ordinary Iraqis who have had a bellyful of violence and intimidation.
Of course, such a strategy would carry risks of its own. It could expose U.S. troops to greater danger, especially if, as Krepenivich and Pollack propose, more Americans are embedded into green Iraqi units. Yet such mixed deployments, by leveraging the effectiveness of Iraqi forces, might also allow the United States to reduce troop levels in Iraq. All the experts caution, however, that effective counterinsurgency demands patience and steady nerves.
"Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars and will result in longer U.S. casualty rolls," writes Krepenivich.
Are Americans willing to pay the price, and if so, for how long? No one knows. So far, the public seems to accept the argument that the horrendous costs of an American failure in Iraq outweigh the sacrifices we have made. But without credible benchmarks for marking progress, that calculus could change.
The oil spot strategy would create one such benchmark -- the amount of Iraqi territory where some semblance of normal life is returning. By gradually shrinking the areas in which terror, intimidation, and chaos reign, an effective counterinsurgency strategy could also buttress the administration's so far futile efforts to broker a political deal with recalcitrant Sunnis.
This, more than the iron fist of U.S. military power, is what insurgents fear most.
Will Marshall is president of the Progressive Policy Institute.