How the "surge" succeeded - or even whether it has succeeded - is a source of
constant commentary in military circles. In an "after-action report" written
for the head of the Department of Social Sciences at West Point by retired
four-star General Barry McCaffrey, who traveled to Iraq in mid-December, some
of the problems that continue to plague US forces in Iraq were detailed.
McCaffrey, who has often been outspoken in his criticism of the
George W Bush administration's counter-terrorism strategy, admitted that "an
active counter-insurgency campaign in Iraq could probably succeed in the coming
decade with 25 US Brigade Combat Teams". But that would be more than one-half
of the total available in the entire army - a level of commitment that simply
cannot be sustained.
With US requirements in Afghanistan - estimated by McCaffrey at four brigades
permanently engaged in a campaign that would last 15 years, a continued war on
terrorism in Southwest Asia has become nearly impossible. Additionally,
McCaffrey says, "The US
Army is starting to unravel. Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the army
thousands of new soldiers who should not be in uniform" - those with criminal
records, who have used drugs, who have been given moral waivers, or who have
not graduated from high school. A senior Pentagon official agrees. "We have
increased our recruiting totals and tripled the number of our police
battalions," he says, bitterly. "We will soon have to build new stockades to
handle the influx."
McCaffrey recently summarized his views during testimony before the House Armed
Services Committee. Alongside him was General Jack Keane, a celebrated army
paratrooper and former vice chief of staff of the army, and the man most
responsible for pushing the "surge" strategy with Bush, in December of 2006.
Keane's intervention with Bush to shift American policy was so far outside of
military tradition as to be virtually unprecedented. In only one other case -
when Maxwell Taylor was named to replace Lyman Lemnitzer by John F Kennedy as
Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) chairman in 1962 - has a retired officer intervened
so publicly to shift American policy. "Jack Keane was way out of line," a
retired four-star army officer who served as a North Atlantic Treaty
Organization commander says. "He's a first-class self-promoter, one of the
army's real kiss-ups."
In essence, the case against Keane, repeated now by the coterie of retired
senior officers, is that "Keane pulled a Taylor" - that, in the words of a
retired four-star officer "it looks as if he wanted to get back into the JCS -
that he wanted to get his boy [General David] Petraeus a good job".
Keane's pride in his role and in Petraeus' success was on full view during his
armed services testimony. But his reading of what went right in Iraq and why is
at odds with narrative accounts of on-the-ground American combat officers, and
tilted to give himself, Petraeus and the "surge" strategy full credit for what
Keane called "a remarkably successful military campaign that will be studied
for years".
According to Keane, the violence in Iraq only began to go down "after all the
troops were in place" - the implication being that a flood of US soldiers
intimidated and scattered insurgent forces, an argument he emphasized by saying
that, until he and Petraeus arrived on the scene, and given the Pentagon a dose
of backbone, the war was lost. "We had never taken on defeating the
insurgency," he said, "we had always left that up to the Iraqis" - a statement
that will, no doubt, come as a shock to those marines of the First Marine
Expeditionary Force who fought house-to-house in Fallujah in April of 2004, as
well as to the families of those soldiers who lost their lives serving under
Petraeus' predecessors.
It is such statements that make Keane one of the most reviled figures in the
military community, and that does no favors for his protege, Petraeus, who must
remain in uniform - and deal with the senior commanders whom Keane regularly
insults.
The differences between Keane and McCaffrey are stark: where Keane is proud and
ready to declare victory, McCaffrey is analytical, careful and intent to tell
anyone who will listen of the obstacles that remain. While "AQI [al-Qaeda in
Iraq] has been defeated," McCaffrey says, "there are still 3,000 attacks per
month against US, coalition and Iraq forces. There is still a civil war going
on."
Additionally, McCaffrey's reading of why Anbar is now quiet diverges
significantly from that given by Keane: "The bottom line is the Sunnis got
scared and started to engage, the spin-off of that is these concerned local
citizens who are primarily Sunnis, but it's now being extended into the Shi'ite
areas, and the areas south of Baghdad" - a reading confirmed by interviews with
US commanders in Anbar and Babib provinces, and reflected in information about
the inception of the "Awakening of the Tribes" that first began with John
Coleman's dispatch of help to a tribal Sheikh in Fallujah.
That is to say, as McCaffrey put it: "The Iraqi people have turned on AQI
because it overreached, trying to impose an alien and harsh practice of Islam
inconsistent with the more moderate practices of the Sunni minority. The
foreign jihadi elements in AQI (with their enormous hatred of what they view as
the apostate Shi'ite) have alienated the nationalism of the broader Iraqi
population." Or, as a Pentagon official now puts it: "The so-called success of
the 'surge' had nothing to do with military victory, this was politics."
Assessing blame
While Keane and McCaffrey's views are listened to with interest among senior
military officers, the concerns of current serving commanders are much more
immediate. For many among the senior leadership at the Pentagon, for instance,
the apparent successful spread of the "Awakening of the Tribes Movement" has
been tempered by the realization that the initiative put in place in Fallujah
and Ramadi and Babil could have been - and should have been - put into practice
five years ago.
Pentagon officials are quick to blame former Iraq czar L Paul Bremer of the US
Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) for the failure. "We're reconstituting
the Iraqi military, that's all this is" a Pentagon official notes. "A lot of
these guys in Babil that we're paying lost their salaries when Bremer disbanded
the Republican Guard and broke up the Ba'ath Party. It was a stupid move. So
this is a make-good."
Another Pentagon official remembers the opening to Gaood in 2004: "This should
have been done then," he says, "and I don't understand why it wasn't. Think of
the blood, the enormous loss of life, the lost prestige, the failures."
Pentagon officers are also quick to point out that, while Petraeus has taken
credit for the shift in strategy in Iraq, the "Awakening of the Tribes
Movement" actually began long before he recommended an increase in American
troops levels in the country.
In fact, the shift in strategy is more the result of necessity than choice - of
decisions made by commanders on the ground who opposed the White House,
National Security Council, CPA - and State Department view that all opposition
to the Americans must be, ipso facto, evidence of terrorism. "We've not only
started to define the real enemy," a senior military office says, "but we've
stopped shooting people. We've figured out that protecting Iraq is Iraq's job,
not ours."
All of which raises the question of whether the United States should have
invaded Iraq in the first place, an issue that is becoming more pertinent to
military officers who view the American adventure in Iraq as a political and
military failure.
Some of these officers have become outspoken in their condemnation of the Bush
administration: which is a rarity, even among retired senior officers. "There's
a reason for that," former four-star General Volney Warner says, "and the
reason is that every former and currently serving military officer's fear is
that we in the military will be left holding the bag, that we will be blamed
for this debacle. And that's the last thing that we want to have happen. We
didn't make the decision to go into Iraq. We were ordered to do it. So the
blame should go where it belongs."
Retired Lieutenant General Ricardo Sanchez's public condemnation of the Bush
administration's handling of the war last October is only one, if the most
public, evidence of these fears. "From a catastrophically flawed,
unrealistically optimistic war plan to the administration's latest 'surge'
strategy, this administration has failed to employ and synchronize its
political, economic and military power," Sanchez told a group of military
reporters in Washington. "The latest 'revised strategy' is a desperate attempt
by an administration that has not accepted the political and economic realities
of this war and they have definitely not communicated that reality to the
American people."
Sanchez's comments were welcomed in military circles, even as some retired
officers bemoaned the fact that it was Sanchez (who oversaw the Abu Ghraib
prison torture scandal) who chose to speak out about the administration's Iraq
policies. "He's right in what he says about the war, there's no question about
that," retired Army Brigadier General John Johns says, "but there's really not
much sympathy for him among the services. The order came down from the White
House to Rumsfeld to him about torture and he should have said 'no', and he
didn't." Volney Warner agrees: "Right message, wrong messenger."
For retired Admiral Bobby Ray Inman, a close friend of Defense Secretary Robert
Gates, the problems that have plagued the American effort in Iraq are more than
simply political. "There's no way to get a unified approach when you are so
polarized," he says. "In many ways, I think the problem is systemic. We need a
cleaner command structure and we just don't have it."
Volney Warner agrees. "In Vietnam we had a Robert Komer, a guy at the White
House who was just a dictator and he coordinated the war between State and
Defense - and he reported to the president. We don't have that kind of guy now,
so it's not clear who's in charge or what the overall strategy is."
In military parlance, Inman and Warner's call for a "cleaner command structure"
is reflected by complaints of senior military officers that "the interagency
process is broken" - code for the view among the staff of the Joint Chiefs that
no one is listening to their views. "The JCS has been thumping the table for
two years over how we can't sustain our troops levels in Iraq and no one has
been listening," a Defense Department official says. "No one is talking to
anyone. During Rumsfeld's term you would have thought that we were at war with
Condi Rice, not al-Qaeda."
One of the key officers that Defense Secretary Robert Gates picked to begin to
try to solve all of this was Navy Admiral Michael Mullen, the new JCS chairman.
Mullen, a seemingly soft-spoken Annapolis and Harvard Business School graduate,
speaks carefully and slowly of America's "persistent engagement" with "radical
jihadis" and in lofty and often indecipherable terms about "global
partnership", "globalization", "global interconnectedness" and "strategic
imperatives".
But Mullen's broad generalizations, navy officers who know him
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Army is starting to unravel. Our recruiting campaign is bringing into the army
thousands of new soldiers who should not be in uniform" - those with criminal
records, who have used drugs, who have been given moral waivers, or who have
not graduated from high school. A senior Pentagon official agrees. "We have
increased our recruiting totals and tripled the number of our police
battalions," he says, bitterly. "We will soon have to build new stockades to
handle the influx."
