NO! NO! NO! NO!
The Surge is Working!!!
Posted on 10/18/2007 6:44:33 AM PDT by StatenIsland
Al Qaeda in Iraq on the Run Maybe the U.S. Congress will save it?
By Clifford D. May
Al Qaeda is on the horns of a dilemma. Last month, some 30 of its senior leaders in Iraq were killed or captured. Now, Osama bin Laden faces a tough decision: Send reinforcements to Iraq in an attempt to regain the initiative? That risks losing those combatants, too — and that could seriously diminish his global organization. But the alternative is equally unappealing: accept defeat in Iraq, the battlefield bin Laden has called central to the struggle al Qaeda is waging against America and its allies.
Hard times for al Qaeda should be good news for America but you wouldn’t know it from the reaction of the antiwar movement and their sympathizers in Congress and the elite media. Many have been unwilling even to acknowledge that U.S. forces are fighting al Qaeda in Iraq. They claim we are merely refereeing a civil war and/or combating Iraqi “resistance” to American “occupation.”
CNN this week ran a special called “Meeting Resistance,” a documentary about what it called “ordinary Iraqis …taking up arms and fighting the Americans.” Earlier this month Sen. Jay Rockefeller (D., Va.) lamented that Congress had been unable to pass legislation to “change the mission away from deep involvement in Iraq’s civil war and toward a more narrow focus on fighting al-Qaeda.”
How startled CNN producers and the Senator must have been to see the front-page story this week in the Washington Post reporting that American troops have dealt “devastating and perhaps irreversible blows to al-Qaeda in Iraq.” If our forces have achieved this without it being their mission, and despite the “resistance” of “ordinary Iraqis,” they must be warriors unlike any the world has seen since Thermopylae.
Is it ignorance or partisanship that makes so many politicians and media moguls blind to what has been happening in Iraq over recent months? Do they really not understand the dramatic change in strategy implemented by Gen. David Petraeus, the new American commander in Iraq?
That key to that strategy, known as the “surge,” is not the number of troops deployed — though a minimum force size is necessary — but rather how they are utilized. Col. Wayne W. Grigsby, Jr., who commands a “surge” brigade based in a mixed Sunni and Shia area near Baghdad, made it simple for me in a phone conversation this week: “We do not commute to work,” he said. “We live in the towns with the people we are here to help.”
That means providing them with security — gathering intelligence from them about where the terrorists are hiding, and then eliminating them, their safe havens, their bomb factories and their weapons caches. Do that and the bloodshed begins to subside.
“The Iraqi people are fed up with the violence and with the extremists, both Sunni and Shia,” Grigsby said. Far from “resisting” the American troops in their communities, “they want to join the fight and protect their neighborhoods. They are coming to us and saying, ‘How can we help? We don’t want to live like this.’”
Volunteers do not form sectarian militias. On the contrary, Grigbsy said, “they want to be recognized as legitimate members of the Iraqi security forces.”
American troops also facilitate economic and political development — something, they say, ordinary Iraqis sincerely desire. What about reconciliation? “I see signs of Sunni and Shia getting along,” the colonel answered. And there is, increasingly, “grass-roots governance. People aren’t waiting for the central government to act.”
Despite the fact that many more American troops are now deployed “outside the wire,” the number of soldiers killed in action is down 64 percent from May, the month before the “surge in numbers” reached full strength and the “surge of operations” began against al Qaeda cells, Iranian-backed militias and other enemies of America and Iraq.
And now bin Laden has to choose: send his most capable lieutenants to try to reheat the insurgency in Iraq; or cede the battlefield to the Americans and the majority of Iraqis who have no interest either in blowing people up or embracing the al Qaeda way of life.
The first course risks losing combatants who could otherwise be promoting al Qaeda’s agenda in Hamburg or New Jersey. As for the second course, bin Laden has said that the “world war” raging in Iraq will end in “either victory and glory, or misery and humiliation.”
At this moment, al Qaeda in Iraq seems likely to suffer the latter. Confronted by America’s adaptable, agile and courageous military forces, its only hope is divine intervention — and maybe the U.S. Congress.
No, it’s not “most” of it. Again, if you aren’t reading the German diaries, you’re clueless on what was happening in the Wehrmacht.
Consider Iwo Jima: in ALL our previous invasions, the Japanese had fought at the water's edge. Suddenly, they completely changed tactics and retreated to inland caves and tunnels. But on Okinawa, the original plan was for them to change AGAIN and fight on the beaches so the Imperial Japanese Navy could sail in with suicide attacks and destroy the landing craft. The Army changed its strategy without telling the Navy, and reverted to the Iwo Jima plan.
The point is, as you say, all war is fluid, and "the enemy gets a vote." No enemy responds exactly as you expect, and strategy is constantly developing.
I certainly hope you’re right.
Gen. Patraeus is a savvy guy but way late to this party. I don’t see how anyone can give credit to anyone in the WH for bringing new ideas in at this late date.
The generals said what Rummy wanted them to. Nothing more, nothing less. Who do you think they worked for ?
Since President Bush went completely against the tide which was pull troops out at the time, he deserves a large share of the credit.
Some people get so caught up in their hatred of him they refuse to give him credit for anything. In this case he was told to pull troops out, not put more in and how many called it a failed strategy??
Pray for W and Our Troops
And the early winter and the fact the Germans didn’t have decent cold weather lubricants etc etc
And the fact that the Russians had all those fresh Siberian Divisions without which they would have lost
In any case that was a standard military campaign not a Guerrilla type war etc
And the fact the Iraqis decided that al Qaeda was worse than the USA etc etc
The German loss at Stalingrad was also due in some significant measure to the German High Command botching the math.
They calculated that they could fly in 800 tons per day (food and ammo) to the 3 NAZI-held airfields in the caldron, but the reality was that they were only able to fly in 160 tons per day (this deficit of ammo caused the Wehrmacht’s 6th Army to surrender en masse...).
This was *not* the only fatal math error by the Germans in WW2. The more startling mathematical error was Heisenburg mis-calculating the amount of enriched Uranium required for an atomic bomb.
No such math error was made by the Americans, however (e.g. Manhattan Project). Likewise, the Poles used math to crack at least one German field encryption...and the Brits essentially invented an entirely new form of math (Boolean logic for computerized digital processing) during the war.
The irony here is that the German educational system was rated as superior in math by the global news media of its day.
Won’t fly. I know too many military people who give honest opinions, not fluff. Besides, if you bother to read Tommy Franks’ book, you’ll see that these plans were on the books for years, and were constantly updated, but that they NEVER called for a massive force of 450,000. That was “old thinking” that we had to get away from. Rummy was exactly right.
You might actually read something, like Richard Overy's "Why the Allies Won." It's been pretty well received by most of the military people.
Rummy was right.
The point is, in every war there is a tipping point that usually comes when the TRAINED troops are replaced by untrained troops. In the Pacific, it was the "Marianas Turkey Shoot," where the #s were fairly close, but we had veteran pilots and the Japanese had untrained pilots.
The tipping point in Iraq came LONG before the surge---the surge is just the "turkey shoot" part of the campaign.
1000 days ago it probably would not have worked and likely would have made the situation worse:
(1) The Iraqis were not then sick of AQ. More troops would have fed the fear among many that we were there to occupy and take over.
(2) We had not then developed the current strategy. More troops under the old strategy would not have been effective.
The point is, we are still pursuing the old strategy which is not wrong - to train and stand up the Iraqi security forces (top level state building) and combined it with Petraeus' new ideas of standing up local security and rehabilitation (bottom up state building).
They both have their place, but the second part had to await the Iraqis having educated themselves as to the disaster of the alternatives they were sold by AQ and other sectarian factions.
NO! NO! NO! NO!
The Surge is Working!!!
My son, a Thermopylae like Warrior (chest swelling with pride). What a statement. I hope the libs are choking on this article.
Your post #73 above is very well said. Thoughtful. Correct.
You view it as a "mistake" because you can't handle the news media pounding away against a long war...because you can't handle the GOP being criticized night and day on every page of every newspaper printed, but Historically losing fewer than 4 U.S. soldiers per day in combat is not even a blip on the radar screen.
Yes, it's tragic that even 1 U.S. soldier is killed, but that was a foregone conclusion once the 2nd plane hit the 2nd WTC tower in NYC...that the U.S. was going to lash out and teach *someone* a lesson.
Even better, what we have done is to topple a region-destabilizing dictator who financed suicide bombers in Israel (haven't heard about many suicide attacks there recently, have you noticed?!), shot at U.S. warplanes enforcing no fly zones, and harbored notorious international terrorists on Iraqi soil such as Abu Abbas, Abu Nidal (Achille Lauro hi-jacking), Abu Musab al Zarqawi, etc.
But wait, there's more. Because we sat in for the long war in Iraq, we turned that area into a terrorist roach motel that has seen more than 120,000 anti-American elements flock to battle and meet their deaths there. And that's just the number of anti-American fighters who showed up toes first at the Iraqi morgues. Far more have been wounded (welcome to insurgent medical care).
The example that we set in Iraq convinced Khadafy in Libya to *peacefully* surrender his WMD program to us where it resides at Oak Ridge even as I type this note.
And Syria yanked its army out of Lebanon as soon as Bush said "Boo!"
Chirac is gone from France. Martin is gone from Canada. Schroeder is gone from Germany.
These are major shifts away from recent anti-Americanism.
Of course, I don't blame you for wanting a short (or no) war in Iraq. American lives and money have been spent there.
But where you and I probably differ is that I see those tremendous sacrifices as aiding all surviving Americans for decades...perhaps even for centuries to come.
Faced with the above American display of willpower and an Ethiopian army on the ground, Al Qaeda quickly crumbled in Somalia rather than attempting to stay and regroup/bide their time, for instance.
Recruits to jihad and supplies for jihad are so limited that Al Qaeda has to scrape to put together a simple car bomb in Pakistan, of all places (e.g. Bhutto assasination attempt). They can't even knock off a civilian woman now.
Little girls go to school in Afghanistan, something that they didn't do before...and they thank Americans for it rather than hearing only to curse the U.S. as they were told by the Taliban before we banished them to caves (in those few cases where jihadists even managed to survive our attacks).
It's game changing, but it is a long war strategy. Roach motels. Slow, democratic political change. Money. jobs. Rebuilding efforts. Alliances.
This is not a war for attention deficit disorders or weak hearts.
But it beats losing the entire airline industry from attacks that use innocent grandmothers and grandchildren to ram into building after building day after day.
The lesson had to be taught. The teacher charges blood. School's still in session.
I suggest, if you intend to Monday morning quarterback, you get an accurate tape of the game.
Not only that, even had they not simply disbanded on their own accord, from the total lack of command and control exhibited by the IA, throughout the ranks, it might well have been a harder task to first undo all bad training they had before rebuilding it than to simply start afresh with properly motivated volunteers.
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