The Surge Succeeds

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LTG Brett Dula USAF ret forwarded article by J R Dunn.... The Surge SucceedsIt's now quite clear how the results of the surge will be dealt with bydomestic opponents of the Iraq war. They're going to be ignored.They're being ignored now. Virtually no media source or Democraticpolitician (and not a few Republicans, led by Richard "I can alwaysbacktrack" Lugar) is willing to admit that the situation on the ground haschanged dramatically over the past three months. Coalition efforts haveundergone a remarkable reversal of fortune, a near-textbook example as tohow an effective strategy can overcome what appear to be overwhelmingdrawbacks.Anbar is close to being secured, thanks to the long-ridiculed strategy ofrecruiting local sheiks. A capsule history of war coverage could be puttogether from stories on this topic alone - beginning with sneers, moving onto "evidence" that it would never work, to the puzzled pieces of the pastfew months admitting that something was happening, and finally the recentstories expressing concern that the central government might be "offended"by the attention being paid former Sunni rebels. (Try to find another storyin the legacy media worrying about the feelings of the Iraqi government.)What you will not find is any mention of the easily-grasped fact that Anbaracts as a blueprint for the rest of the country. If the process works there,it will work elsewhere. If it works in other areas, that means thedestruction of the Jihadis in detail. Nor is that all. Diyala province, promoted in media as the "new Al-Quedastronghold" appears to have become a death-trap. The Jihadis can neitherdefend it nor abandon it. The Coalition understood that Diyala was where theJihadis would flee when the heat came down in Baghdad, and they were readyfor them. A major element of surge strategy - and one reason why the extrainfantry brigades were needed - is to pressure Jihadis constantly in alltheir sanctuaries, allowing them no time to rest or regroup. A blizzard of operations is occurring throughout central Iraq under theoverall code-name HYPERLINK"http://www. weeklystandard. com/weblogs/ TWSFP/2007/ 07/iraq_report_ phantom_thunder_ up.asp"Phantom Thunder, the largest operation since the originalinvasion. It is open-ended, and will continue as long as necessary. Currentancillary operations include Arrowhead Ripper, which is securing the city ofBaqubah in Diyala province. Operation Alljah is methodically clearing outevery last neighborhood in Fallujah. In Babil province, southeast ofBaghdad, operations Marne Torch and Commando Eagle are underway. (As thiswas being written, yet another spinoff operation, HYPERLINK"http://www. americanthinker. com/blog/ 2007/07/another_ major_offensive_ agains.html"Marne Avalanche, began in Northern Babil.) The Coalition has left the treadmill in which one step of progress seemed tounavoidably lead to two steps back. It requires some time to discover theproper strategy in any war. A cursory glance at 1943 would have given theimpression of disaster. Kasserine, in which the German Wehrmacht nearlysplit Allied forces in Tunisia and sent American GIs running. Tarawa, whereover 1,600 U.S. Marines died on a sunny afternoon thanks to U.S. Navyoverconfidence. Salerno, where the Allied landing force was very nearlypushed back into the sea. But all these incidents, as bitter as they mayhave been, were necessary to develop the proper techniques that led to thetriumphs of 1944 and 1945. Someday, 2006 may be seen as Iraq's 1943. It appears that Gen. DavidPetreaus has discovered the correct strategy for Iraq: engaging the Jihadisall over the map as close to simultaneously as possible. Keeping them on therun constantly, giving them no place to stand, rest or refit. Increasingoperational tempo to an extent that they cannot match ("Getting inside theirdecision cycle", as the 4th generation warfare school would call it),leaving them harried, uncertain, and apt to make mistakes. The surge is more of a refinement than a novelty. Earlier Coalition effortswere not in error as much as they were incomplete. American troops wouldclean out an area, turn it over to an Iraqi unit, and depart. The Jihadiswould then push out the unseasoned Iraqis and return to business. Thisoccurred in Fallujah, Tall Afar, and endless times in Ramadi. Now U.S. troops are remaining on site, which reassures the locals andencourages cooperation. The Jihadis broke (and more than likely never knew)the cardinal rule of insurgency warfare, that of being a good guest. As Maoput it, "The revolutionary must be as a fish among the water of thepeasantry." The Jihadis have been lampreys to the Iraqi people.Proselytizing, forcing adaptation of their reactionary creed, engaging intorture, kidnapping, and looting. Arabic culture is one in which opendealings, personal loyalty, and honor are at a premium. Violate any of them,and there is no way back. The Jihadis violated them all. The towns andcities of Iraq are no longer sanctuaries. The results have begun to come in. On July 4, HYPERLINK"http://voanews. com/english/ 2007%EF%BF% BD%2707%EF% BF%BD%2718% EF%BF%BD% 27voa16.cfm"Khaled al-Mashhadani, the most senior Iraqi in Al-Queda, was capturedin Mosul. On July 14,HYPERLINK"http://www. usatoday. com/news/ world/iraq/ 2007%EF%BF% BD%2707%EF% BF%BD%2717% EF%BF%BD% 27us%EF%BF% BD%27strike_ N.htm"Abu Jurah, a senior Al-Queda leader in the area south of Baghdad, was killed ina coordinated strike by artillery,helicopte rs, and fighter-bombers. These blowsto the leadership are the direct outgrowth of Jihadi brutality and the newconfidence among the Iraqis in what they have begun to call the "al-Amerikitribe". We will see more of this in the weeks ahead. The Jihadis have come up withno effective counterstrategy, and the old methods have begun to lose mana.The last massive truck-bomb attack occurred not in Baghdad, but in a smallDiyala village that defied Al-Queda. An insurgency in the position of usingits major weapons to punish noncombatants is not in a winning situation. You will look long and hard to find any of this in the legacy media. Apartfrom a handful of exceptions (such as John F. Burns of the New York Times),it's simply not being covered. Those operational names would come across asbizarre to the average reader, the gains they have made impossible to fitinto the worldview that has been peddled unceasingly by the dead treefraternity. What the media is concentrating on - and will to continue toconcentrate on, in defiance of sense, protest, and logic, to the bitter end- is peripheral stories such as the Democrat's HYPERLINK"http://www. msnbc.msn. com/id/19797695/ "Senate pajama party, reassertions ofthe HYPERLINK"http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp-dyn/ content/article/ 2007/07/17/ AR2007071701456. html"claim that the war has "helped" Al-Queda, and the latest proclamation from theHYPERLINK"http://www. cbsnews.com/ stories/2007/ 07/01/ftn/ main3003207. shtml"world'sgreatest fence-sitter. The situation as it stands is very close to that of the final phase ofVietnam. Having for several years confused that country's triple-layerjungle with the rolling plains of northwest Europe, William Westmoreland in1968 turned over command to Creighton Abrams. Though also a veteran of theadvance against Germany (he had been Patton's favorite armored commander),Abrams lacked his predecessor' s taste for vast (not to mention futile)multi-unit sweeps. After carrying out a careful analysis, Abrams reworkedAllied strategy to embody the counterinsurgency program advocated by Marinegeneral Victor Krulak and civilian advisor John Paul Vann. Abram's war was one of small units moving deep into enemy territory, runningdown enemy forces and then calling in massive American firepower in the formof artillery or fighter-bombers for the final kill.(Anyone wishing for adetailed portrayal of this style of operations should pick up DavidHackworth's HYPERLINK"http://www. amazon.com/ Steel%EF% BF%BD%27Soldiers %EF%BF%BD% 27Hearts% EF%BF%BD% 27Transformation %EF%BF%BD% 27Battalion/ dp/0743246136/ ref=pd_bbs_ sr_1/002% EF%BF%BD% 277204606% EF%BF%BD% 272895246? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184979360&sr=1%EF%BF%BD% 271"Steel My Soldiers' Hearts. It will surprise no one to learn thatHackworth claims that the strategy was his idea and that he had to fight theentire U.S. military establishment to see it through, but it's a good readall the same.) This was a strategy that played to American strengths, onethat went after the enemy where he lived. By 1970, Abrams had chased thebulk of the Vietnamese communists across the border into Cambodia and Laos. But Vietnam also had its ruling narrative, one that had no room forsuccessful combat operations. That narrative had been born in 1968, at thetime of the Tet offensive. Tet was a nationwide operation intended by NorthVietnamese commander Nguyen Vo Giap to encourage the Vietnamese people tojoin with the Viet Cong and PAVN in overthrowing the government. It was anutter rout, with the communists losing something in the order of 60,000 men.The Viet Cong were crippled as a military force, and never did recover. But panicky reporters, many of whom had never set foot on a battlefield (notto mention figures at ease with manipulating the facts, such as PeterArnett), were badly shaken by the opening moves of the offensive, among theman abortive attack on the U.S. embassy grounds at Saigon. Their reportage,broadcast and printed nationwide, portrayed a miserable defeat for the U.S.and its allies, with the Viet Cong and PAVN striking where they pleased andmaking off at their leisure. The media portrait of a beleaguered Americanwar effort was never corrected, and became the consensus view. (This processwas analyzed in detail in Peter Braestrup's HYPERLINK"http://americanthi nker.com/ 2005/12/the_ legacy_of_ tet.html"Big Story, one ofthe most crucial -- and overlooked -- media studies ever to see print.)After Tet, there could be no victories. The success of the Abrams strategy was buried for twenty years and more, asthe myth of utter U.S. defeat was put in concrete by "experts" such asStanley Karnow, Frances FitzGerald, and Neil Sheehan. Only with theappearance of revisionist works such as Lewis Sorley's HYPERLINK"http://www. amazon.com/ Better%EF% BF%BD%27War% EF%BF%BD% 27Unexamined% EF%BF%BD% 27Victories% EF%BF%BD% 27Americas/ dp/0156013096/ ref=pd_bbs_ sr_1/002% EF%BF%BD% 277204606% EF%BF%BD% 272895246? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184979656&sr=1%EF%BF%BD% 271"A Better War and Mark Moyar's HYPERLINK"http://www. amazon.com/ Triumph%EF% BF%BD%27Forsaken %EF%BF%BD% 27Vietnam% EF%BF%BD% 27War%EF% BF%BD%271954% EF%BF%BD% 271965/dp/ 0521869110/ ref=pd_bbs_ sr_1/002% EF%BF%BD% 277204606% EF%BF%BD% 272895246? ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1184979795&sr=1%EF%BF%BD% 271"Triumph Forsaken has the record begun to be set straight. That was how it was played at the close of the Vietnam War. That's how it'sbeing played today. And what do they want, exactly? What is the purpose of playing so fast andloose with the public safety, national security, and human lives bothAmerican and foreign? Generally, when someone repeats a formula, it's because they want to repeata result. And that's what the American left wants in this case. During themid-70s, American liberals held political control to an extent they had notexperienced since the heyday of FDR. The GOP was disgraced and demoralized.The Democrats held the Senate, the House, and the presidency. There wasabsolutely nothing standing in the way of their maintaining complete powerfor as long as anyone could foresee... until Jimmy Carter's incompetenceproved itself, which caused the whole shabby and illusory structure to fellapart in a welter of ineptitude and childishness.The American left wants a return to the 1970s -- without Jimmy Carter.(Okay, without disco, either.) They want a cowed GOP. They want control ofthe institutions and the branches. They want a miserable, defeated countrythey can manipulate. And they want it all under the gaze not of the Saint ofPlains, but of Hillary Rodham Clinton, who can assure that left-wingpredominance will continue for a generation or more. Will they get it? That's a question worth some thought. Because as itstands, neither of the program's necessary elements is coming to fruition.The war is not being lost, and their great political scandal has fizzled. The other half of the equation was Watergate. Vietnam would not have beenanywhere near as much a disaster without it. Watergate paralyzed the Nixonadministration. It turned Nixon himself from an odd, unlikable, butincredibly capable politician to a half-crazed ghost sobbing in the Ovaloffice in the middle of the night. It transformed his last great triumph --the Paris peace accords that ended the war on an acceptable standoff -- intoashes. The left wing of the Democratic Party, shepherded by people likeGeorge McGovern and Mark Hatfield, proceeded to undercut the settlement asquickly as they could manage. Two separate appropriations acts passed inJune 1973 cut off all further aid to the countries of Southeast Asia. (Athird such act passed in August 1974 has gained more attention but it onlyduplicated the effects of the first two.) From that point on it was a matterof time. Nixon resigned a little over a year later. Less than a year afterthat, in April 1975, Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia all fell. (The price tag for this, which liberals don't care to bring up, was over 2million dead in Cambodia, 165,000 dead in Vietnam, another 200,000 plusdrowned and murdered on the high seas during the exodus of the boat people.Laotian numbers can only be estimated but must have been in the thousands.The price of Indochinese "peace" was nearly twice that of the war itself.) And that, in case you were wondering, is what Plamegate was about. TheDemocrats needed a scandal - and not merely a run-of-the-mill, everydayscandal, but a mega-scandal, a hyper-scandal, something that would utterlycripple the administration and leave it open to destruction in detail. Thetargets were Karl Rove and Dick Cheney, held by the MoveOn crowd to be theactual brains behind Adolf W. Chimp. When nothing at all could be dug up onthe administration principals, the scandal was effectively over. Knockingoff a vice-presidential aide might cause excitement within the Beltway, butnobody in the real world could be expected to care. It may be a bitterthought to I. Lewis Libby that he was taken down through sheer proximity,like a bystander during a drive-by shooting, but it was in the very best ofcauses. Libby's sacrifice not only saved the administration, it may wellsave tens of thousands of Middle Eastern lives in the years to come. (Thisalso explains why the President was so circumspect in dealing with theinvestigation - he knew exactly what the opposition was up to, and couldafford to give them no ammunition whatsoever.) Plamegate ended last Thursday with a judge HYPERLINK"http://www. washingtonpost. com/wp%EF% BF%BD%27dyn/ content/article/ 2007/07/19/ AR2007071901395_ pf.html"throwing Plame's suit out of court on strictlytechnical grounds. (This is something of a disappointment - I would reallyhave liked to see what that pair of hustlers would do when cross-examined bya competent defense attorney.) People like John Conyers are trying to createa conflagration by blowing on the embers of the attorney firings and thevice-presidential subpoenas. To no avail. Scandals, like forest fires, occuronly when conditions are perfect. Through their failed efforts, the liberalshave in effect set a backfire, surrounding the administration with widebarriers of burned-over ground. The Democrats themselves have rendered Bushunassailable, and all the slumber parties, the empty votes, and the rhetoricare intended to camouflage that fact. Bush will have hard days yet, but hewill not be Nixonized. He will be able to fight his war as he sees fit. That means a continuation of the surge, and of the strategy of GeneralPetreaus. Will that be enough? It's impossible to say. But the past fewmonths have been the most surprising in the entire Iraq saga to date. I havea feeling that Al-Queda (and the media, and the Democrats), will have a fewmore surprises coming in the months ahead. "If It Weren't For The United States military""There Would Be NO United States of America""Home of The Free, Because of the Brave"