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Iraq

Some of our long term readers may have noticed I have not posted a great deal on Iraq over the past several years. This is not due to any change in my support for the war or for the fine soldiers who have fought through dark times and bright. The real reason is the type of war being engaged in the last several years is one in which I have insufficient expertise to really comment on. Weapon systems and correlations of forces and international intrigue I deal with well… but cointerinsurgency strategy and tactics is not one of my strong suits. As an example, I was not for the surge when it was first proposed because I felt a too heavy foot print would cause us more trouble than not. I was decidedly wrong, but at the time no one seemed to be making a clear and cogent case for the other way.

Now some one has. I recently finished reading Michael Yon’s “Moment of Truth In Iraq” and found it a marvelous learning experience. While some of this material may have been published on his web site at the time it was happening, the book puts the events and tactics in perspective.

He shows how at one point we really were making a muck of things by applying the wrong tactics. There were things happening in the middle phase of this war that I found disquieting but was unable to place into a broader context. Michael Yon has done so.

Michael shows how General Petreaus consistently succeeded where ever he was placed in Iraq because he did indeed know how to go about things. Where I would have thought putting a few soldiers here and there right in the middle of the population would make them think more of us as invaders, Yon shows how it did the exact opposite. It created trust and faith that we had their backs. You could really only know this by being there.

He shows how misunderstanding the tribal power structures was a mistake of the first order and that learning that lesson and working with the grain of the culture instead of against it has led to success.

I highly recommend this book.

12 comments to Iraq

  • Kevin B

    Dale, I have read the view that the ‘surge’ could not have been a success without several factors coming together.

    The first of these, the factor that is given most credit for the ‘Anbar Awakening’ and the following ‘Sunni Awakening’, was that the Sunnis, especially the sheiks, had to live with AQ Iraq for long enough to come to hate and despise that organisation. They had to experience the random cruelty and disdain for life of the likes of Zarquawi, and the dismissive, patronising, attitude that AQI had towards the locals, and once the Iraqi Sunnis had lived with this for a few years; had lost relatives, seen villages destroyed and markets bombed, they were ripe for ‘awakening’.

    The other factor I’ve seen mentioned was the training cycle for the Iraqi army, particularly the Officers and NCOs, without which the Army would have lacked the displine to be an Iraqi army.

    In other words, the timing of the surge was key. Had it come too soon it would not have had the effect it has.

    I haven’t read Michael Yon’s book yet, but I’d be interested to know whether he discusses this.

  • RRS

    One might suggest that those with views similar to those of Kevin B (and they may be a majority) should look back at the record of Gen. Petreaus when in command in Mosul.

    There was also that supercilious pontification from my erstwhile (but younger) Law School classmate, John Warner (the Senator) to the effect: “General, order must come from the top down – from the top down!”

    Of Course, order is being re-established from the ground up. Just as Richard (not his son Daniel) Pipes predicted in 2003.

    What is slowly taking shape is dominance, if not absolute monopoly, by governing bodies, of the capacity to use violence for social order. Given the established traditions of clans and tribes, some of the capacity for violence will be retained outside governmental authorities (leaving a sort of sub-governance that has persisted for ages and will be difficult to substitute for many generations to come).

    Incidentally, it should be known that Michael Yon has been a self-sustaining reporter (that’s two grades at least above what passes as “journalist” these days), not an adjunct of some major “News Organization.”

  • Kevin B

    RRS, I certainly don’t mean to diss General Petraeus or Michael Yon. Both, in their different ways, have done tremendous service in Iraq and for Iraq.

    I’m just interested to know Yon’s take, in his book, on whether the factors discussed were needed to ensure the success of Petraeus strategy.

  • Dale Amon

    He extensively covers how Al Qaedi blew it and gave us a second chance after we had pretty much blown it by focusing all to much on the kinetic and too little on the culture and the individuals and the neighborhoods.

    It is an excellent read and I feel I learned much from it.

  • Dale Amon

    RRS: I would go even furher. Michael Yon is the sort of American kids should be shown as a role model. He shows much that is the best of America and I salute him.

    He didn’t just report by the way. He was deep into Harms Way and ducking automatic weapons fire on foot and in one case had to put down the camera and take up a gun to save someone’s life.

    This is the kind of journalist who is worthy of respect. He’s the Ernie Pyle of this war.

  • guy herbert

    Dale,

    Since you raise it, I did notice you’d stopped posting graphs. And I don’t think you ever did respond to my suggestion that a more valuable graph for determining the health of the campaign and regime change would include all casualties of violence rather than just those among the primary forces of the occupying powers.

    You didn’t even give the government economist’s answer: What we have figures for must be meaningful; whereof we cannot count, we may not admit any significance.

  • Sunfish

    What is slowly taking shape is dominance, if not absolute monopoly, by governing bodies, of the capacity to use violence for social order. Given the established traditions of clans and tribes, some of the capacity for violence will be retained outside governmental authorities (leaving a sort of sub-governance that has persisted for ages and will be difficult to substitute for many generations to come).

    That’s not automagically a problem. It’s not completely unheard-of for relatively stable and long-lived countries to also have arms outside of government control. By itself that doesn’t worry me.

    Now, what happens when some tribe decides to kick off, that could be a concern.

    Guy:

    You didn’t even give the government economist’s answer: What we have figures for must be meaningful; whereof we cannot count, we may not admit any significance.

    There’s another perfectly reasonable answer: What we have figures for, we know or at least we think we do. What we haven’t counted, we may not have useful data. It’s easy to count dead US/UK/allied troops: we know how many entered the country and have their personnel records. It’s not so easy for us to count Iraqis: we didn’t have the records of who did exist. There wasn’t an accurate census in 2002, so merely counting them now doesn’t give a good picture.

    It didn’t help that Saddam Hussein did not have the Missouri Bureau of Vital Statistics issuing birth certificates to every Kurd or Shi’ite, and neither he nor Paul Bremer had an army of county coroners signing death certificates every time someone died. Maybe birth and death shouldn’t be matters of precisely-tracked public record, but failure to track them means not having a good picture of how many people there are and how many died under what circumstances.

  • RRS

    Guy, et al.

    Graphs are for Nancy Pelosi & Carl Levin and other ginks who have to be spoon-fed by their pre-programmed staffers.

    What should count (my opinion) are the actual reports from those engaged in daily activities in a hostile environment. Government functionaries (Pakistan? inter allia) will emit information dressed as “statistics,” much of which meet the Disraeli criterion.

    Reporters (called journalists) who are directed by the editors of a commercial news organization to find and send in a story that “shows the ongoing and growing problems of ….” will concentrate on the narrative and not on facts observed first hand. Government functionaries will do much the same, but less artfully.

    Most here are probably aware of blogs like Bill Rossio’s longwarjournal.org; or the military’s mnf-irq.com; for disparate reasons they each are more factual than narrative.

    Graphs, in cases like these, can be constructed (see, legislative proceedings) to indicate or induce a variety of conclusions. There are good reasons to abandon Graphs, though Dale may have his own.

  • Paul Marks

    You are right to praise General Petraeus, Dale.

    However, the politician who put himself most at risk (both with the Democrats and with his fellow Republicans) by saying that there most be more troops and they must go out into the population (not hide away in bases only appearing for search and destroy missions) was John McCain.

    Did his name slip your mind?

  • Dale Amon

    RRS: I would have to say that the reason I stopped with the graph was that for the effort required in upkeep the information content it provided the readership was approaching zero. It also happened that my time became more precious due to a combination of the need to earn enough to survive and simultaneously try to find enough time to help with the slow forward push of my New Space venture. It comes with the territory of being an entrpreneur on the most bleeding edge of all rather than being a professional journalist.

    There is a great deal of overhead for me in switching gears between being a serious engineer and being a serious communicator of ideas and opinion. The last few years engineer and the fulfilment of the bare tip top of Maslov has limited my communication time a bit more than I would like!

  • Dale Amon

    Paul. As a matter of fact yes,. but it is not relevant to my article. It is also not relevant to my feelings toward McCain the politician. If General Petreaus were pro-McCain-Feingold, I would not vote for him either.

  • Paul Marks

    Dale – John McCain certainly was relevant to your article.

    But McCain-Feingold is not relevant to your article.

    As for revenge for McCain-Feingold being more important than preventing the transformation of the United States (and, therefore, the rest of the world) into a totalitarian society.

    I do not agree with you.

    It is certainly odd to support the deaths of thousands of soldiers (and the spending of huge amounts of money – something that I make no apology for mentioning) in the hope of transforming Iraq into a free society, but to not care about President Obama, Speaker Pelosi, Senator Durbin (and so on) transforming the United States into a totally unfree one. By, for example, destroying dissenting media – which they will do, apart from a bit of internet stuff and a few newspapers, within a year of January 20th 2009.

    Especially as a free Iraq is hardly likely to continue to exist in the context of a world in which the United States has fallen.

    As I have said before, I have no false hope of changing your opinion.

    My intention is to deny you the comfort of telling yourself that you did not know – that you were not warned.

    I do not see why you should have that comfort.