How The Surge Is Succeeding

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How The Surge Is Succeeding

By INVESTOR'S BUSINESS DAILY | Posted Wednesday, March 05, 2008 4:30 PM PT
Iraq: A bright young infantry officer just back from Baghdad is dazzling audiences with the story of how our forces turned things around in Iraq. And he warns that the place where the war can be lost now is at the ballot box in America.

U.S. Army Capt. Pete Hegseth graduated from Princeton less than five years ago, but since then he has served as a volunteer with the 101st Airborne in its 2005-06 Iraq deployment. This included stints as a platoon leader in Baghdad during the December 2005 elections and as a civil-military operations officer in Samarra for seven months.
When the Golden Mosque was destroyed there two years ago, triggering a huge escalation of sectarian violence over the following months, Hegseth was awakened by the explosion.
Pete Hegseth, executive director of Vets for Freedom and an Iraq veteran, spoke at a May news conference in Washington in support of the war. He was joined by senators including, from left, Joseph Lieberman, John McCain and Kay Bailey Hutchison.

Now, Hegseth is fighting on another front in the war on terror — the one in Washington. The Bronze Star winner is executive director of Vets for Freedom, a nonpartisan organization composed of combat veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan who share their firsthand knowledge to educate politicians and the public about the need to win those conflicts.
He spoke to a Manhattan Institute audience in New York City on Tuesday after just returning from spending a week with a unit in Baghdad.
Hegseth reported that during that time just spent in Iraq, he didn't hear a single shot fired or a single explosion. This, he said, underscored the absurdity of the political debate in Washington regarding the surge in Iraq, especially among many Democrats who would squander our recent successes there with big withdrawals of forces.
The remarkably positive situation in Iraq today came after our forces engineered an incredible turnaround in just a few months, a process Hegseth described in some detail.
After years of "spinning our wheels" — not knowing where insurgents were and not understanding the strategic loyalties of the population — the U.S. not only sent in more troops, but also sent them out to get to know the Iraqi people.
A lot of troops had been spending time "sitting on big bases, and they didn't know the physical or human terrain." An Army Humvee might speed through a neighborhood once in a while, driven by a frightened soldier.
The average Iraqi male didn't believe that the coalition forces were serving his interests or those of his family, so many Iraqis would form some association with a militia or similar insurgent group just to put food on the table.
When the surge pushed our soldiers and Marines out from their bases to mingle with the people, it sent the clear message that we were not leaving and that we were committed to the Iraqi people's protection. It put a human face on what the United States was trying to do there, according to Hegseth.
With more and more Iraqis trusting U.S. personnel, we got information from them that allowed us to nab numerous insurgents, even as they slept in their beds. And since our forces were meeting with so many people, al-Qaida in Iraq couldn't figure out who was informing.
AQI consequently got even more brutal — killing children, for instance — tactics that turned much of the population in areas under AQI control against the terrorists.
Another result is that there have been more than 100,000 new recruits for the Iraqi army and security forces, and Hegseth said trusted and indigenous security forces are a key to the success of a counterinsurgency strategy.
As the New York Times reported from Baghdad on Tuesday, Iraqi youths are exhausted by the violence of jihad and have grown disillusioned with religious leaders who preach it.
And as the Ethics and Public Policy Center's Peter Wehner noted Wednesday in a Financial Times article on al-Qaida losing the war for the minds of Muslims: "The Iraq War, once thought to be a colossal failure, could turn out be a positive and even a pivotal event in our struggle against militant Islam."
A pointed question that Hegseth gets asked is why it took the greatest armed forces in the world so long to start getting things right in Iraq. His answer was that the military is "a big, bureaucratic institution that learns slowly" — like so much of the rest of big government.
"There was no doctrine of counterinsurgency that we could draw on," he said, until Gen. David Petraeus wrote the Army Counterinsurgency Manual shortly before becoming commander of our forces in Iraq and executing the surge.
Hegseth's powerful message of victory will be one of the most important weapons against the anti-war forces who want America to lose in Iraq, and by extension the global war on terror. John McCain may want to make Vets for Freedom part of his own arsenal this year.