This is good, but full benefit from the article requires that all three pages are read. Can you guys handle that?
Distilled excerpts:
During my 15th trip to Iraq in August, for the first time I didn’t hear a shot fired. In several cities, I walked into markets with only a few American soldiers, and was immediately surrounded by Iraqis eager to talk about the economy, security, politics, whatever.
Normality? Nowhere close. Concrete barriers (designed to restrict the flesh-ripping radius of suicide bombers) were still in place, enclosing neighborhoods in Baghdad and a dozen other cities. Car bombings and criminal kidnappings persisted, as did battles against disparate al-Qaeda cells and Shiite insurgent gangs incited by Iran. Still, Iraq was not engulfed in civil war. The Sunni resistance had largely collapsed.
...The Awakening would not have started if the Americans had remained robo-cops, operating from bases apart from the population. Instead, the Americans on the western front were out among the people. Sattar knew the American leaders by name. The Americans parked a tank on his front lawn to protect him. I asked Sattar, later assassinated by AQI, if the turnaround in Anbar could not have come years earlier, and saved much grief. He thought for a moment, then said no.
“We Sunnis had to convince ourselves,” he said. He was the most remarkable leader I saw in Iraq.
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7 comments:
"The basic cause of the turnaround was the decency and strength of the American troops whom the Sunnis came to know on the streets. "
Le Roi Soleil chokes on his champagne.
"The process of reappraising the confused U.S. strategy in Iraq began in the summer of 2006, when Baghdad was falling apart, and did not conclude until January of 2007. Bush himself was passive and indecisive. But he was well served, as was the nation, by the quiet, unassuming National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, "
Bush as passive and indecisive? Gee, who woulda thunk it? Not JJ.
"The strategy under General George Casey, Petraeus’s predecessor as top commander in Iraq, had been to hand an ongoing war over to the nascent Iraqi army, while the U.S. exited as fast as possible. Although this strategy was at odds with the Bush vision of victory, it went unchallenged by the White House from 2004 until late 2006, when Baghdad was falling apart"
Yup, it was all to clear to see. A Hackett for a general with a president in McLellan mode
"The crucial enabler, though, was the change in Sunni attitude. This was caused by the combination of decency and toughness by tens of thousands of American grunts who had been out on the streets for years. That may sound like fluff, but it was the daily grind of the grunts—listening to complaints, arguing with Iraqi and American officials for resources, checking on suspect activity, conducting vehicle searches, uncovering arms caches, arguing with sheiks, absorbing sniper fire without blasting away—that gradually won over the Sunnis. Yes, the Sunni tribes had come to hate the al-Qaeda organization they had welcomed years earlier. But without trusting and aligning with the Americans, the tribes could not drive out al-Qaeda. "
Le Pew's pet peeves knocked down like so many shots of whiskey at a Hitchens and Hunter Thompson jamboree.
Thanks for the article, MFT.
Finally " the military strategy in Iraq rattled down the wrong track for the same reasons as the current meltdown in the financial sector. Those at the top were out of touch and overconfident, and the fiduciary responsibility for risk assessment was foregone".
This is endemic throughout our culture......
A A Spengler
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