The Redhunter

If you don't want to believe the Kagan's and Jack Keane because they were influential in promoting the plan that eventually became the Surge (are we to capitalize this or not?) maybe you'll believe the Associated Press. From an AP news analysis piece that has been quoted widely:

Despite the occasional bursts of violence, Iraq has reached the point where the insurgents, who once controlled whole cities, no longer have the clout to threaten the viability of the central government.

That does not mean the war has ended or that U.S. troops have no role in Iraq. It means the combat phase finally is ending, years past the time when President Bush optimistically declared it had. The new phase focuses on training the Iraqi army and police, restraining the flow of illicit weaponry from Iran, supporting closer links between Baghdad and local governments, pushing the integration of former insurgents into legitimate government jobs and assisting in rebuilding the economy.

Scattered battles go on, especially against al-Qaida holdouts north of Baghdad. But organized resistance, with the steady drumbeat of bombings, kidnappings, assassinations and ambushes that once rocked the capital daily, has all but ceased.

This amounts to more than a lull in the violence. It reflects a fundamental shift in the outlook for the Sunni minority, which held power under Saddam Hussein. They launched the insurgency five years ago. They now are either sidelined or have switched sides to cooperate with the Americans in return for money and political support.

Insurgencies don't end all at once, World War II style. They tend to peter out over many years. Lt. Col. (Dr) David Kilcullen (Australian Army, ret), senior advisor to Gen Petraeus in 2007 for counterinsurgency, was asked about timeframes by Charlie Rose in an interview on October 5, 2007. What Kilcullen said astonished Rose:

DAVID KILCULLEN: . there's two issues. One is a territorial issue. The other one is time. Let me talk time. There has never been a successful counterinsurgency that took less than 10 years.

CHARLIE ROSE: Less than 10 years?

DAVID KILCULLEN: Successful.

You have to watch the interview to get the full force of Rose's surprise. He couldn't believe what he was hearing.

Kilcullen did not mean that in a successful counterinsurgency there would be ten years of heavy fighting. What he meant is that there would be ten years where there would be some insurgents somewhere who could at least theoretically pose a danger.

While on her fourth trip to Iraq since May of 2007, Kimberly Kagan, mentioned above, visited the headquarters of a small Iraqi political party in Baghdad. She wanted to find out more about their campaign plans for the upcoming elections. After a tour of their headquarters, she and her fellow visitors spoke for a few hours with about 30 political activists and aspiring politicians, some young, some older. Most were men, but there were several women. Her observations make for fascinating reading:

We sip our tea and discuss the upcoming provincial elections. The party leader proudly takes out a folder containing the results of last week's poll, which the party commissioned from an independent firm. He has very high name recognition, strong favorable ratings, and low unfavorable ratings. If these continue until Iraq's national elections in 2009, he thinks he will retain his seat in parliament, and the party may gain a few more.

We are guests, so we ask our questions first. We discuss the party and its campaign, national issues such as foreign investment in Iraq, and foreign affairs including the Iranian nuclear program. We ask what they tell people when they go door to door: Why should anyone join and vote for their party? One older woman answers, We are religious people, but we are not a religious party. Any Iraqi can join, regardless of sect. We stand for all Iraqis. She says this gravely, and it does not seem a platitude.

These party members are hardly naive, despite their optimism. They have experienced politically driven and sectarian violence. The headquarters is surrounded by low, concrete barriers to protect it from vehicle bombs. After the party signed a lease for its first headquarters in Baghdad in 2005, the homeowner reneged on the agreement for fear that his property would be bombed, so the party moved.

I ask the young people why they have joined the party, and whether they hope to have careers in politics. One young man, who has been to college, explains that many young Iraqis have not had a proper education. He has joined the party and its youth committee to help improve Iraqi education, recruit good teachers, and ensure that all young people can not only read and write, but also acquire the skills that they will need to pursue their careers in a high-tech world. This is important, he insists, not only for the young people themselves, but also for the future of Iraq's economy, which must be able to compete in the global market. Another young man will not pursue a career exclusively in politics, but believes that when he enters the business world his political connections will come in handy.

The young woman with highlighted hair is frankly ambitious. She intends to have a political career and hopes to be a high party official someday--so she can better help the people, she adds as an afterthought. The older woman seated next to the party leader smiles wryly at this comment and cleans her spectacles so no one will notice her expression. She is evidently the high official that the young woman aspires to replace.

This could be the future of Iraq. These people have a strong vision of what their country can become, and are working to bring it to fruition in their lifetimes. They are not alone.

Read the whole thing.

All this is possible because al Qaeda in Iraq is disintegrating. In a press briefing last week, Col. Tom James, commander of the 4th Brigade Combat Team of the 3rd Infantry Division, said that "we see that the recent attacks are IEDs of a primitive nature." He concluded from this that "the weakening (of al Qaeda) over time is obvious to us based on their ability to deliver an effective IED."

I've followed these press briefings pretty carefully for the past few years, and one thing I've noticed is that after our early and foolish over-optimism of the early years of OIF, we learned to be more circumspect and cautious in predicting the future. So when a MNF-Iraq release is titled "Al-Qaeda support structure dwindling" we need to pay attention.

If for some crazy reason you haven't been reading this blog (shameless self plug alert) and so don't know why we've been successful in 2007-8 where we failed earlier, Michael Yon explains what we did in an interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez this past April on NRO. Money quotes:

We are winning partly because in the most violent sections of the country this became a war of competing values, terrorist values vs. American values. But only when we got off our big bases, and out of our tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, could we make that choice very clear. Few people with a choice choose al Qaeda. ...

...most of all I began to see the fruits. I saw it working, the Iraqi people beginning to align with us and for themselves. I saw it in big "kinetic" battles where we took a fraction of the casualties we expected because the citizens told us where almost every terrorist ambush and booby trap was hidden. And I saw it in neighborhoods in which the American military had become the most respected institution in Iraq, and it was our soldiers whom the people turned too for protection but also for justice.
...

You win a counterinsurgency by walking the neighborhood, not by flattening it.

Christopher Hitchens is always clear thinking on most issues of foreign policy. A leftist on most matters, he grants them no quarter on Iraq. In "Fighting good fight in Iraq" he goes after the notion that we should have concentrated on Afghanistan instead of invading Iraq:

Would we be bound to say, in public and in advance, that the Western alliance couldn't get around to confronting such a threat until it had Afghanistan well under control? This would be similar to the equivalent fallacy that nothing can be done in the region until there is a settlement of the Israel-Palestine dispute. Not only does this mean that every rogue in the region can reset his timeline until one of the world's oldest and most intractable quarrels is settled, it also means that every rogue has an incentive to make certain that no such settlement can occur. (Which is why Saddam supported, and now the Iranians support, the suicide-murderers.)

It would also be very nice to accept another soft-centred corollary of the Iraq v Afghanistan trade-off and to believe that the problem of Afghanistan is a problem only of the shortage of troops. Strangely, this is not the view of the Afghan Government or of any of the NATO forces on the ground.

The continued and indeed increasing insolence of the Taliban and its al-Qa'ida allies is the consequence of one thing and one thing only. These theocratic terrorists know that they have a reliable backer in the higher echelons of the Pakistani state and of its military-intelligence complex and that, while this relationship persists, they are assured of a hinterland across the border and a regular supply of arms and recruits.
...

If we had left Iraq according to the timetable of the anti-war movement, the situation would be the precise reverse; the Iraqi people would be excruciatingly tyrannised by the gloating sadists of al-Qa'ida, who could further boast of having inflicted a battlefield defeat on the US. I dare say word of that would have spread to Afghanistan fast enough and indeed to other places where the enemy operates.

The notion that fighting a low-intensity wars (another term for "counterinsurgency") in Iraq and Afghanistan simultaneously is too much for the United States is more than faintly ridiculous.

During World War II we fought two high-intensity wars simultaneously on opposite sides of the planet. During the Cold War we maintained plans to fight two and a half high-intensity wars simultaneously.

The idea that we cannot fight two counterinsurgencies that are geographically near each other at the same time is not sustainable.

Finally, let's give the Iraqis some credit, in particular Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. Now, for the record, to put it mildly I'm not entirely happy with al-Maliki, but when he does come through it needs to be recognized. He came through a few months ago by defeating Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army in Basra. From the Wall Street Journal:

Mr. Maliki took a big risk when he decided to move against his fellow Shiites to reclaim Basra for the government. Iraqi troops were untested for such a complex, divisional-level operation and, in hindsight, their battle plans were too hastily drawn. The early setbacks might easily have emboldened Mr. Sadr, caused the Iraqi army to crumble and led to the end of Mr. Maliki's government.

Instead, Mr. Maliki and Iraqi forces persevered. And two months later, hundreds of Mahdi Army fighters have been arrested and weapons caches found. Following the model of the U.S. surge in Baghdad, Basra's streets are far safer thanks to the visible presence of 33,000 Iraqi troops. The Mahdi vice squads that terrorized the city's population are gone. The U.S. and Britain provided air support during the early stages of the operation, and continue to provide advisory support. But the Basra operation has clearly been an Iraqi success.

If you don't trust the WSJ, you can read largely the same story in The New York Times:

Three hundred miles south of Baghdad, the oil-saturated city of Basra has been transformed by its own surge, now seven weeks old.

In a rare success, forces loyal to Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki have largely quieted the city, to the initial surprise and growing delight of many inhabitants who only a month ago shuddered under deadly clashes between Iraqi troops and Shiite militias.

More details on Maliki's Operation Knight's Charge in Basra can be found at Kimberly Kagan's Institute for the Study of War.

Despite all this, Iraq could still go south. A war with Iran will upset Iraqi Shiites, possibly to the point of reigniting the civil war. The government could degenerate into autocracy. And you or I could be killed in an auto accident tomorrow. But as Thomas "Stonewall" Jackson once said, "Never take council of your fears." His point was not that we should ignore or dismiss danger, but rather that it should not paralyze our thinking. Despite the dangers of what lies ahead, the future or Iraq has never been better.