Ivory Dome

In the midst of all the reporting on Britney Spears and the presidential race, an important story from Iraq seems to have been lost in the shuffle:

US Sets Timetable to Hand Over Iraq’s Largest Province

I would have missed this myself had I not set up a Yahoo! Alert for the word “Ramadi” back when my son-in-law was deployed there.  According to this article, progress in this former hotbed of terrorism has been so dramatic that “over the past year, attacks in Ramadi have dropped from 25-30 every day to less than one a week.”  The official handover is scheduled for March or April.

Another fact in this article that’s under-reported in the mainstream media is this: “If Anbar is handed over on schedule, it will be the 10th of Iraq’s 18 provinces to be returned to local control by the coalition.”  Anyone who’s familiar with the geography of Iraq will appreciate the fact that Anbar province comprises a huge portion of country.

My son-in-law was deployed to Ramadi during the height of the violence there.  I told him this summer when we visited him and our daughter in Germany that it was my hope that some day he’d be able to walk the streets of Ramadi in peace.  He’s due to redeploy this spring, so maybe he’ll have that opportunity. 

 I’ve been very skeptical of arbitrary timetables for withdrawal from Iraq that are based on failure rather than success, but this is a timetable I can live with.

President Bush did make a bad mistake in the war on terrorism. But the
mistake was not his decision to go to war in Iraq. Bush’s mistake came in
his belief that this country is the same one his father fought for in WWII.
It is not.

Back then, they had just come out of a vicious depression. The country was
steeled by the hardship of that depression, but they still believed
fervently in this country.  They knew that the people had elected their
leaders, so it was the people’s duty to back those leaders.

Therefore, when the war broke out the people came together, rallied behind,
and stuck with their leaders, whether they had voted for them or not or
whether the war was going badly or not.

And war was just as distasteful and the anguish just as great then as it is
today. Often there were more casualties in one day in WWII than we have had
in the entire Iraq war. But that did not matter. The people stuck with the
President because it was their patriotic duty. Americans put aside their
differences in WWII and worked together to win that war.

Everyone from every strata of society, from young to old pitched in. Small
children pulled little wagons around to gather scrap metal for the war
effort. Grade school students saved their pennies to buy stamps for war
bonds to help the effort.

Men who were too old or medically 4F lied about their age or condition
trying their best to join the military. Women doubled their work to keep
things going at home. Harsh rationing of everything from gasoline to soap,
to butter was imposed, yet there was very little complaining.

You never heard prominent people on the radio belittling the President.
Interestingly enough in those days there were no fat cat actors and
entertainers who ran off to visit and fawn over dictators of hostile
countries and complain to them about our President. Instead, they made
upbeat films and entertained our troops to help the troops’ morale. And a
bunch even enlisted.

And imagine this: Teachers in schools actually started the day off with a
Pledge of Allegiance, and with prayers for our country and our troops!

Back then, no newspaper would have dared point out certain weak spots in
our cities where bombs could be set off to cause the maximum damage. No
newspaper would have dared complain about what we were doing to catch
spies.

A newspaper would have been laughed out of existence if it had complained
that German or Japanese soldiers were being ‘tortured’ by being forced to
wear women’s underwear, or subjected to interrogation by a woman, or being
scared by a dog or did not have air conditioning.

There were a lot of things different back then. We were not subjected to a
constant bombardment of pornography, perversion and promiscuity in movies
or on radio. We did not have legions of crackheads, dope pushers and armed
gangs roaming our streets.

No, President Bush did not make a mistake in his handling of terrorism. He
made the mistake of believing that we still had the courage and fortitude
of our fathers. He believed that this was still the country that our
fathers fought so dearly to preserve.

It is not the same country. It is now a cross between Sodom and Gomorra and
the land of Oz. We did unite for a short while after 9/11, but our attitude
changed when we found out that defending our country would require some
sacrifices.

We are in great danger. The terrorists are fanatic Muslims. They believe
that it is okay, even their duty, to kill anyone who will not convert to
Islam. It has been estimated that about one third or over three hundred
million Muslims are sympathetic to the terrorists cause…Hitler and Tojo
combined did not have nearly that many potential recruits.

So…we either win it – or lose it – and you ain’t gonna like losing. We must kill them till they beg us to stop, then and only then, can we move forward with creating a rational Democracy.

Now that hostilities appear to be decreasing in Iraq (notwithstanding the tenuous standoff between Turkey and the PKK), this might be a good time to step back, and rather than pat ourselves on the back for the fledgling successes of the Surge, take a closer look at why this war has dragged on for as long as it has and how we can avoid this in future conflicts.

Back in February 2003, just one month before Operation Iraqi Freedom, two members of the U.S. Army War College’s Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), Conrad C. Crane and W. Andrew Terrill, authored a report entitled “Reconstructing Iraq:  Insights, Challenges, and Missions for Military Forces in a Post-Conflict Scenario.”

In the Forward to his 84-page report, Douglas C. Lovelace, Jr., SSI Director, wrote these prophetic words:

“If this nation and its coalition partners decide to undertake the mission to remove Saddam Hussein, they will also have to be prepared to dedicate considerable time, manpower, and money to the effort to reconstruct Iraq after the fighting is over.  Otherwise, the success of military operations will be ephemeral, and the problems they were designed to eliminate could return or be replaced by new and more virulent difficulties.”

The report itself consists of three parts.  The first part discusses 20th century post-war operations from an historical perspective; The second part analyzes unique challenges posed by a post-war Iraq.  In the third part, Crane and Terrill provide a detailed “mission matrix” consisting of some 135 tasks, organized in 21 categories, which they deemed necessary for winning the peace in Iraq.

Crane and Terrill presented their initial findings to a joint and interagency workshop in December 2002.  Unfortunately, by the time the final report was published in February 2003, the die was already cast.  The Bush Administration had already decided that they could accomplish the post-conflict mission with considerably less time, manpower, and money than Crane and Terrill proposed.  And, as Director Lovelace predicted, the success of military operations were indeed ephemeral, and the problems they were designed to eliminate did in fact return and were replaced by new and more virulent difficulties.

Crane and Terrill foresaw much of the ethnic and tribal problems between Sunnis and Shi’ites that plagued Iraq for the last four years and even predicted the Kurdish problems that now loom on the horizon.  The lesson to be learned:  plan from the outset at least as well for the peace as for the war.

Here’s a link to the Crane-Terrill Report:

http://www.strategicstudiesinstitute.army.mil/pdffiles/PUB182.pdf 

What’s Sahawa?, you might ask.  It’s the Arabic word for awakening, and that’s been happening in Iraq, not only among the Sunnis in Anbar province, but now it seems that the Shiites are getting on board as well.  The two men in the picture are Shiite leader Ammar Hakim (left) and Sunni sheik Abdul Sattar Abu Risha (right).  On October 14, forty Shiite and Sunni leaders (including Hakim and Abu Risha) met in Ramadi, the birthplace of Sahawa, under the protection of the U.S. Army.  Here’s where I read about this:

http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2007/10/a-shiite-awaken.html

Why isn’t the New York Times all over this important development.  Well, it turns out they are … sort of.  Here’s their report on the same meeting, starting in the fourth paragraph of an article with a slightly less optimistic headline:  Iraqi Journalist Is Shot and Killed in Baghdad:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/10/15/world/middleeast/15iraq.html?_r=2&oref=slogin&oref=slogin

(I guess the Old Gray Lady figured that if they buried this good news in a negative article, no one would notice.)

If the Shiite Sahawa takes off the way the Sunni Sahawa has, the Democrats are going to be in trouble (remember Harry Reid’s “The war is lost” remark back in February?).  Faced with the politically unfortunate prospect of success in Iraq, they’re trying a new form of sabotage:  alienate the Turks to the point that they cut off the major supply routes to our troops.  But that’s another topic; I’ll try to post about that later.