The Redhunter

The good news is that Gen Petraeus and his second in command, Lt General Ray Odierno know exactly what they are doing. Ditto that for most of the rest of the US military.

As for the new Iraqi Army, "at the battalion level — and in many police units — it is advancing at an acceptable pace." This is not a big surprise. Most of what I've read elsewhere confirms this. Their problem is that their equipment is terribly substandard compared to ours. It's not the fancy electronics that they lack, it's basic body armor and armored vehicles.

The problem with the Iraqi Army is rather that "the performance at the national level ... is unacceptable. The heart of the problem is that Iraqi society is extraordinarily hierarchical, and the top level is failing." Unfortunately no surprise there, either. The problem in Iraq is at the top, not the bottom. To be sure, there are problems in training the new Iraqi Army, cultural problems that have handicapped Arab armies for decades. But in the end they are more easily resolved or worked around than the ingrained corruption and factional infighting at the top.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is caught on the horns of a dilemna: "The more he purges hardcore Shiites from the ministries, the more he risks a vote of no confidence in the Assembly, or removal from office. If he does little or nothing, President Bush has (allegedly) threatened to remove him." His solution has been to stand aside and let Petraeus and Odierno do the dirty work of putting "the hammer to Shiite as well as Sunni extremists." This must change.

The Plan

If you don't want to wade through the documents linked to above, here's the plan as outlined by West

In a nutshell, for the U.S. to achieve the goal of relative stability in Iraq, three battlefield conditions must be met by the end of 2007. First, Iraq’s predominantly Shiite army must demonstrate a strategy and a momentum against a resumption of Shiite ethnic cleansing in and around Baghdad. Second, in Anbar, the Iraqi army and the predominantly Sunni police must sustain the momentum for eradicating AQI. Third, in the rest of the Sunni Triangle, the Iraqi army must prevent al-Qaeda from developing sanctuaries.

The strategy itself is clear enough. The allied forces will try to 1) bring security to the population by placing American and Iraqi forces in every neighborhood; 2) peel away the irreconcilables — prominently, AQI and JAM death squads — by shooting or imprisoning them; and 3) reconcile the majority of Sunni insurgents and Shiite militia through government reforms, compromise, and legislation.

The Most Dangerous Enemy

West says that the most dangerous enemy is not factional infighting or the Shiite militias. They're not to be underestimated, and they must be destroyed or disbanded, but in the end they're not the biggest problem, al-Qaeda in Iraq (AQI) is.

As for AQI, it must be beaten psychologically. Both JAM and AQI prey on the weak. They don’t fight each other or the Iraqi army. The Iraqis in special-forces units scorn AQI and literally chase them down during night raids. The Iraqi soldiers don’t express any particular fear of them. Yet AQI has a mystique of ferocity among the people, too many of whom believe AQI zealotry will overwhelm the Iraqi security forces. The Iraqi army must break that mystique by picking fights, by venturing into areas like the Zidon south of Fallujah, by publicly mocking and humiliating AQI, and by smashing it. The AQI fighters are mean bastards, but they can be broken. They have to be put away permanently when caught, or put in the earth.

As of this writing, the fourth of five brigades that are part of the "surge" is deploying to Iraq. Critics will scoff over past claims of progress, and to some extent they have a point. The stakes are too high, however, for us to give up while there is a possibility of success. We do have that possibility, and as such we must support and fully fund our troops.