But we're catching up.
Michael Yon:
For a time, Fallujah garnered nearly 100% of the media battle-stage. A speck of a city in a dysfunctional country standing toe-to-toe with a Super Power whose guns were hot and loaded. In the eyes of many, Fallujah was the frog strangling the stork, the defiant mouse giving the finger to the eagle, or more nobly, the Tankman of Tiananmen Square. The fact that Fallujah’s “defiance,” like the attacks on 9/11, was delivered in the form of celebratory murder was carefully omitted from the publicity campaign. (Hollywood press agents have nothing on al Qaeda’s media squad.)
Any premature history of this war will be as simplistic as a woven carpet, but some patterns are clear even today: crushing Fallujah backfired. If only because the timing assured a near total Sunni boycott of the first and most important national election, the start of nation-building politics, the same process that is now so widely acknowledged as the only path to a secure and self-sufficient Iraq.
Anbar was the special provenance for al Qaeda, the one place in Iraq they could establish and maintain a robust and largely unchallenged dominance. To achieve this, al Qaeda had used the stick of terrorism and the carrot of promises to gain allies. A lot of carrots, actually, in the form of promises that they would cast out the Americans, and reward the people of Anbar with ministries in the new government.
Many Vietnam veterans fear that our leaders never learned the lessons they paid dearly for. And mostly they are right. However, some of our officers—like James Mattis and David Petraeus—have studied the lessons of Vietnam in great detail. But for a long time, although these two officers realized we were in the middle of an insurgency, it was tantamount to “un-American” to call insurgents insurgents. They were “dead-enders,” and since there was no insurgency, there was scant need for counterinsurgency warfare. Had these two officers been running this war from the beginning, it probably would be finished by now.
Despite that Petraeus has the cockpit as under control as it can be, the jet is still nosing down. The only way this is going to work is if the majority of the subordinate commanders, and our troops, are applying the difficult lessons of counterinsurgency. Lessons that we failed to apply for most of the first few years of this war. Lessons our Vietnam veterans paid for in full. Lessons lost on others from wars here long ago and seldom mentioned these days. Lessons whispered by the Ghosts of Anbar.
Ironically, in Anbar al Qaeda has become our best ally for killing al Qaeda. They’ve managed to do this directly, just by being al Qaeda. Despite the promised carrots, what al Qaeda consistently delivered here was mostly stick, and with a special kind of hypocritical contempt that no sensible person would believe possible. (Not unlike the notion of baking the children of resistant parents or ordering shepherds to diaper the corrupting genitals of goats.)
Al Qaeda has a management style—doing drugs, laying up sloppy drunk, raping women and boys, and cutting off heads, all while imposing strict morality laws on the locals—that makes it clear that they have one set of principles for themselves, and another for everyone else.
In that kind of scheme, it didn’t take long before people in Anbar realized that any benefits from al Qaeda having control would not be distributed equally. Once that realization spread, the tribal sheiks—almost all Sunni—had to consider the alternatives.
I've excerpted Michael Yon's post at length, but there is much, much more, and all of it is well worth reading. Do not miss the captions in the very powerful photo-essay that accompanies the piece. But for right now, I want to point out a few succinct passages in that new
counterinsurgency field manual you've heard about:
1-11. Revolutionary situations may result from regime changes, external interventions, or grievances
carefully nurtured and manipulated by unscrupulous leaders. Sometimes societies are most prone to unrest
not when conditions are the worst, but when the situation begins to improve and people’s expectations
rise. For example, when major combat operations conclude, people may have unrealistic expectations of
the United States’ capability to improve their lives. The resulting discontent can fuel unrest and insurgency.
At such times, the influences of globalization and the international media may create a sense of
relative deprivation, contributing to increased discontent as well.
1-12. The information environment is a critical dimension of such internal wars, and insurgents attempt
to shape it to their advantage. One way they do this is by carrying out activities, such as suicide attacks,
that may have little military value but create fear and uncertainty within the populace and government institutions.
These actions are executed to attract high-profile media coverage or local publicity and inflate
perceptions of insurgent capabilities. Resulting stories often include insurgent fabrications designed to
undermine the government’s legitimacy.
1-13. Insurgents have an additional advantage in shaping the information environment. Counterinsurgents
seeking to preserve legitimacy must stick to the truth and make sure that words are backed up by
deeds; insurgents, on the other hand, can make exorbitant promises and point out government shortcomings,
many caused or aggravated by the insurgency. Ironically, as insurgents achieve more success and
begin to control larger portions of the populace, many of these asymmetries diminish. That may produce
new vulnerabilities that adaptive counterinsurgents can exploit.
1-14. Before most COIN operations begin, insurgents have seized and exploited the initiative, to some
degree at the least. Therefore, counterinsurgents undertake offensive and defensive operations to regain
the initiative and create a secure environment. However, killing insurgents—while necessary, especially
with respect to extremists—by itself cannot defeat an insurgency. Gaining and retaining the initiative requires
counterinsurgents to address the insurgency’s causes through stability operations as well. This initially
involves securing and controlling the local populace and providing for essential services. As security
improves, military resources contribute to supporting government reforms and reconstruction
projects. As counterinsurgents gain the initiative, offensive operations focus on eliminating the insurgent
cadre, while defensive operations focus on protecting the populace and infrastructure from direct attacks.
As counterinsurgents establish military ascendancy, stability operations expand across the area of operations
(AO) and eventually predominate. Victory is achieved when the populace consents to the government’s
legitimacy and stops actively and passively supporting the insurgency.
Now here's
The Belmont Club:
The recent Brookings trip report to Iraq believed abuses by Shi'ite militias were turning the population against them and pushing communities into the arms of the Coalition. The fighting that just ended between Shi'ite militias in Karbalah, and which forced not only the curtailment of the lucrative pilgrimage but the declaration of a curfew is a perfect example of how not to make friends and influence people.
Fighting among rival Shi'ite militias and police in the Iraqi city of Karbala has killed some 50 people, forcing authorities to curtail a major pilgrimage and order a curfew. Reports say the clashes involved gunmen loyal to cleric Muqtada al-Sadr and those connected to the Badr Brigades of the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council (SIIC).
Clashes between powerful Shi'ite militias in Iraq may mark the beginning of a new phase of fighting in the southern part of the country. ... It is not only about armed militias. Criminal gangs with no political affiliation are especially strong in the city. Local officials say that about 5,000 assassinations have occurred in the city in the past two years.
Shortly afterward Moqtada al-Sadr announced his intention to deactivate the Mahdhi Army for six months, and the Associated Press cited concerns over internal disunity as the primary reason for its hibernation to regroup.
(Oh, and here's the link for that
Brookings report on Iraq, August 2007.)
Remarks. The first four weeks of the Iraq war went very well; the next four years, not so much. But there's a very real possibility that we're finally turning the tide, and I think part of the reason for that is a willingness to confront the legacy of Vietnam. I don't have time or space here to explore President Bush's excellent August 22 speech at the VFW, but I do want to draw your attention to the prominent mention of Vietnam and Bush's unequivocal condemnation of the abandonment of anti-Communist forces:
In 1972, one antiwar senator put it this way: "What earthly difference does it make to nomadic tribes or uneducated subsistence farmers in Vietnam or Cambodia or Laos, whether they have a military dictator, a royal prince or a socialist commissar in some distant capital that they've never seen and may never heard of?" A columnist for The New York Times wrote in a similar vein in 1975, just as Cambodia and Vietnam were falling to the communists: "It's difficult to imagine," he said, "how their lives could be anything but better with the Americans gone." A headline on that story, date Phnom Penh, summed up the argument: "Indochina without Americans: For Most a Better Life."
The world would learn just how costly these misimpressions would be. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge began a murderous rule in which hundreds of thousands of Cambodians died by starvation and torture and execution. In Vietnam, former allies of the United States and government workers and intellectuals and businessmen were sent off to prison camps, where tens of thousands perished. Hundreds of thousands more fled the country on rickety boats, many of them going to their graves in the South China Sea.
Three decades later, there is a legitimate debate about how we got into the Vietnam War and how we left. There's no debate in my mind that the veterans from Vietnam deserve the high praise of the United States of America. (Applause.) Whatever your position is on that debate, one unmistakable legacy of Vietnam is that the price of America's withdrawal was paid by millions of innocent citizens whose agonies would add to our vocabulary new terms like "boat people," "re-education camps," and "killing fields."
Bush goes on to cite the damage to America's credibility that ensued in the years following Vietnam.
William Kristol picks up the thread:
The United States welcomed the refugees--but we were in worldwide retreat. It turned out that the USSR was sufficiently tired and ramshackle that its attempts to take advantage of that retreat had limited success. Still, the damage done by U.S. weakness in the late 1970s should not be underestimated. To mention only one event, our weakness made possible the first successful Islamist revolution in the modern world in Iran in 1979, in the course of which we allowed a new Iranian government to hold 52 Americans hostage for 444 days.
The era of weakness ended with the American public's repudiation of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Vietnam played a cameo role in that presidential campaign. In August of 1980, speaking to the Veterans of Foreign Wars, Ronald Reagan personally added the following thoughts on Vietnam to the prepared text of a defense policy speech: "As the years dragged on, we were told that peace would come if we would simply stop interfering and go home. It is time we recognized that ours was, in truth, a noble cause. . . . There is a lesson for all of us in Vietnam. If we are forced to fight, we must have the means and determination to prevail."
Kristol adds: 'Reagan stood by his guns. He beat Jimmy Carter. And all honor to George W. Bush for following in Reagan's footsteps, grasping the nettle, and confronting the real lessons and consequences of Vietnam. The liberal media and the PC academics are horrified. All the better.'
Amen to that. With the left reduced to uttering one incoherent howl after another, it's more important than ever for the pro-victory forces to stand our ground. Because we can win, if we dare to face the ghosts of Anbar - and the ghosts of Vietnam.