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DEFENDING THE WAR.
Dove Taleby Jonathan Chait Post date: 09.02.05Issue date: 09.12.05

As the situation in Iraq started deteriorating last year, I kept waiting for war opponents to go after the liberal Iraq hawks. Months went by, though, and the doves appeared more interested in slapping around fatter and juicier targets like the Bush administration and its starry-eyed neoconservative backers. I started to think we might escape unscathed.
But now it's open season on liberal hawks. A recent Nation feature, by Ari Berman, attacks a coterie of liberal hawks who "found a way to profit from its errors, coalescing around a view that its members had been misled by the Bush Administration and that too little planning, too few troops and too much ideology were largely to blame for the chaos in Iraq." Meanwhile, the cover story in the latest American Prospect chides pro-war pundits as "the journalistic equivalents of Donald Rumsfeld--authors of disaster, spared from accountability, still bewilderingly in place." (The story focuses on conservatives but has a section on Thomas L. Friedman, as a proxy for liberals who crusaded for a democratizing war despite the fact that Bush had no intention of prosecuting the war as they preferred.)
Well, OK, fair enough. Given that things have not gone terribly well to date, a certain degree of humility is in order here. (In 2002 and 2003, I wrote a tnr cover story and a couple of editorials defending the war in fairly strident terms.) I'm tempted to accept the chastening and slink away. The trouble is that things aren't quite as clear-cut as the doves would have it. And more is at stake here than pundit bragging rights. The clear implication of this dressing-down is the view that the Democratic Party needs to nominate a war opponent in 2008 in particular and to stop listening to its hawkish foreign policy intellectuals in general.
Obviously, Iraq remains dangerously unstable. But, even if, for the sake of argument, we concede that the war is an abject disaster, it doesn't necessarily follow that the liberal prescription was wrong. Liberal complaints about mismanagement of the war have centered on the Bush administration's refusal to send as many troops into Iraq as the Army, and nearly any expert, thought would be necessary to carry out an orderly occupation. Could more troops have really made a significant difference? Yes, because, as The New Yorker's Malcolm Gladwell has famously argued, sociological phenomena are often governed by "tipping points" rather than proportional returns. This is often the case with crime or other antisocial behavior, and it seems to apply to Iraq. A sufficient number of troops would likely have provided enough security to carry out reconstruction projects, which would have reduced the supply of unemployed, desperate males, which in turn would have created more political stability. Instead, Iraq has endured a vicious cycle of insecurity, failed reconstruction, economic stagnation, and political instability.
Many Iraq doves have dismissed this alternative as wishful thinking, a way for liberal hawks to transfer the blame completely onto the Bush administration and spare themselves. Yet the most prominent advocate of this view, Larry Diamond, is not only the most prominent expert on the subject (as a specialist on democracy-building who consulted with the Coalition Provisional Authority), he opposed the war in the first place. Obviously, we can't know for sure how a competently executed occupation would have fared. Yet the certainty of the doves has little to recommend it. History is filled with examples of occupations--East Timor, postwar Germany, and Japan--that had sufficient troops and did not lead to the sort of chaos endemic in Iraq.
To this, the Iraq doves reply that we hawks should have known all along that Bush wouldn't prosecute the war the way we wanted. The administration's incompetence and devotion to fighting a war on the cheap, they say, was blindingly obvious from Afghanistan, whose rebuilding had already suffered from too few resources and attention by 2003. But, I figured at the time, the invasion of Afghanistan was executed within a matter of weeks. The buildup to the Iraq war lasted far longer. And various government agencies--State, Defense, and others--had engaged in copious planning. When Bush and his mouthpieces blithely insisted the war could be waged quickly and cheaply--even though authorities like economic adviser Lawrence Lindsey and General Eric Shinseki had confessed that the war might be costly and require a quarter of a million troops--I simply thought they were lying. The administration has routinely minimized the cost of its initiatives, in order to keep deficit hawks from worrying about the size of its tax cuts. Who could have guessed that, this time, the Bushies actually believed their own propaganda? After all, the administration appeared to have an excellent grasp of its political interests, and obviously a chaotic Iraq would hurt Bush's reelection campaign. It seemed logical to me that they would do what they needed to do to safeguard their own standing.

I should probably note at this point that my argument for the Iraq war, unlike that of many liberals, did not hinge upon democratization. I wasn't sure creating a democracy in Iraq right away was feasible, and I figured that the Bush administration would settle for a stable, less repressive but still illiberal government in Baghdad. My rationale hinged upon Saddam Hussein's failure to disarm. While the weapons of mass destruction rationale has gotten an even worse rap than the democracy rationale, I still believe the logic made the most sense given what we knew at the time. Let me explain.
The truce terms of the first Gulf war called for Saddam to dismantle his weapons of mass destruction program under the watch of international inspectors. Throughout the 1990s, Saddam played a cat-and-mouse game with the inspectors, alternately extending and withdrawing cooperation, depending mostly on how much diplomatic and military pressure he faced. It reached a crisis point in 1998, when Iraq stopped cooperating altogether. In response, the Clinton administration ordered three days of bombing, but--in part due to the impeachment--essentially let the issue drop. And, yet, even as Clinton left office, the reasons for enforcing the truce terms remained compelling. Iraq under Saddam posed a major regional menace and harbored ambitions to obtain a nuclear weapon. Saddam's dreams of regional domination and history of irrational aggression suggested that allowing him to obtain such a weapon would be extremely dangerous.
Worse, containment was clearly breaking down. Iraq had successfully rebuffed international inspectors, and the will to enforce economic sanctions was rapidly eroding. As Brookings scholar and liberal Iraq hawk Kenneth Pollack notes, "The oil-for-food program was a massive sieve," allowing billions of dollars to filter up to Saddam and his henchmen. Rather than toughen the weapons inspections, the political pressure in the U.N. Security Council pushed in the direction of weakening or altogether lifting the economic sanctions. The "smart sanctions" enacted in May 2002 represented the Bush administration's attempt to retrench weakening international support--doing a better job at alleviating the suffering of Iraqis, but not doing anything to stem the flow of cash and illicit goods into Iraq.
The Bush administration recognized two basic truths. First, the cycle of threats, partial cooperation, and confrontation would simply go on forever until Iraq developed a nuclear weapon and (in Saddam's view) could no longer be deterred. Therefore, the United States had to demand full cooperation with the truce terms of the Gulf war, not salami-slicing. Second, because economic sanctions and bombings had failed to produce full cooperation, only the threat of war had any chance of compelling it. Diplomatically, this strategy unquestionably worked: By threatening to invade Iraq, the Bush administration succeeded in forcing the U.N. Security Council to demand renewed inspections.
A certain revisionism has taken root over the last couple of years as to just what those inspections achieved. As most liberals now recall it, Saddam was cooperating with the inspectors, yet Bush short-circuited the process with a precipitous invasion. Nothing of the sort happened. Saddam failed to provide a full accounting of what had happened to Iraq's unconventional weapons, denied the inspectors private interviews with scientists, and hid crucial documents in private homes. As Hans Blix, the chief U.N. weapons inspector, reported in January 2003, Iraq "appears not to have come to a genuine acceptance, not even today, of the disarmament that was demanded of it."
Subsequently, Iraq offered a greater degree of cooperation. It never fully complied, though. And, despite the fact that Blix and nuclear inspector Mohamed ElBaradei were making progress at tracking Iraq's weaponry, there is only so much you can learn without the full cooperation of the host country. (Inspectors thought they had a handle on Iraq's WMD programs in the mid-'90s, too, until Saddam's brother-in-law defected and revealed that his biological program was far more advanced than the outside world thought.) The "progress" reported by inspectors did not represent Iraq taking its final chance to completely foreswear its WMD programs. Instead, it was simply another example of Saddam strategically calibrating his level of defiance. At moments of maximum pressure, Saddam would come most of the way toward the demands of the inspectors, only to relapse inevitably when the heat was turned down. His partial compliance with Blix reflected the same strategic assumption that he could simply wait out the United States and the Security Council.
Saddam's goal was to split the Security Council and reveal the war threat as a bluff. And, when French President Jacques Chirac declared, in February of 2003, that "disarmament must happen peacefully," he revealed that it was a bluff. France supported tougher inspections only as a gambit to head off war. Even if Iraq did not disarm, France (and, hence, the Security Council) would never support an invasion. Had diplomacy and inspections continued, they would merely have headed back into the same cycle.
e all know, of course, that Iraq turned out to have abandoned its weapons of mass destruction programs. In retrospect, going to war to save the world from a nonexistent weapons program was an enormous mistake. Yet the conclusion the most radical doves take from this proves more than they think. Berman's Nation story acidly notes, "It's more than a little ironic that the people who got Iraq so wrong continue to tell the Democrats how to get it right." The same article concludes, "Unless and until the [pro-war] strategic class transforms or declines in stature, the Democrats beholden to them will be doomed to repeat their Iraq mistakes."
Did the doves know this all along? There was a smaller, fairly radical category of Iraq doves who did not share the hawks' concern about Iraq's pursuit of WMD. They include left-wing icons like George Lakoff and Michael Moore, who, unlike virtually the entire Democratic Party, opposed the war in Afghanistan as well. They see the Iraq war not as a departure from the broader struggle against terrorism but as its apotheosis. (The Nation would fall into this category, including Berman, who writes with evident disgust that some Democratic centrists still want "to make fighting Islamic totalitarianism the central organizing principle of the party.") Many of these leftists never accepted that Iraq posed any appreciable unconventional threat, and they can justly crow at their vindication.
And, yet, their general record of foreign policy predictions is not exactly stellar. Simply take The Nation as an example. Its handwringing over the Afghanistan invasion--"airstrikes and other military actions may not accomplish the ends we endorse and may exacerbate the situation"--seems somewhat overwrought. Its fierce denunciation of the war in Kosovo--"nato's war on Yugoslavia has failed catastrophically"--has not worn well. And its editorial take on the Gulf war--"Sanctions have a much better chance of forcing Iraqi concessions in a shorter time and with much less misery than war.... The death toll [from fighting] could rise to Korean War levels, or higher"--missed the mark rather badly. So perhaps the left should rethink this idea of choosing foreign policy intellectuals on the basis of their predictive accuracy.
Most Iraq doves, though, did not share the Nation/ Moore worldview. They shared the basic assumptions of the liberal hawks. In the lead-up to war, almost nobody suggested that Iraq had completely given up its WMD programs. While U.S. intelligence agencies did not bear out the alarmist interpretation peddled by the Bush administration, they--along with the major European intelligence agencies--believed that Iraq still harbored biological and chemical weapons and a nuclear program. Ted Kennedy believed it. ("The biological and chemical weapons Saddam has are not new. He has possessed them for more than a decade.") The New York Times editorial page believed it. ("What really counts in this conflict ... is the destruction of Iraq's unconventional weapons and the dismantling of its program to develop nuclear arms.") There was no good reason not to believe it. Saddam had spent a decade thwarting weapons inspectors and paid an enormous economic price for doing so. Moreover, on two previous occasions (after the Gulf war and in 1995), Western intelligence discovered that they had been underestimating Iraq's WMD capability.
It's this moderate liberal critique that didn't hold together. These Iraq doves conceded that Iraq had a serious WMD program and conceded that letting Saddam acquire a nuclear weapon would be a disaster. Yet they assumed, against all evidence, that the rest of the U.N. Security Council had a good-faith interest in enforcing effective containment and that measures short of war would persuade Saddam to abandon his WMD deterrent. We now know that Saddam was so determined to keep his neighbors and his own people guessing about his WMD capability that he endured a full invasion rather than openly disarm. The moderate Iraq dove analysis, if anything, looks far worse in light of what we now know. It just happens that the moderate doves were bailed out for reasons they didn't foresee.
One way to think of it is to imagine a known murderer walking down a dark alley with his hand stuck inside his jacket. The police shout at him to put his hands up, yet he continues to walk toward them. After he ignores still more warnings, they shoot him dead, only to discover he was unarmed. Were they wrong to shoot him? Certainly they should not have shot him, but based on what they knew at the time, their decision was correct. It would be hard for those arguing to hold one's fire to make a compelling case that their advice ought to be heeded in the future. Jonathan Chait is a senior editor at TNR.

The Left debates the war

Even ideological allies differ on the war's gains vs. its costs

By Thomas Cushman Special for The Republic Sept. 4, 2005 12:00 AM

Consider the following passage: "It is the sense of the Congress that the United States should support those elements of the Iraqi opposition that advocate a very different future for Iraq than the bitter reality of internal repression and external aggression that the current regime in Baghdad now offers."Let me be clear on what the U.S. objectives are: The United States wants Iraq to rejoin the family of nations as a freedom-loving and law-abiding member. This is in our interest and that of our allies within the region."This sounds a lot like George W. Bush. But these are in fact the words of President Bill Clinton on the occasion of his signing into law the Iraq Liberation Act of 1998. It was the U.S. Congress and a Democrat President who put forward the humanitarian rationale for the war in Iraq, a war of liberation and democratization that was set in motion by a Republican president with the consent of the Congress in 2003. Throughout this war, it seems that the only legitimate position among liberals is to oppose it. This is not the case. I am the editor of a new collection of essays by a group of leading liberal writers, scholars, and political leaders who have defended the war on humanitarian grounds.Our support of the war was inspired by many factors. Most of us felt a strong sense of solidarity with the Iraqi people, who had experienced a long history of brutal oppression under Saddam, including systematic torture, executions and genocidal campaigns.Saddam's regime killed more than 300,000 of his own people. We were dismayed by the failure of the United Nations to enforce its own laws and principles and by the flagrant violation of U.N. Security Council resolutions by the Hussein regime.Many of us were especially disheartened that many of our colleagues on the left chose to vilify and degrade the United States as an "empire" bent on world domination rather than focusing on the evil of Saddam's regime and assisting the Iraqi people to rid themselves of it.Most of us were convinced by Saddam's own history of aggression, his previous use of weapons of mass destruction, and his efforts to conceal his activities from Western inspectors that he did possess WMD and posed a threat to world peace and security.At the time, it did not seem wise to give Saddam Hussein the benefit of the doubt, a move that the United Nations and anti-war advocates never failed to do. As it turns out, the WMD argument, Bush's central rationale for the war, turned to be unsubstantiated. In the present period of strife in Iraq, can we still make humanitarian arguments in defense of it?The Bush administration never made the humanitarian case strongly enough in the days leading up to the war. My own answer to this question, shared by many of the authors in the collection, is yes. Liberal democratic states that wage war to remove tyrants have a duty to foster social reconstruction and democratization and to facilitate the entrance of the new society into the community of civilized liberal democratic nations.It might seem strange to stress this moral duty, since most of the news in Iraq these days appears to be bad. But this is in the nature of the news: bad news is newsworthy and good news is ignored.Those who continue to argue against the war and thereby encourage the defeat of this revolutionary experiment amplify the bad news. Those of us who see this as a bold new experiment in freedom and democracy focus on what has gone right in Iraq.Saddam Hussein has been deposed and faces trial. Last year, free and open elections occurred in which 7 million Iraqis proudly voted in the first democratic elections in Iraqi history. A Kurdish president was elected in a land where Kurds had been persecuted throughout the reign of Saddam. A new civil society consisting of hundreds of new non-governmental organizations is emerging.At present, the new democracy is working on a constitution. It is a thorny process, and no one can say what the concrete results will be. But one must take heart in at least the fact that it is happening.As we observe this process, it is a good idea to remember how difficult was the process of the writing of our own U.S. Constitution. How many times did the new American republic almost fall apart over serious differences of opinions among the authors of American destiny? Even our own country did not avoid a civil war over some of the issues that were never adequately addressed at the time of the writing of our own constitution. If you are a liberal who finds Bush himself and his conduct of the war problematic but also cannot stand the cynical naysaying and shrieking despair of the anti-war left, then you will find some comfort in the views of those of us who consider ourselves to be liberal anti-totalitarians. The anti-war movement has failed the Iraqi people, not only in not supporting them in their revolutionary experiment but by deliberately creating an impression of the war that is laden with their own negativity and despair, rather than focusing on the successes of the war and assisting the Iraqi people in their struggle for freedom. The anti-war forces have not only ill-served the Iraqi people but have obscured some of the central facts of Iraqi public opinion. According to extensive survey research carried out under the auspices of Oxford University, the majority of the Iraqi people supported the war to depose Saddam Hussein.Almost three years after the war, in spite of the brutal realities of the occupation and the war against democracy and freedom being waged by Baathist and al-Qaida terrorists (whom Michael Moore once lovingly compared to American Minutemen), most Iraqis feel that the war was worth it. Even more importantly, a significant majority of Iraqis feel hopeful about the future. These are not the stories that you will hear in the media, but they are heartening to those who hope that the Iraqi revolution will succeed. Survey research also shows that Iraqis want the American occupation to end and the opportunity to forge their own destiny. The war has created a curious mixture of feelings of liberation and humiliation among the Iraqi people. It would, however, be a serious mistake if coalition forces were to leave now.The process of democratization cannot succeed without adequate security, and Iraqi security forces are not yet ready to take on that responsibility on their own.If American forces pull out now, this will be a victory for the fascists who are trying to destroy Iraq's path to freedom and democracy. To retreat now would give these forces a victory that would not only destroy the hard-won achievements made inside Iraq but would also deal a serious blow to the ideals of Western civilization, liberal democracy and freedom by emboldening the very forces that would like to destroy these ideals.Indeed, our own future depends fundamentally on preserving and advancing the liberal democratic dreams of the Iraqi people and defeating the enemy in Iraq, even if the road sometimes appears to be impossibly rough and rocky.
About the authorThomas Cushman is a professor of sociology at Wellesley College and the editor in chief of the Journal of Human Rights. He is editor of the collected essays A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq, recently published by the University of California Press.
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How to Win in Iraq

By Andrew F. Krepinevich, Jr.

From Foreign Affairs, September/October 2005

ANDREW F. KREPINEVICH, JR., is Executive Director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and Distinguished Visiting Professor of Public Policy at George Mason University. He is the author of The Army and Vietnam.

A FALTERING EFFORT

Despite the Bush administration's repeated declarations of its commitment to success in Iraq, the results of current policy there are not encouraging. After two years, Washington has made little progress in defeating the insurgency or providing security for Iraqis, even as it has overextended the U.S. Army and eroded support for the war among the American public. Although withdrawing now would be a mistake, simply "staying the course," by all current indications, will not improve matters either. Winning in Iraq will require a new approach.
The basic problem is that the United States and its coalition partners have never settled on a strategy for defeating the insurgency and achieving their broader objectives. On the political front, they have been working to create a democratic Iraq, but that is a goal, not a strategy. On the military front, they have sought to train Iraqi security forces and turn the war over to them. As President George W. Bush has stated, "Our strategy can be summed up this way: as the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down." But the president is describing a withdrawal plan rather than a strategy.
Without a clear strategy in Iraq, moreover, there is no good way to gauge progress. Senior political and military leaders have thus repeatedly made overly optimistic or even contradictory declarations. In May of 2004, for example, following the insurgent takeover of Fallujah, General Richard Myers, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, stated, "I think we're on the brink of success here." Six months later, before last November's offensive to recapture the city, General John Abizaid, the commander of U.S. forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, said, "When we win this fight -- and we will win -- there will be nowhere left for the insurgents to hide." Following the recapture, Lieutenant General John Sattler, the Marine commander in Iraq, declared that the coalition had "broken the back of the insurgency." Yet in the subsequent months, the violence continued unabated. Nevertheless, seven months later Vice President Dick Cheney claimed that the insurgency was in its "last throes," even as Lieutenant General John Vines, commander of the multinational corps in Iraq, was conceding, "We don't see the insurgency expanding or contracting right now." Most Americans agree with this less optimistic assessment: according to the most recent polls, nearly two-thirds think the coalition is "bogged down."
The administration's critics, meanwhile, have offered as their alternative "strategy" an accelerated timetable for withdrawal. They see Iraq as another Vietnam and advocate a similar solution: pulling out U.S. troops and hoping for the best. The costs of such premature disengagement would likely be calamitous. The insurgency could morph into a bloody civil war, with the significant involvement of both Syria and Iran. Radical Islamists would see the U.S. departure as a victory, and the ensuing chaos would drive up oil prices.
Instead of a timetable for withdrawal, the United States needs a real strategy built around the principles of counterinsurgency warfare. To date, U.S. forces in Iraq have largely concentrated their efforts on hunting down and killing insurgents. The idea of such operations is to erode the enemy's strength by killing fighters more quickly than replacements can be recruited. Although it is too early to tell for sure whether this approach will ultimately bring success, its current record is not good: even when an attack manages to inflict serious insurgent casualties, there is little or no enduring improvement in security once U.S. forces withdraw from the area.
Instead, U.S. and Iraqi forces should adopt an "oil-spot strategy" in Iraq, which is essentially the opposite approach. Rather than focusing on killing insurgents, they should concentrate on providing security and opportunity to the Iraqi people, thereby denying insurgents the popular support they need. Since the U.S. and Iraqi armies cannot guarantee security to all of Iraq simultaneously, they should start by focusing on certain key areas and then, over time, broadening the effort -- hence the image of an expanding oil spot. Such a strategy would have a good chance of success. But it would require a protracted commitment of U.S. resources, a willingness to risk more casualties in the short term, and an enduring U.S. presence in Iraq, albeit at far lower force levels than are engaged at present. If U.S. policymakers and the American public are unwilling to make such a commitment, they should be prepared to scale down their goals in Iraq significantly.
THE FACE OF THE INSURGENCY
The insurgency plaguing Iraq has three sources. One is the inexplicable lack of U.S. postwar planning. The security vacuum that followed the collapse of Saddam Hussein's regime gave hostile elements the opportunity to organize, and the poorly designed and slowly implemented reconstruction plan provided the insurgents with a large pool of unemployed Iraqis from which to recruit. The second source is Iraq's tradition of rule by those best able to seize power through violent struggle. Washington's muddled signals have created the impression that American troops may soon depart, opening the way to an Iraqi power struggle. (This is why the Shiite Arabs and the Kurds, even though they generally support the new government, have refused to disband their own militias.) The third source of the insurgency is the fact that jihadists have made Iraq a major theater in their war against the United States, abetted by the absence of security in Iraq and the presence of some 140,000 U.S. "targets."
The insurgency is dominated by two groups: Sunni Arab Baathists and foreign jihadists. Although it is difficult to measure their strength precisely, the former group is clearly larger, numbering perhaps 20,000, while the jihadists are estimated to number in the low hundreds. The Baathists -- former members of Saddam's ruling elite -- hope to restore themselves to power. The jihadists want to inflict a defeat on the United States, deal a blow to its influence in the region, and establish a radical Islamist state in Iraq.
Both insurgent camps know they cannot defeat the U.S.-led coalition militarily. Their best chance of success is to wait for a premature U.S. withdrawal and then spark a coup, in which a small, well-disciplined group with foreign backing seizes power from a weak, demoralized regime. Toward this end, the insurgents are fighting to perpetuate disorder and to prevent the establishment of a legitimate, democratic Iraqi government. By creating an atmosphere of intimidation, insecurity, and despair, they hope to undermine support for the government. Brazen attacks on its leaders and police send a chilling message to the Iraqi people: If the government cannot even protect its own, how can it protect you? Sabotage of Iraq's national infrastructure underscores the government's failure to provide basic services such as water and electricity and to sustain the oil production on which Iraq's welfare depends. By inflicting casualties on U.S. forces at the same time, the insurgents seek to raise the cost of continued U.S. involvement and weaken support for the war back home -- thereby hastening a U.S. withdrawal.
The insurgents have proved themselves to be resilient and resourceful, but they have also shown serious weaknesses. Compared with the United States' opponents in Vietnam, they are a relatively small and isolated group; the Iraqi rebels number no more than a few tens of thousands, whereas the ranks of the Vietnamese Communists were composed of roughly ten times that number. Iraqi insurgents rarely fight in groups as large as 100; in Vietnam, U.S. forces often encountered well-coordinated enemy formations of far greater size. The Vietnamese Communists, veterans of over two decades of nearly continuous war against the Japanese, the French, and the South Vietnamese, were also far better trained and led than the Iraqi insurgents and enjoyed external backing from China and the Soviet Union. The support provided to the insurgents by Iran, Syria, and radical Islamists elsewhere pales in comparison.
The Iraqi insurgents are also relatively isolated from the Iraqi people. Sunni Arab Muslims comprise the overwhelming majority of insurgent forces but account for only 20 percent of Iraq's population, and the jihadists are mostly foreigners. Neither insurgent movement has any chance of stimulating a broad-based uprising that involves Arab Shiites and Kurds. Indeed, despite the hardships endured by the Iraqi people, there has been nothing even approaching a mass revolt against the U.S.-led forces or the interim Iraqi government. This is not surprising, for the insurgents have no positive message with which to inspire popular support. A Baathist restoration would mean a return to the misery of Saddam's rule, and the jihadists would do to Iraq what radical Islamists have done in Afghanistan and Iran: introduce a reign of terror and repression.
The insurgency's success, accordingly, depends on continued disorder to forestall the creation of a stable, democratic Iraq and erode the coalition's willingness to persist and prevail. The insurgents believe the coalition lacks staying power, citing as evidence the U.S. withdrawals from Lebanon following the 1983 bombing of the Marine barracks in Beirut and from Somalia a decade later after 18 U.S. servicemen were killed. The Baathist insurgents hope that if they succeed in outlasting the Americans, support from Syria and other Arab states will enable them to topple the new regime. This would likely trigger a civil war, with Shiite Arab Iraqis supported by Iran. Radical Islamists would have perhaps their best chance of seizing power under such chaotic conditions.
CENTERS OF GRAVITY
In conventional warfare, the enemy's military forces and capital city are often considered its centers of gravity, meaning that losing either would spell defeat. In the Iraq war, for example, the coalition concentrated on destroying Saddam's Republican Guard and capturing Baghdad. But the centers of gravity in counterinsurgency warfare are completely different, and focusing efforts on defeating the enemy's military forces through traditional forms of combat is a mistake.
The current fight has three centers of gravity: the Iraqi people, the American people, and the American soldier. The insurgents have recognized this, making them their primary targets. For the United States, the key to securing each one is winning "hearts and minds." The Iraqi people must believe that their government offers them a better life than the insurgents do, and they must think that the government will prevail. If they have doubts on either score, they will withhold their support. The American people must believe that the war is worth the sacrifice, in lives and treasure, and think that progress is being made. If the insurgents manage to erode their will, Washington will be forced to abandon the infant regime in Baghdad before it is capable of standing on its own. Finally, the American soldier must believe that the war is worth the sacrifice and think that there is progress toward victory. Unlike in Vietnam, the United States is waging war with an all-volunteer military, which gives the American soldier (or marine) a "vote" in the conflict. With over 150,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, soldiers must rotate back into those war zones at a high rate. If confidence in the war wanes, veterans will vote with their feet by refusing to reenlist and prospective new recruits will avoid signing up in the first place. If this occurs, the United States will be unable to sustain anything approaching its current effort in Iraq. A precipitous reduction in U.S. forces could further undermine the resolve of both the American and the Iraqi people. At present, U.S. Army and Marine Corps reenlistment rates are strong. Army recruiting, however, is down substantially.
The insurgents have a clear advantage when it comes to this fight: they only need to win one of the centers of gravity to succeed, whereas the United States must secure all three. Making matters even more complicated for the coalition, a Catch-22 governs the fight against the insurgency: efforts designed to secure one center of gravity may undermine the prospects of securing the others. For example, increased U.S. troop deployments to Iraq -- which require that greater resources be spent and troops be rotated in and out more frequently -- might increase security for the Iraqi people but erode support for the war among the U.S. public and the military. This risk is especially great given the nature of the current U.S. operations against the insurgents. They put too great an emphasis on destroying insurgent forces and minimizing U.S. casualties and too little on providing enduring security to the Iraqi people; too much effort into sweeping maneuvers with no enduring presence and too little into the effective coordination of security and reconstruction efforts; and too high a priority on quickly fielding large numbers of Iraqi security forces and too low a priority on ensuring their effectiveness.
The key to securing the centers of gravity in the current war is to recognize that U.S. forces have overwhelming advantages in terms of combat power and mobility but a key disadvantage in terms of intelligence. If they know who the insurgents are and where they are, they can quickly suppress the insurgency. The Iraqi people are the best source of this intelligence. But U.S. forces and their allies can only gain this knowledge by winning locals' hearts and minds -- that is, by convincing them that the insurgents' defeat is in their interest and that they can share intelligence about them without fear of insurgent reprisals.
HISTORY LESSONS
Insurgencies are nearly as old as warfare itself, so there is no shortage of past counterinsurgency strategies to draw on. The Romans suppressed rebellions with such ferocity and ruthlessness that it was said they would "create a desert and call it peace." The British often maintained order through a divide-and-conquer strategy. They would support one of several factions vying for power, and in return for this support the favored group would respect British interests in that part of the world. Neither of these strategies is attractive today. The Roman approach clearly conflicts with American values, and the British strategy would lead to a client-sponsor relationship with a nondemocratic regime -- hardly what the Bush administration hopes to foster in Iraq.
During the Vietnam War, U.S. strategy focused on killing insurgents at the expense of winning hearts and minds. This search-and-destroy strategy ultimately failed, but it evidently continues to exert a strong pull on the U.S. military, as indicated by statements like that of a senior army commander in Iraq who declared, "[I] don't think we will put much energy into trying the old saying, 'win the hearts and minds.' I don't look at it as one of the metrics of success." Having left the business of waging counterinsurgency warfare over 30 years ago, the U.S. military is running the risk of failing to do what is needed most (win Iraqis' hearts and minds) in favor of what it has traditionally done best (seek out the enemy and destroy him). Thus, U.S. forces have recently pushed forward with more offensive operations of this type in western Iraq, which has produced some insurgent casualties but had a negligible effect on overall security.
The oil-spot strategy, in contrast, focuses on establishing security for the population precisely for the sake of winning hearts and minds. In the 1950s, the British used it successfully in Malaya, as did the Filipinos against the Huk insurgents. Given the centers of gravity and the limits of U.S. forces in Iraq, an oil-spot approach -- in which operations would be oriented around securing the population and then gradually but inexorably expanded to increase control over contested areas -- could work.
Coalition forces and local militias, such as the Kurdish Pesh Merga, now provide a high level of security in 14 of Iraq's 18 provinces. These areas comprise the country's true "Green Zone" (the term normally used to describe the heavily fortified part of Baghdad where U.S. headquarters are located). In these provinces, people lead relatively normal and secure lives. The rest of the country -- the "Red Zone" -- is made up of the generally unsecured provinces of Anbar, Baghdad, Nineveh, and Salah ad Din, each of which has a sizable or dominant Sunni Arab population. The oil-spot campaign should start by enhancing security in the Green Zone. The U.S. and Iraqi governments should also focus reconstruction efforts here, in order to reward loyalty to the government and to minimize "security premium" expenses on projects.
To start, U.S. and coalition forces must do much more to aid and develop the capabilities of their Iraqi counterparts in counterinsurgency operations: training them, embedding U.S. soldiers and marines in Iraqi units, and providing U.S. quick-reaction forces to support the Iraqis, if needed. The embedding effort should be far more extensive than currently planned, and some of the U.S. Army's best soldiers should be assigned to this initiative. It would involve some risk, since embedded U.S. personnel are likely to suffer more casualties than they would in all-U.S. units. But the payoff would be high as well.
The challenges associated with training Iraqi security forces are well documented, but the United States could still dramatically improve on its current efforts. Embedding more and higher-quality U.S. soldiers in Iraqi units would be like inserting a steel reinforcing rod into hardening concrete. A higher number of embedded soldiers would support the training of Iraqi officers, as well as facilitate the identification and advancement of capable Iraqi leaders (and weed out substandard ones). Finally, by concentrating Iraqi forces in generally secure areas and in a few areas selected for security "offensives," the oil-spot strategy would minimize the risk that newly trained Iraqi units will find themselves in over their heads and without adequate support.
The U.S. high command must also end the pernicious practice of rotating senior military and civilian leaders in and out of Iraq as though they are interchangeable. Generals who have demonstrated competence in dealing with insurgents in Afghanistan and Iraq have been recalled to stateside duty. Such officers should be promoted and retained in Iraq for an extended period. Those who fail should be rotated back home and replaced. As history has shown time and again, capable leaders are "force multipliers": they greatly enhance the effectiveness of the troops under their command.
The offensives in the oil-spot strategy should consist of efforts to expand the Green Zone by securing, over time, more and more of the Red Zone. In each phase, both security and reconstruction resources would go to areas selected for these offensives. Since forces and resources are limited -- and because laying the foundation for enduring security in each currently unsecured area would take considerable time, likely half a year or longer -- oil-spot offensives would typically be protracted in nature.
Each offensive would begin with Iraqi army units and their embedded U.S. advisers sweeping through the target area and clearing it of any major insurgent forces. These units would then break up into smaller formations and take up positions in towns (or, in the case of cities, sectors) of the cleared area, providing local security. National police would then arrive and begin security patrols and the vetting and training of local police and paramilitary security forces. As these efforts developed, Iraqi army units would switch to intensive patrolling along the oil spot's periphery to deflect insurgent threats to the newly secured area. A quick-reaction force made up of U.S. or Iraqi army units would deal with any insurgent penetration of the patrol zone. Iraqi and U.S. intelligence operatives would begin the process of infiltrating local insurgent cells and recruiting local Iraqis to do the same. Although current efforts at infiltration have produced spotty results, the oil-spot strategy would give U.S. and Iraqi intelligence forces the time needed to succeed by committing coalition forces to provide an enduring level of security.
These security operations would facilitate reconstruction, offering Iraqis the promise of a better life. Sustained security would also ensure that the benefits of reconstruction would endure, rather than be sabotaged by the insurgents. It would facilitate social reform -- for example, enabling women to attend school without fear of retribution from radical Islamists. It would also provide time for the proper vetting and training of local security forces before they assumed their responsibilities. Finally, enduring security would help to convince the local population that the government is serious about protecting them. The overall objective, of course, would be winning their active support, whereupon they would presumably begin providing the government with intelligence on those insurgents who have "gone to ground" in the secured area. Once the population sees the benefits of security and reconstruction -- and not until then -- local elections could be held.
Given limited military and financial resources, the targets for oil-spot offensives would have to be carefully chosen. Two attractive targets would be Baghdad and the northern city of Mosul. Both are key political and economic centers that border relatively secure areas. As Iraq's capital, Baghdad has great symbolic value. And both areas are within the operational area of U.S. forces, the most capable in the coalition.
U.S. and Iraqi forces should refine their choices by targeting those areas where they can find tribal allies -- and should design reconstruction efforts to ensure that the cooperative local sheik receives "credit" for his help in the eyes of his tribe. Providing such credit would increase the incentives for the tribe to help ensure that reconstruction succeeds, and it might help persuade tribes to provide intelligence on potential acts of sabotage or even to actively support security operations.
Once local forces are ready to assume principal responsibility for local security, most of the Iraqi army units in the area, the national police, and their U.S. supporters should expand the oil spot further. Some quick-reaction forces, however, should remain in the initial oil-spot area to guarantee that the local security forces have prompt support if needed.
Although securing Green Zone targets as well key national infrastructure and previously secured areas should be the military's first priority, the four unsecured provinces cannot simply be abandoned to the insurgents. Small, extended patrols of U.S. (and, with time, Iraqi) Special Operations forces in the Red Zone should be undertaken to provide intelligence and early warning of significant insurgent activities, while denying insurgents sanctuary and limiting their ability to rest, refit, and plan. If the insurgents attempt to occupy a major town or city, as they did in Fallujah, U.S. and Iraqi forces should mount a punitive expedition to drive them out. Such operations, however, must always remain subordinate to the overall oil-spot strategy, focused on protecting the population, not pursuing insurgent forces.
An important advantage to the oil-spot strategy, given growing concerns over U.S. Army recruiting problems and declining U.S. public support, is that it should be possible to execute the strategy, including the Baghdad and Mosul offensives, with fewer than the 140,000 U.S. troops now in Iraq -- 120,000 might be sufficient. This 20,000 troop reduction would be possible for several reasons. Substantially increasing the number of U.S. advisers in newly formed Iraqi units would enable these units to become more capable more quickly, and curtailing ill-advised sweep operations would enable U.S. forces to be employed more productively. Retaining capable senior U.S. generals in Iraq for extended periods, meanwhile, would dramatically enhance military effectiveness, even at somewhat lower force levels.
THE GRAND BARGAIN
Lieutenant General Sir Gerald Templer, Britain's high commissioner and director of operations during the Malayan insurgency in the 1950s, observed that the political and military sides of counterinsurgency must be "completely and utterly interrelated." So, too, must they be in Iraq. While U.S. military operations take the form of the oil-spot campaign, political efforts should aim to strike a grand bargain with the Iraqi people. This grand bargain would lay the foundation for the gradual development of the broad base needed to sustain an Iraqi democracy.
The grand bargain would cut across key Iraqi religious and ethnic groups and across key tribal and familial units. Its underlying assumptions would be that there are significant elements of each major ethnic and religious group willing to support a democratic, unified Iraq; that a sufficiently broad coalition can be formed, over time, to achieve this end; and that the United States is willing to undertake a long-term effort, lasting a decade or longer, to ensure the grand bargain's success. The Kurds would likely be the easiest to win over. They want the insurgency defeated and a long-term U.S. presence to protect them against Shiite dominance or a Sunni restoration, as well as against external threats from Iran and Turkey. A small, but significant, Sunni element may also want the insurgency defeated, if it can be assured of a long-term U.S. presence to hedge against both Shiite domination (and retribution) and Iranian domination of a Shiite-led government. Like the Kurds, most Shiites want the insurgency defeated. Some are also wary of Iranian attempts to subvert Iraqi independence. These Shiites may also accept a long-term U.S. presence to guard against Iranian subversion and to minimize the risks of a civil war that would threaten their natural advantage in numbers in an Iraqi democracy.
This grand bargain would not seek to win over any one of the principal Iraqi groups entirely, only a substantial portion of each, which combined would provide a critical mass in support of the common objectives mentioned above. Since defeating the insurgency is but one step toward achieving these objectives, each group would have an incentive to have Iraq retain some U.S. forces beyond the insurgency's defeat -- something critical to achieving the United States' broader security objectives. Under the grand bargain, in short, Iraqis may find that although having U.S. "occupiers" offends their sense of nationalism, with the existence of a sovereign Iraqi regime they are willing to tolerate a much smaller force as "guests."
Stitching this coalition together would require a good understanding of Iraqi tribal politics. In many areas of Iraq, the tribe and the extended family are the foundation of society, and they represent a sort of alternative to the government. (Saddam deftly manipulated these tribal and familial relationships to sustain his rule.) There are roughly 150 tribes in Iraq of varying size and influence, and at least 75 percent of Iraqis are members of a tribe. Creating a coalition out of these groups would require systematically mapping tribal structures, loyalties, and blood feuds within and among tribal groups; identifying unresolved feuds; detecting the political inclinations of dominant tribes and their sources of power and legitimacy; and determining their ties to tribes in other countries, particularly in Iran, Syria, and Turkey.
To this end, the United States should help the Iraqi government establish an Iraqi Information Service to gather intelligence on the insurgents and penetrate their infrastructure. The service should divide Iraq into regions, sectors, and local grids to focus their efforts, with priority going to those areas that have been secured by or targeted for oil-spot operations. Although U.S. and other coalition forces should monitor and support this effort, the Iraqis themselves, given their superior understanding of local culture, must lead it. Given the unsettled state of Iraqi politics, however, American "Iraqi affairs officers" should also be embedded in Iraqi Information Service units to monitor their activities.
Accurate tribal mapping could guide the formation of alliances between the new Iraqi government and certain tribes and families, improve the vetting of military recruits and civil servants, and enhance intelligence sources on the insurgency's organization and infrastructure. Most important, it would facilitate achieving the grand bargain by identifying the Kurdish, Sunni, and Shiite tribes that would be most likely to support a unified, independent, and democratic Iraqi state. In return, tribal allies should receive more immediate benefits, such as priority in security and reconstruction operations.
There are risks in making allies of tribal groups. Tribal alliances are often ephemeral, and the coalition must be prepared to shift its allegiance back and forth between rival tribes rapidly. There is also the risk of tribes emerging as alternatives to the government. Taking on one tribe as an ally may make enemies out of rival tribes that heretofore were neutral. It will take diligence and expert diplomacy to make this element of the strategy work.
As progress is made in crafting the grand bargain and the first oil-spot offensives are concluded, the strategy would enter its second phase. Phase II would see a significant reduction in U.S. force levels -- perhaps to as few as 60,000 -- reflecting the growing strength of the Iraqi government and security forces and the declining strength of the insurgents. U.S. advisers would begin to be phased out of the most capable Iraqi units. Over time, as the insurgent threat shrank to an insignificant problem, the third phase of the strategy would be implemented: the withdrawal of the U.S. military units and most advisers, save for a residual U.S. military presence numbering perhaps 20,000 troops to deter predators such as Iran and Syria. This U.S. security umbrella would also eliminate Baghdad's need to pursue costly nuclear, chemical, or biological weapons programs. In addition, a residual U.S. presence would discourage any internal Iraqi faction from attempting to overthrow the government.
BETTER METRICS
To date, the Bush administration and its critics alike have often focused on the wrong metrics for measuring progress in the Iraq war. Critics, for example, often use insurgent strength to gauge progress. But it is notoriously difficult to assess accurately insurgent force levels, especially because many Iraqi insurgents are neither full-time participants in the conflict nor true believers in the Baathist or the radical Islamist cause. Rather, they have been forced to support the insurgency or have been co-opted by insurgents, who pay unemployed Iraqis to plant improvised explosive devices (IEDs).
It is also tempting to use the number of combat incidents as a sign of insurgent strength and the lack thereof as a sign of insurgent weakness. This must be done with care. A lack of insurgent activity does not necessarily mean success for the counterinsurgent forces. The number of combat incidents around Fallujah in the summer of 2004 was quite low. Yet this was hardly a measure of the Iraqi government's success. Rather, it was a clear signal of its impotence, since the insurgents were in full control of the city at that time. Conversely, a large number of attacks may reflect the insurgents' weakness. A rash of attacks might result from insurgents' fears that they are losing the war and must do something dramatic to reverse their fortunes. Consider, for example, the spike in violence around the time of the January 2005 elections -- violence motivated by the insurgents' fear of the elections, not their growing strength.
Nevertheless, it is worth tracking insurgent activity, not to get a sense of whether progress is being made but to understand the insurgents' priorities and to recognize trends in their behavior. For example, tracking combat incidents could provide insights into trends in the scale of enemy attacks, their level of success, and the insurgents' targeting priorities. These data may also signal a shift in the insurgents' strategy. For example, signs that insurgents were moving away from attacks on government officials could indicate that efforts to protect key government officials were paying off.
To the extent that U.S. casualties erode support for the war among American soldiers and the American public, they are an important metric in gauging progress. But the current casualty rate is well below that suffered in Vietnam, and support among those most in danger -- American soldiers and marines -- remains strong. Both the U.S. Army and the U.S. Marine Corps are exceeding their reenlistment rates. It is the army's recruitment efforts that are experiencing difficulties, an indication that Americans in general are increasingly reluctant to serve.
More important than casualties when it comes to securing the two American centers of gravity is the "free-rider problem." If Americans think that the Iraqis do not want to fight for their own freedom against undemocratic insurgent movements, U.S. soldiers (and the American people) may become increasingly reluctant to make sacrifices on the behalf of those they perceive to be ungrateful beneficiaries.
There are other, less problematic metrics that could prove useful in measuring the war's progress and taking the pulse of the war's centers of gravity. One is the number of assassinations of government officials and religious leaders. From the population's perspective, if the government cannot even protect its officials, it is difficult to see how it can protect individual citizens. Correspondingly, if the insurgents cannot protect their leaders from being killed or captured, it would likely discourage prospective recruits, who would infer that the rebels could not shield them either. Success here would be a clear indication that the counterinsurgent forces were winning the intelligence battle. Since victory in this sense would very likely mean that individual citizens were stepping forward to provide information, it would also mean that the coalition and the Iraqi government were winning over the "hearts and minds" of the Iraqi people and thus securing a crucial center of gravity.
Another useful metric is the percentage of contacts with the enemy that are initiated by coalition forces. This measurement can gauge progress in the intelligence war, which is a surrogate for popular support in Iraq. A positive trend in this metric would indicate that the population was providing "actionable" intelligence and that the initiative was passing from the insurgent to the counterinsurgent forces. A subset of this metric, the percentage of contacts with the enemy initiated by Iraqi forces, is far superior to counting Iraqi troops in determining the Iraqi security forces' effectiveness. If the percentage of contacts with the enemy that are initiated by Iraqi forces were to increase, and if their share relative to that of other coalition forces were to grow, this would indicate that Iraqi forces are assuming more of the burden for Iraq's security and also winning the people's support. Positive trends in this metric could also encourage greater U.S. popular support, since it would also enable reductions in the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.
Still another useful measure is the percentage of "actionable" intelligence tips received from the population relative to the percentage gained through military surveillance (reconnaissance aircraft or security forces patrols, for example) and government intelligence operatives. An increase in this ratio would indicate that the people share the coalition's objectives and feel secure enough to volunteer information on the insurgents.
Then there are "market metrics." Insurgents have exploited both the unemployed and criminals in seeking support. They often pay Iraqis to plant IEDs and declare bounties for the killing of government officials. Such measures indicate that the insurgency is struggling to expand its ranks and must buy support. It would be helpful to keep track of the "market" in this aspect of the conflict. What are the insurgents offering to those who will plant an IED? What kind of bounty are they placing on the lives of their enemies, and how does that price change over time? The assumption behind these market metrics is that the higher the insurgents' price, the fewer people there are who are willing to support them. Such a reduction in support could indicate success on the part of the coalition and the Iraqi government in improving security, reducing unemployment, and strengthening the popular commitment to the new regime, all of which would leave fewer people vulnerable to persuasion or coercion by the insurgents.
PAYING THE PRICE
No strategy will bring about an end to the insurgency quickly or easily. In that sense, the strategy presented here is the best of a bad lot. It is superior to the current "stay the course" strategy and to following an arbitrary timetable for withdrawing from Iraq, the solution advocated by many of the Bush administration's critics. Its chief virtue is that it reflects an understanding of the war's centers of gravity and attempts to balance the sometimes competing demands of these centers while also securing them.
There will of course be great difficulties in carrying out such a plan. First, creating a coalition for a grand bargain will prove challenging, given the long-standing animosities between segments of the Iraqi population, the Iraqis' suspicions of Americans, and the cultural ignorance of U.S. forces and policymakers. Second, the U.S. military must walk a fine line between risking the increased casualties that extended embedding of American soldiers in Iraqi units will produce and risking a collapse of recruitment and retention efforts that could result from a continued reliance on large U.S. troop deployments. Third, setting up effective Iraqi security forces will be a fitful, long-term process, and oil-spot operations could prove frustrating to a U.S. military that prefers to take the fight to the enemy through traditional offensive operations. Finally, coordinating and integrating security, intelligence, and reconstruction operations will require a level of U.S.-Iraqi cooperation and an integrated U.S. effort far beyond what the interagency process in Washington has produced -- including strong central coordination and leadership from the senior political official on the scene, the U.S. ambassador to Baghdad.
Even if successful, this strategy will require at least a decade of commitment and hundreds of billions of dollars and will result in longer U.S. casualty rolls. But this is the price that the United States must pay if it is to achieve its worthy goals in Iraq. Are the American people and American soldiers willing to pay that price? Only by presenting them with a clear strategy for victory and a full understanding of the sacrifices required can the administration find out. And if Americans are not up to the task, Washington should accept that it must settle for a much more modest goal: leveraging its waning influence to outmaneuver the Iranians and the Syrians in creating an ally out of Iraq's next despot.