The Battle for Iraq

WHAT SHOULD WE DO IN IRAQ? The U.S. presidential election will likely be won or lost over the war and its aftermath. If the United States fails in Iraq--if it is driven out by violence, and the country descends into internecine strife--then former ambassador (and current Kerry adviser) Richard Holbrooke may well be right: Iraq will be "a mess worse than Vietnam." It's a good bet that few people in the administration, as in the country at large, think the counterinsurgency is going well. It is quite striking to listen to President Bush's speeches about Iraq--about its centrality to the war on terror and the future of America's security--and then talk to officials in the State Department, the Pentagon, and the White House who would rather change the subject. If nothing else, America's second Gulf War will test whether the president of the United States can successfully commit the country to an enormous undertaking--the democratization of an important Muslim state--about which many, if not most, of his diplomats, intelligence officials, and senior soldiers are, at minimum, ambivalent.

President Bush may have seen the necessity of removing a genetically aggressive, weapons-of-mass-destruction-loving Saddam Hussein from a post-9/11 world. He certainly went on to see the essential need to transform the dysfunctional political culture of the Middle East--the nexus between autocracy and Islamic extremism--and the unavoidable task of trying to aid the Iraqis in building a democracy in the Arab world, the birthplace of bin Ladenism. But probably relatively few of the "foreign-policy professionals" and

"intelligence experts" below the president see the world similarly. Washington's foreign affairs and intelligence bureaucrats are more or less at one with Senator John Kerry: President Bush has been a rash revolutionary who, among other things, has committed them to an unwanted task that will likely unsettle if not rack them for years to come.

President Bush's strategic vision aside, do his administration's tactics in Iraq make sense? Are any of Kerry's criticisms of the president's plan valid? Is the senator's game plan in any way more astute? The likely answers to these questions are not encouraging.

There is a decent chance that the tactics now in use in Iraq will produce the opposite of what is intended: The insurrection in the Sunni triangle will deepen, and the clerical rebel Moktada al-Sadr and his Sadriyyin followers may well roll forth again, with even more force, from their Baghdad Shiite stronghold. Many American officials certainly hope, and appear to believe, that the "gradualist" course now chosen will eventually win the day: If U.S. forces abstain from the siege-and-conquest of truly difficult insurgent towns in the Sunni triangle in favor of behind-the-scenes, Iraqi-led negotiations backed by CIA largesse, aerial bombardment, quick ground assaults, and the gradual deployment of more Iraqi paramilitary and police units, an inglorious but lasting victory will follow. Yet the administration may well be setting itself up for a perfect storm of Arab Sunni intransigence, fundamentalism, and betrayal. The White House should take little comfort in knowing that Kerry's ideas are even worse. Kerry's plan, when not surreal--the French and the Germans, who tried to ease sanctions on Saddam Hussein, and who opposed the war on nationalist, internationalist, European, pacifist, and capitalist principles, have little desire to aid America now--is unsound, precisely because it repeats and amplifies the bad counterinsurgency ideas of the Bush administration.

The senator and the Bush administration see the "Iraqification" of the conflict as the all-critical component in pacifying the country and setting the stage for a gradual American withdrawal. When Iraqis become responsible for their own destiny, when they directly fight those who are bombing city streets, highways, and oil pipelines, so the theory goes, the anti-American/anti-foreigner quality to this insurrection will diminish. Iraq is for Iraqis, and they more than Americans really ought to fight for it. Whether you're talking about the military brass under the Middle East's Central Command chief General John Abizaid or the civilian leadership of the Pentagon, the commanders in the field and in Washington have developed a view that American soldiers on the ground can be too provocative. Their movements, let alone their military actions, can cause a nationalist backlash among Iraqis of all stripes. Hence the need for American troops to keep a lower profile, at least lower than they did when Ambassador L. Paul Bremer and the Coalition Provisional Authority ruled Iraq. The Americans need to have Iraqis with them, preferably in front of them, to deflect the anger that comes from a proud people with stronger foreigners in their midst. According to administration officials, Iraqi prime minister Ayad Allawi agrees with this assessment. Once upon a time, the Iraqi National Congress's Ahmad Chalabi also emphasized these sentiments to U.S. officials.

This view, of course, accords well with the Pentagon's dominant ethic of force protection and domestic political concerns about U.S. casualty rates. But

the primary factor at play here is the understanding of what makes the Iraqis tick, in particular those who hate us but have not yet joined the armed insurrection. Although Kerry has not yet spoken or written in sufficient detail about Iraq to determine his view on this most basic analytical question, odds are good that the senator would agree with those in the Bush administration who fear that more Americans in combat in Iraq might well make things worse. (Since the senator has called for both more troops and no more troops in Iraq, it is difficult to assess his stand precisely.) Democratic senator Joseph Biden, who is a senior adviser to Kerry and rivals Ambassador Holbrooke in TV time advancing the Kerry campaign, has perhaps put the Democratic critique most forthrightly. "We have to help train up their [Iraqi] forces. That's the key. That's the ultimate exit strategy, and the secretary of defense said in February [2004] that we have trained 220,000 Iraqi military. . . . That was malarkey." Biden, like Kerry, wants to see a more rapid, massive deployment of Iraqi military and paramilitary police units, and the Bush administration has so far failed to deliver this supposed sine qua non for American success.

But this bipartisan position is likely to be our undoing. Basic point: The United States is engaged in a revolution in Iraq. We have toppled Saddam Hussein, the Baath party, and the Sunni Arab dominion over the country. We have promised to help the Iraqi people establish a democracy, which means that we are the midwife of a political system that will empower the Shia, who constitute at least 60 percent of Iraq's population. This is an enormous shock to Iraq's Arab Sunnis, who may represent as much as 25 percent, but quite possibly no more than 15 percent, of all Iraqis. Many in the Muslim Middle East hate and fear the Anglo-American invasion of Iraq. One of the principal reasons is Sunni antipathy for the American-delivered Shiite new order.

Even Iraqi Arab Sunnis who loathed Saddam Hussein (probably a majority) and were happy about his fall (perhaps a majority) remain enormously anxious about the rise of the Shia. Many of them surely would like to believe a new Sunni order could be established. A year ago in Iraq, before the violence in the Sunni triangle became ferocious, I could feel the hope among ordinary Sunnis that their power and prestige could somehow be recovered. I could feel it among Sunnis who had no love of Saddam Hussein and the Baath, and only mildly disliked the Americans for liberating them. And a failure to fully appreciate the revolutionary implications of America's actions for the Sunnis led to the second major error. (The first was the Pentagon's failure to prevent the looting of Baghdad.) After the rapid fall of the capital, the Americans didn't aggressively vacuum up former Baathist military officers and intelligence officials into detention camps. Communities and towns built by and for Baathists were left largely undisturbed. These men really hope that the old order in some fashion can be reborn. Their desired new order is, even more than the old, aggressively non-Shiite, since the Shiites showed in April 2003 they had no problem with President Bush's liberation of their country.

The Americans then made another large mistake. The Pentagon, the State Department, and the CIA--the three powers running the Coalition Provisional Authority--did not realize how religious identity among Arab Sunnis had grown. The signs of a vibrant fundamentalism were there: the sermons, the preachers, the change of dress, personal manners, and language, and the graffiti written on the walls, and the hard-core books and pamphlets in the markets. The Americans and their highly secularized Iraqi translators often mistook Iraqi salafis for foreign fundamentalists. (The same may be true today for Prime Minister Allawi and other highly secularized, older Iraqi exiles, who have a noticeable blindness when it comes to seeing the vibrancy of Islamic militancy in post-Saddam Iraq. We would be wise to be skeptical about Allawi's contention that foreign jihadists are "pouring" into the country.) In the spring of 2003, Washington delivered demarches to Riyadh protesting Wahhabi missionary activity.

The growth of Sunni fundamentalism in Iraq perhaps started in the 1970s. It's very difficult to know for sure since the Orwellian tyranny of Saddam allowed for no reliable Western or Arab observation and comment. Elsewhere in the Sunni Arab world, including in Baathist Syria, the 1970s saw fundamentalism take off. What seems sure is that by the late 1980s and 1990s it was growing in Iraq. The country was catching up with the rest of the Sunni Arab world, where Islamic activism was gaining the intellectual and moral high ground. From the late 1980s forward, Saddam Hussein became an enthusiastic mosque-builder--perhaps the most energetic mosque-builder Islam had seen. Regardless of what lurked in Saddam's soul, the Butcher of Baghdad knew the changing sentiments of his Sunni base. With the fall of Saddam and his withered Baathist creed, the Sunni religious identity blossomed. The Shiites, too, have experienced an increased religiosity since April 2003, though it appears to be tempered by their traditional clergy and the much-discussed excesses and failures of the clerical regime in Shiite Iran.

State Department, CIA, Pentagon, and National Security Council officials usually talk about a Baathist core to the insurrection in the Sunni triangle. Perhaps. It is more likely, however, that Sunni fundamentalism has been consuming the Baath for years. Since Saddam's collapse, this slow-motion invasion of Baathist body-snatchers has likely gained significant speed. In Falluja, this is obviously the case. The growing range and boldness of the guerrilla-cum-terrorist actions suggests something more vigorous and young than the remnants of the Baath.

SUNNI MILITANTS are unquestionably men of hope, who believe fervently that they can drive the Americans out and create another Sunni-dominated state. And the Americans have certainly given them cause to cheer. The "gradualist" approach of the Bush administration has been a gift. The American retreat at Falluja was an enormous fillip to their pride and self-confidence. As the militants have grown stronger, U.S. soldiers have increasingly withdrawn from Iraqi streets. While the Americans have wanted to seem less provocative to the Iraqi people, they have certainly sent a different image to the holy warriors and ex-Baathists. Washington forgot historical rule number one about getting enemies to surrender and acquiesce: You must first beat them. They must see clearly that they have no hope. In a Middle Eastern context, your hayba, the awe that comes with indomitable power, must overwhelm them. This has not happened in Iraq since the fall of Saddam.

Indeed, from day one of the Coalition Provisional Authority nearly the opposite has occurred. America wanted to be rather nice to the Sunni base of Saddam's power in the hope of placating it, of getting it to play along. (The CIA's dogged advancing of the pro-Sunni, Baathist-sympathetic, Shiite Ayad Allawi and the White House's approval of him as prime minister was the culmination of this attitude.) The American retreat started in earnest in Baghdad last year, when Washington and the Provisional Authority decided to reduce the number of military outposts throughout the city. To Ambassador Bremer's credit, he warned that violence in Baghdad was likely to go up as the number of outposts decreased. But the "gradualist" ethic had taken hold: American troops were no longer seen primarily as agents of order but as catalysts for trouble. Iraqi policemen, backed more selectively and discreetly by U.S. soldiers, would do a better job. The result: Violence and crime skyrocketed in the capital as the American security perimeter shrank. And what happened in Baghdad has now happened in much of the Sunni triangle.

The situation is worse in 2004 because American officials and soldiers have become even more attached to the idea that Iraqi forces are the key to our salvation. Consider the symbolism of what we are doing. Do Sunni militants, ex-Baathists, and ordinary Iraqis think American soldiers, who come out now only in heavily armed convoys and rarely spend the night, look like troops that have the will to beat diehard Sunni fundamentalists? How does it look when the Americans hunker down in their heavily armored vehicles while the Iraqi security forces voyage out in easily obliterated pick-up trucks? The Iraqis are getting pummeled much worse than we are. For whom does this inspire confidence? For whom fear? And the worst is still to come.

There are obviously many brave Iraqi Sunni Arabs who have given their lives or are willing to give their lives to see a new, more humane order in Iraq. But how many? The tens of thousands that probably will be necessary to quiet the insurrectionist Sunni triangle? The legions that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld promises and Senator Biden wants at once? When I have spoken to military, military intelligence, and CIA officers about who is being recruited into the new Iraqi army, paramilitary units, and police, I have not been persuaded that much due diligence is being performed. Has anyone connected the dots between the families, communities, and towns that have provided the Sunni volunteers for these new forces and the families, communities, and towns that are producing the Sunni militants? Hundreds of Americans and ironclad loyal Iraqis are needed for this task of vetting. Have the Pentagon and CIA deployed them? (A war-weary former colleague in the Agency laughed at me when I asked him this question.) We obviously already have significant problems with policemen, common soldiers, and senior officers working for the "other" side. As the insurrection has spread, so too the odds that the individuals we are training are related to the individuals they will be expected to kill. Many of these recruits also probably have a heightened Sunni religious identity. Are these young men supposed to begin a family-cum-Sunni blood feud? For the benefit of a Shiite-led democracy where the Kurds--the Kurds!--may well end up having more influence and wealth than the Arab Sunnis?

In the past, Iraqis of different ethnicities and creeds worked and fought together against common foes. Marriage and profound friendships among Iraq's various peoples are quite common. Revenge killings are rare. The Iraqi nationality, at least among the Arab Sunnis and Arab Shiites, is strong. So why do we want to put so much pressure so soon on possible fracture lines in Iraqi society? Particularly given the signals the United States has been sending since Falluja: a receding interest in putting American soldiers aggressively into harm's way and an increasing interest in doing the opposite with Sunni Iraqis? It's very likely that the more we try to Iraqify the military and police operations in the Sunni triangle, the worse the insurrection will become.

What we see as an astute, sensitive, long-term strategy to enlist the locals, our Iraqi enemies and friends will see as further proof that we are unwilling to start a true counterinsurgency campaign. We could quickly confront a potentially paralyzing situation. If it becomes apparent to all that the Iraqification option isn't going to work in the Sunni heartland, it may be nonetheless enormously difficult for Prime Minister Allawi to abandon the idea. He has staked his career on his ability to corral the Sunni insurrection. If he cannot do so except through repeated American frontal assaults against Sunni neighborhoods, towns, and cities, he may find himself at odds with the Sunni ex-Baathists who have always made up his inner circle. Allawi may be prepared to do this. The recent, apparently successful attack on Samarra gives one hope. Then again, he could buckle and oppose the necessary American military actions.

Time is critical now. Secretary Rumsfeld may be right that elections in "three-quarters or four-fifths of the country" are better than no elections at all in January. Any significant delay of elections would quickly force Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, Iraq's preeminent Shiite cleric, to stand against the United States. If he were to do so, he would win, we and Prime Minister Allawi would lose, and the chance for a nationwide insurrection would skyrocket. But it will be much better for us all if elections happen everywhere, more or less at the same time.

The U.S. embassy in Baghdad really has no good idea of how many Arab Sunnis are willing to support a new democratic Iraq, which inevitably will be Shiite-dominated. (This same problem is directly connected to the U.S. military's and the CIA's inability to get a clear picture of the insurrectionists, their number, coordination, and command structure.) In all probability, Sistani's objections to a prewar agreement among opposition groups, which gave the Shia approximately 55 percent of Iraq's population, will not go away. Indeed, they are likely to grow as we get closer to serious politics that will determine the future of the country. Sistani may well play hardball because he is the spiritual father of his hitherto always-cheated flock. He also truly believes in one-man, one-vote democracy. And he has Moktada al-Sadr and the young rabble-rousing cleric's followers still waiting in the wings. Odds are good that Sadr will quickly take the streets and the limelight the moment the Shia feel they are being cheated (Sadr may well storm back in any case before the elections). Sistani cannot allow Sadr to steal more of his authority among young Shiite men. The Bush administration certainly appears to understand the need to keep the election date. It may be very difficult for the administration to admit that its present course in Sunni Iraq is awry, but it does understand that elections are necessary to improve the dynamics in the country. Washington certainly knows that it doesn't want to collide with Sistani again.

The administration and the country would certainly be better off if the Kerry campaign and the Democratic party would outflank the White House from the right on Iraq--to attack the NSC, the Pentagon, and the State Department for their lack of aggressiveness, for the continuing "Falluja syndrome" that still undermines operations in the Sunni triangle. But confronted with essentially a Howard Dean/Edward Kennedy critique--the second Gulf War was a mistake (as was the first), conceived through intelligence incompetence or manipulation, and destined to be a sandy Indochina--the administration will surely be less inclined to judge itself harshly. It seems unlikely that this left-wing stratagem will work in November, if for no other reason than that 1,000-plus combat deaths are too few, even with the media daily pounding George Bush with bad news from the Middle East, for Americans to dump the president and his patriotic call to stand our ground. But the Kerry-Holbrooke assessment will likely define the Democratic party's response to Iraq even after a defeat of the senator in November, further diminishing the necessary pressure on the Bush administration to undertake the ugly counterinsurgency campaign it's been avoiding.

The administration may enjoy more maneuvering room in Iraq than most of its critics believe: The Kurds and the vast majority of the Arab Iraqi Shia have not, and likely will not, go into rebellion against the Allawi government owing to events in the Sunni triangle. (Better numerous American failures than a Shia assumption of responsibility for quieting the Sunni hard-core.) And the Bush administration and Allawi are in some places making progress. Not without justification, they grouse that the press, (understandably) intimidated by the violence in Baghdad and on the highways, is no longer capable of reporting the good news of the counterinsurgency, in places like Samarra and Ramadi, where American and Iraqi efforts have, so far, kept the towns from becoming new Fallujas. This may not be great news--given the hatred of Saddam Hussein, his Tikriti clan, and the Baath party among Samarra's rather bourgeois tribal elders, one would hope to do better than a seesawing victory in what was one of the more pro-American Sunni Arab towns in April 2003. But such "progress" means the insurgency doesn't yet have decisive popular support. The Sunni triangle, let alone Iraq, is not yet Vietnam.

The Bush administration's plan of action is obviously a work in progress, which is as it should be. As the president stated in Thursday's foreign policy debate, he and his administration have and will again adapt to circumstances in Iraq. Events dictate strategy (not a strong theme in the State Department's much-touted and little-read treatise on post-Saddam Iraq), and it's entirely possible that the administration's "gradualist" approach will be jettisoned if insurgents continue to increase the tempo of violence, or if the White House decides it must make a serious try to pacify the Sunni triangle before the first round of national elections in January 2005.

Yet the odds of a massive November surprise offensive, after the U.S. elections, aren't high given how thinly spread American combat forces are across the country. Also, Secretary Rumsfeld's remark about partial elections may indicate that the secretary, who has consistently looked askance at deploying more troops, has little intention of adopting counterinsurgency tactics requiring a lot more manpower (for example, simultaneous or even sequential house-to-house offensives in Falluja, Ramadi, Baquba, Mosul, or the worst sections of Baghdad). The president could order thousands of Marines from East Asia and the United States to Iraq fairly quickly. But such an offensive in November or December would be essentially an all-American affair: Even the most expedited deployment of Iraq's new, American-made army would likely be too late for an all-out assault in 2004.

In any case, we should plan on the worst: The Sunni triangle will probably become much more savage, and Moktada al-Sadr may well again come at us and Grand Ayatollah Sistani, his primary foe, when we are stressed by battles with Sunnis. We should assume, as Senator Biden fearfully predicted, that we will inherit the wind in Iraq, and we should meet that wind head on. The president should transport all the Marines he can to Iraq, and then take and hold the centers of the Sunni insurrection, starting with Falluja. The administration shouldn't fear the Arabic satellite TV networks' broadcasting the horrors of the American offensive. Bin Ladenism grew by preaching the gospel of American weakness, not strength. The Ottoman empire, the greatest of Islam's holy-warrior states, attracted vastly more jihadists from its realms and beyond when it had Europe's Christian kingdoms on the run. If the Americans win--and win we will--these TV networks will not be able to camouflage defeat.

But we first have to recover lost ground. Falluja was a serious defeat for the United States. Prime Minister Allawi and his Iraqi soldiers cannot now ride to the rescue. A resurrected and reformed Sunni Baathist army never could. Iraq's Arab Sunni community must have the opportunity to participate electorally in the future of the country. It is possible they will choose to drive right over the cliff. A centuries-old habit of power is a hard thing to let go of. But if they choose not to free themselves from old ways, then they will have only themselves to blame. The United States can then begin what it should have done from the beginning: slowly constructing a new Iraqi army primarily with Arab Shiites and Kurds--the foundation of Iraq's future democracy.

We must-MUST-sustain President Bush to prevent the catastrophic failure in the entire Arab Middle east that the election of Kerry would engender.

But that does not mean we should support an Iraq policy which is doomed to fail. This article pulls together a number of ideas which I have held for the better part of a year about the course of our war policy.

Long article, but very good read, deserves the time.

But the Kerry-Holbrooke assessment will likely define the Democratic party's response to Iraq even after a defeat of the senator in November, further diminishing the necessary pressure on the Bush administration to undertake the ugly counterinsurgency campaign it's been avoiding.

Not so sure about that. Kerry as usual is trying to have it both ways: dovish/hawkish.

Last Sunday on Fox, his adviser Sen. Biden, speaking for Kerry, said that Kerry would have sent the marines into Falluja, after the ghastly murder of 4 Americans, months ago (Believe it or not).

No sure how, but seems to me that that is something the Bush people should somehow capitalize on: either in campaign terms and/or in policy terms if they decide to take Falluja or the like. (At the very least, this should be used to send a wedge between Kerry and the Kennedy-Moore wing.)

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