The Redhunter

What's the Plan?

If you haven't read the actual plan that General Petraeus is implimenting, stop and go do so now. You can find the unclassified version here, please download and go through the whole thing. There's also a brief fact sheet on the White House website that you should read.

The Good

Rep Christopher Shays (R-CT) got back from Iraq earlier this month and briefed his collegues on what he saw. Shays has been a critic of the war these past few years but now sees room for optimism. He goes to Iraq ever few months, so has gained quite a bit of perspective since April of 2003.

Three developments now have Shays more optimistic than he has been in many months. During his April trip, he was able to visit the “red zone” in Baghdad, which he says would have been impossible in the past, even with armed protection. And he saw evidence that routine violence was diminishing when almost every one of the 40 Iraqi soldiers he spoke with reported that they felt safe returning to their homes during their regular monthly leaves. Having once thought that Anbar province was lost, he is also encouraged by the cooperation of Sunni tribal leaders in security operations there. Finally, he highlights an effective Iraqi security operation in the north.

W. Thomas Smith Jr, writing in National Review, gives 5 reasons why he thinks that things are now going our way

First, aside from the complexities of establishing a working, unified government (not necessarily the task of the military), the U.S. military does have a sound plan for victory that is being implemented. The enemy does not.

Second, the enemy — including the Iraqi insurgents and al Qaeda terrorists — is progressively splintering into smaller sub-groups.

Third, an increasing number of Iraqi civilians are providing the U.S. military and Iraqi security forces with information about the enemy that is being processed into solid intelligence.

Fourth, Coalition forces are increasingly “driving a wedge” between the insurgents and the general population. And more and more insurgents are turning against the sectarian violence-instigating terrorists.

And lastly, as I discussed at National Review Online’s military blog, “The Tank,” while I was in Iraq, one of the most effective elements of General David Petraeus’s strategy is his approach to a given area of responsibility (AOR).

Petraeus’s predecessor, General George Casey, would have his subordinate commanders move their forces into an AOR, kill, capture, or run the enemy out; bring in some infrastructure for the community; and then leave. It worked to be sure, but only temporarily. The enemy almost always came back.

Petraeus’s approach is to do those things, but never completely leave. His commanders are responsible for ensuring their AORs are progressing. And U.S. soldiers are staying. In Sadr City for instance — as dangerous as it is — U.S. soldiers are living there, bunking side-by-side with their Iraqi counterparts.

Via NRO, Marine Corps Commandant James T. Conway says that things are improving in Anbar province

"I was guardedly optimistic in December," before Bush ordered an extra 21,500 American combat troops to Iraq, including 4,000 Marines to Anbar province, Conway said. Four months later he said he sees a decisively improved situation in Anbar, adding, "That's not too optimistic or too much `happy talk.'"

Conway's weeklong trip took him from one end of the province to the other, and to Baghdad for meetings with the top U.S. commanders and Iraqi defense officials.

Barry McCaffrey, a retired Army general who has been a critic of the Bush administration's approach to the war, wrote in an assessment for the U.S. Military Academy at West Point after visiting Iraq last month that he found in Anbar a "real and growing groundswell of Sunni tribal opposition" to al-Qaida in Iraq.

"This is a crucial struggle and it is going our way — for now," McCaffrey wrote.

StrategyPage agrees that Sunni tribes are turning against al Qaeda

Even Sunni Arabs in neighboring countries are telling the Iraqi Sunnis that resistance is futile. This has created an even more intense backlash against al Qaeda, for whom surrender is unthinkable. Al Qaeda has made a major commitment to success in Iraq. Failure here will be a major defeat. But failure is what is happening. Iraqi Sunni Arab tribes are actively going after al Qaeda groups, and now these Sunni Arab tribal militias are cooperating with the American and government security forces in tracking down the al Qaeda bomb factories, bomb builder and bomb delivery teams.

The biggest problem in Iraq, says StrategyPage, is corruption. If that problem could be solved the security situation could be easily controlled.

Max Boot also has some good things to say about the situation in Baghdad

Throughout 2006, the war was going very badly, especially in Baghdad. Large chunks of the city were subject to a bloody campaign of ethnic cleansing, murder, and terrorism. Sunni families fled. Markets closed. Normal life ground to a halt. Those perilous trends have been stopped in the past few months and are beginning to be reversed. This is due to an increased deployment of Iraqi and American troops, and especially to the fact that Americans are no longer staying on their giant forward operating bases. They are patrollng more intensively from joint security stations and small combat outposts located in the middle of the city.

Though only three of the five extra brigades scheduled to be deployed have yet arrived in Baghdad, the offensive has already paid big dividends. A semblance of normality is returning in some neighborhoods, markets are reopening, sectarian murders and ethnic cleansings have been dramatically reduced. The situation still isn’t great, but at least the downward trend has been stopped.

The Bad

Bill Roggio, always an astute commenter, believes that al Qaeda is on the offensive and that we're not reacting quickly enough

After a relative lull in major, mass casualty suicide attacks inside Baghdad, al Qaeda in Iraq has gone on a major offensive inside the capital city. Al Qaeda's latest suicide offensive began on April 13; the last major bombing inside Baghdad was in a Shia market on March 29. Since April 13, al Qaeda has struck at 11 high profile targets inside the city limits. The targets have included the Iraqi Parliament, two of Baghdad's 11 bridges and Shia markets. Under the readership of Abu Ayyub al-Masri Al Qaeda in Iraq is proving agile in its ability to switch targets in Baghdad while continuing to strike at sectarian fault lines outside the capital. The latest campaign threats to erode the remaining support in America for the Baghdad Security Plan, which is still ramping up. ...

Al Qaeda in Iraq has clearly discovered a seam in the increased security inside Baghdad, and is directing its bombing campaign for political and sectarian effects. This bombing blitz is projecting an image of failure of the nascent Baghdad Security Plan. Al Qaeda clearly hopes to destroy any remaining political support inside the U.S. government and the American people for the security operation, which is still in mid deployment. Al Qaeda also hopes to reignite the Sunni-Shia sectarian war and the activity of the Shia death squads inside Baghdad, which has decreased significantly since the start of the security operation in mid-February.
...

Coalition and Iraqi forces must react to al Qaeda's bombing offensive, as time may not be on its side. As we've said from the very beginning, “U.S. and Iraqi forces must be flexible, and quickly react to as yet unseen surprises.” Now is the time to be flexible.

Also, the overall size of the US military is too small. During most of the Cold War we speng 8-10% of GDP on our military. Today it's at about 4%. Fully 50% of the Federal budget was devoted to military spending, and today it's less than 20%. The single biggest failure of the Bush Administration has been to fight the war against jihadism on the cheap. The editors of National Review provide a few more figures

From 1974 to 1989, the Army had 770,000 to 780,000 active troops (all of them volunteers). Today, we have around 508,000. The Navy had 568 ships in the late 1980s; today it has 276, and its manpower is so reduced that it often has to helicopter sailors from homebound ships to outbound ones in order to keep them staffed. The Air Force’s number of tactical air wings has shrunk from 37 to 20, and the average age of its aircraft is 24 years (as compared with nine years in 1973).

The Army and Marine Corps are stretched, the other services less so. But if we have to take on Iran or North Korea the Navy and Air Force will be at their limits too. The left thinks that the solution to this problem is to pull back our forces from Iraq, and eventually I am sure from Afghanistan too. They are mistaken. The solution is to cut back on domestic spending (eliminating the Department of Education would be a good start) and increase spending on the military.

The Ugly

Christopher Hitchens reviewed Ali Allawi's new memoir, The Occupation of Iraq: Winning the War, Losing the Peace, last week in Slate. Allwai says that Iraq's collapse was inevitable. Ouch. Hitchens quotes Allawi as saying that

When the Coalition arrived in Baghdad on 9 April, 2003, it found a fractured and brutalized society, presided over by a fearful, heavily armed minority. The post-9/11 jihadi culture that was subsequently to plague Iraq was just beginning to take root. The institutions of the state were moribund; the state exhausted. The ideology that had held Ba'athist rule together had decayed beyond repair.

Hitch adds that "...if what Allawi says is true, then Iraq was headed straight for implosion and failure, both as a state and a society, well before 2003." Not at all good for our pre-war intelligence, but it does contradict those who oh-so-confidently proclaim that with better planning everying would be hunky-dory.

In Michael Yon's latest dispatchDesires of the Human Heart, Part I he shows photo after photo of deserted streets, which were once a thriving Baghdad suburb. Read the whole thing, but pay special attention to the photos and their accompanying captions. Money quote

On these empty streets it becomes clear that the war that began in March 2003 has been lost to rampant crime, civil war and the sundry insurgencies that have shorn the Iraqi fabric. But while our fire brigades pour up from Kuwait into Iraq, and while our allies pull out one by one, we are reinvading Iraq with not a second wave but a “surge” of brigade after brigade barreling up IED-laced highways. Ten thousand more troops, then ten thousand more, then maybe ten thousand more again. And those troops who are already here will stay longer than planned. Then longer than planned, again. (One way to get more troops into Iraq is to stop letting them go home. The announcement to extend current deployments was made after I wrote this dispatch.)

People talk of an Army breaking under the strain, but while there remains a sliver of hope that Iraq might avoid conflagration into full-scale genocide, out here, where bones splinter and flesh really does burn, there is a kind of clarity. And on these empty streets, a practiced eye regards the slivers of hope that are strewn among all the shards of broken glass.

The latest group of professional soldiers I had the honor of accompanying was the 1-4 Cavalry from Fort Riley, Kansas. They opened their doors in Baghdad and wanted me to tell the people at home the good, the bad and the ugly.

And now you know where I got the title to this post.