A Policy To Win In Iraq

Fire of Liberty

Professor Frederick W. Kagan, a resident scholar at AEI on Defense Issues, has a short piece in the Weekly Standard which notes that as long as the American military and the friends in the Iraqi security forces continue to take the fight to the insurgents they will win the day. I have to say the best part of Kagan's piece is the following:

There is only one thing the administration and the Iraqi government can do that generates both a sense of their victory and an obvious defeat for the insurgency: clear, hold, and rebuild cities and towns wracked by violence and lawlessness, as the president declared we would do last fall. When Iraqi and American troops clear a town in which the insurgents have been operating freely, we know we've won, the Iraqi people know we've won, and the insurgents know we've won. This is the way to create a sense of victory that everyone understands.

The other virtue of clear-and-hold operations is that they bring security. Without security, further political and economic progress is extremely difficult. And the ultimate goal of reconciling Iraq's sects, ethnicities, and tribes will be much easier once the population is secured. Insurgents take advantage of the absence of coalition and effective Iraqi military and police units to assassinate key officials seen as collaborators, intimidate or punish anyone who might provide information about the rebels to the coalition, and recruit supporters from disaffected and terrorized young men. Those young men are frequently unemployed, moreover, because it is nearly impossible to have a functioning local economy in such lawless conditions. Even the nonmilitary elements of counterinsurgency strategy that the Bush administration has rightly been emphasizing require security to succeed. Yet clear-and-hold is not actually the primary objective of U.S. forces in Iraq today. American commanders instead claim to be focused on "handing over battlespace" to newly trained Iraqi troops. Like the body counts of the Vietnam war, the percentage of "battlespace handover" has become the statistical proxy for success in this war.

That must change. With the Iraqi government now complete and the Iraqi Security Forces growing more rapidly than anyone had a right to expect, there is no more urgent task for the coalition in Iraq today than establishing security throughout the country. This is not merely part of a defensive operation to control the spreading violence. Now is the time for a surge in military operations to clear and hold contested areas in Iraq that can offer the prospect of convincing large numbers of Iraqis that the government will win and the insurgents will lose. This is the best hope for breaking the insurgency rapidly, strengthening the new Iraqi state, and achieving victory.

Here's hoping we push this policy to its fullest and secure Iraq for future generations so we don't have to fight in another war in Iraq some 10 years down the road. By following such a policy we'll achieve results much like Patton did during the Battle of the Bulge. We defeated a wretched then and we can do it again.

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If you want a longer a more detailed account of how to defeat the insurgency in Iraq, I suggest you read this piece by Frederick W. Kagan.