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.
