Page 3 of 3 SPEAKING
FREELY Why 21,500 wrongs won't make it
right By Julian Delasantellis
they knew his Vietnam War decisions were
wrong), McMaster employed tactics that eventually
made it into Petraeus-Amos. McMaster's success in
the pacification of Tal Afar, against the reported
resistance of then-secretary of defense Donald
Rumsfeld and his civilian neo-conservative
Pentagon management team, produced results so
positive that even Bush cited it in
exhorting
"stay
the course".
But with army-unit rotation
policies being what they are,
eventually McMaster's 3rd Armored Cavalry
Regiment was rotated out of Tal Afar, and a new
commander, less committed to the counterinsurgency
theory of Petraeus-Amos, as implemented by
McMaster, took over. As in most of Iraq, chaos is
returning to Tal Afar.
Contrast this to
the operational practice of most US commanders in
Iraq, the practice decried by Petraeus-Amos.
A US unit comes under small-arms fire from
a building. Air strike. Boom. No more small-arms
fire, no more 20 or 30 Iraqi civilians, no more
building, but no additional US casualties. The
unit moves down the street. More small-arms fire,
more air strikes, more collateral damage. At the
end of this day, this officer may have taken out a
few dozen insurgents, and 100 or so civilians, and
maybe created 500 more vengeance-seeking
insurgents among the dead's relatives. But in the
short-term perspective that so seduces Americans
both in and out of uniform, this officer's US
military casualties that day are much more limited
than the idealistic counterinsurgent's.
The living ghost of the secretary of
defense in the Vietnam era, Robert McNamara, still
haunts the Pentagon, in that they still feel best
when making decisions backed up by an extensive
quantitative foundation. Therefore, when both
these officers appear before the promotion board,
who has the better chance of advancement? Is it
the one with an amorphous, and possibly ephemeral
success in "pacification"? Or is it the one who
has created thousands of extra insurgents who will
have to be eventually dealt with but, for now, has
not brought home a unit with so many casualties
that the US press, Congress and general population
have any further reason to pester the Pentagon
brass with inopportune questions about their role
in creating and furthering this long and now
seemingly pointless bloodbath?
A few
months ago, a US Army officer being deployed to
Iraq was interviewed on local television. He said
his main priority was to bring all his troops home
safely. In the feel-good atmosphere that now
defines US popular culture's relationship with its
military, this was probably seen as noble, but
nothing could be further from the truth.
As retired
special-officer-turned-professor at the Naval
Postgraduate School Kalev Sepp put it in The New
Yorker, "It's absurd to think that you can protect
the population from armed insurgents without
putting your men's lives at risk. If you really
want to reduce your casualties, go back to Fort
Riley [Kansas]."
But that's the point,
isn't it? The US military is not fighting this war
in Kansas, or in any other place where it really
gives a damn about the local population. If it
was, the calculus between an officer's career and
local civilian lives wouldn't be weighing so
heavily in favor of career advancement. Despite
all the focus-group-generated spin about noble
troops bravely sacrificing so the grateful Iraqis
can lead better lives, this war has the United
States treating the Iraqis exactly as it sees the
rest of the Arab world - as terrorists,
towelheads, camel jockeys, sand niggers -
precisely how the late Edward Said said the West
saw and treated the "Other".
This choice
between doing counterinsurgency right and doing it
wrong is no real choice at all. Doing it wrong is
not made right by doing it wrong with 21,500 more
troops. Doing it wrong will not be made right by,
in the president's words, loosening the "too many
restrictions on the troops". This only proves that
just because the president appointed Petraeus
doesn't mean he read Petraeus.
Do
counterinsurgency right, or not at all. Do it
right, or bring the troops home.
Note 1. The Mall of
America, in Bloomington, Minnesota, is the largest
shopping mall in the US.
Julian
Delasantellis is a management consultant,
private investor and professor of international
business in the US state of Washington. He can be
reached at juliandelasantellis@yahoo.com.
(Copyright 2006 Julian Delasantellis.)
Speaking Freely is an Asia Times
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