“Do not try to do too much with your own hands. Better the Arabs do it tolerably than that you do it perfectly. It is their war, and you are there to help them, not win it for them.”
– Lawrence of Arabia
Washington – America’s open-ended commitment to Iraq is reaching its end.
Once Iraq’s Dec. 15 election is over, and its people have their own elected government, it will be time to test the proposition that the march to victory is with fewer U.S. troops.
That’s not Cindy Sheehan talking. That’s no cut-and-run clamor from nervous members of Congress in an election year. It’s the verdict of the military men who are leading the fight. After months without an over-arching strategy, the U.S. military has chosen classical counter-insurgency doctrine as the map to success in Iraq.
“History tells us that external powers, without a strong indigenous partner in the security side, have not fared well in dealing with insurgencies,” Gen. George Casey, commander of coalition forces in Iraq, told Congress recently.
“We have built enough Iraqi capacity,” said Casey, “where we can begin talking seriously about transitioning this counter-insurgency mission to them.”
Last week’s Senate push for a plan to end the war was a signal to President Bush that members of Congress are as troubled as their constituents about the casualties we are taking in Iraq. But it’s not just America’s moms and dads who want to discover if Iraqis will fight for a democratic, unified Iraq.
As U.S. military commanders see it, we’re caught in a Catch-22. Our forces are there to suppress an insurgency, which grows stronger because our forces are there.
“The longer that the coalition bears the brunt of the counter-insurgency fight, the longer we’ll bear the brunt of the counter-insurgency fight,” says Casey.
By turning the war over to the Iraqis, Casey says, the U.S. will take some of the pressure off its battered armed forces, reduce Iraqi dependency and remove “one of the elements that fuels the insurgency: that of the coalition forces as an occupying force.”
Casey’s battle plan is endorsed by three other commanders with experience in the Middle East: Gen. John Abizaid, commander of U.S. Central Command; retired Gen. Richard Myers, former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff; and Gen. David Petraeus, who until recently was in charge of training Iraqi security forces.
Abizaid has been practicing what Casey preaches. In the spring of 2003, the U.S. had 375,000 troops in the Gulf region. Today, the number is 200,000. The Pentagon has announced new deployment plans for Iraq, suggesting there will be even fewer troops in 2006.
“We should, in fact, in the long war, over time, reduce our military footprint,” Abizaid says. “We must make clear to the people of the region that we have no designs on their territory and resources.”
Says Myers: “We draw fire by just being occupiers.”
Petraeus, who commanded the 101st Airborne during the war, espouses the italicized advice from Lawrence of Arabia that tops this column. He begins his briefings by reading it aloud.
Now, “the Iraqi security forces are in the fight,” Petraeus says. By mid-December, Iraq will have 230,000 trained members of its security forces, he said, well on its way to a goal of 325,000.
Shipments of body armor, Kevlar helmets, tanks, armored personnel carriers and machine guns are clogging Iraq’s docks. There is “much work ahead,” said Petraeus, but the Iraqis are making “huge progress.”
Indeed, the infamous drive from Baghdad to its airport – the once-deadly “Route Irish” – is now a relatively normal stretch of highway, Casey says, because Iraqi troops have assumed much of the responsibility for keeping it safe.
Retired Col. Lawrence Wilkerson, who worked as former Secretary of State Colin Powell’s chief of staff, quotes Winston Churchill when asked to assess how things are going in Iraq.
“America will always do the right thing, after exhausting all other possibilities,” Churchill liked to say.
The U.S. has “reached the point … where we’ve exhausted all the possibilities,” said Wilkerson. “We’re actually … doing the kinds of things that are necessary to be done.”
Wilkerson has made headlines recently for accusing the secretive “cabal” led by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and Vice President Dick Cheney of bungling the U.S. occupation of Iraq. But he admires Bush “for sticking to” the painful, costly goal of Iraqi freedom and is “guardedly optimistic” about things now.
The Iraqi and American people have shared an enduring ambivalence about this war. They both have recognized the need for U.S. troops, while wishing the Americans would go home.
Now is not the time for ambivalence. It may take a decade, Casey says, during which we’ll be called upon to help. But it is time to start giving the Iraqis back their country, and start bringing our kids home.
“This is not a cut-and-run strategy,” Myers says. “This is a win strategy.”
John Aloysius Farrell writes every Sunday. Comment at the Washington and the West blog () or contact him at jfarrell@denverpost.com.
