Frederick Kagan, ever a mouthpiece of villainy, has proclaimed a Great Victory over Terror. In his latest screed in Weekly Standard, Kagan opines:
"We turned an imminent victory for Al Qaeda In Iraq into a humiliating defeat for them and thereby created an opportunity for further progress not only in Iraq, but also in the global struggle."
"We" have done no such thing. Al Qaeda has been driven away from the larger cities by Sunni condottieri, the 1920 Brigades, aka Hamas in Iraq. I shall dub them the New Sunni Friends, for they go by many names, and none of them wish to be tarred with the American brush. It is difficult to say who is running these operations, for there are many rump formations left over from Saddam’s old Iraqi Army, usually led by old Ba’athist officers, and they feud among each other. And not all of them are in Iraq: they are also to be found on Terrorist’s Row in Damascus with all the other Islamic mujahid organizations.
These New Sunni Friends are doing the heavy lifting against Al Qaeda. We merely fund and arm them, as we once funded Saddam’s army in its fight against another nasty bunch of foreigners, Iran. The New Sunni Friends turn to the USA for money, as their Shiite enemies turn to Iran.
But first, a bit of history:
Al Qaeda brought foreign fighters into Iraq, in the bad old days of Jerry Bremer. This was not so while Lt. Gen. Jay Garner, Bremer’s predecessor, was in charge. While Garner was still in Iraq, the Sunni sheikhs took him seriously: Bremer alienated them all.
The astute Garner had been part of the Operation Provide Comfort operation in 1991. Garner and his brilliant, Arabic speaking subordinate, the Lt. Col, John Abizaid carved out the north of Iraq for the Kurds, an eerie and brilliant campaign of isolating Iraqi units, then allowing them an avenue of retreat. Following the dicta of Sun Tzu, "never oppose an army returning home", Garner and Abizaid drove Saddam’s army off 3,600 square miles of territory, with little more than a single infantry battalion and air cover.
During this time, Frederick Kagan and his brother were running around like Chicken Little, warning of impending doom from Saddam's WMDs. As we all know, no WMDs ever appeared.
When the USA again put boots on the ground in 2003, Garner, walked around Ramadi and Fallujah unmolested. The Sunnis respected him, for they remembered him, and they remembered Abizaid.
A return to present times:
If casualties have dropped in Iraq and Al Qaeda is on the run, the change can safely be ascribed only to the New Sunni Friends. Bill Roggio, ever the voice of reason, says:
US commanders have repeatedly said there is a short shelf life on the amount of time the local security forces [read New Sunni Friends ] will operate without recognition and support from the central government. The dramatic development of local security forces, along with the change in US strategy and the deployment of additional forces are directly responsible for decreasing the violence in Iraq. The Iraqi government must make the next move and recognize these auxiliary police units, which are in already working hand in hand with US and Iraqi forces.
I urge all who have reached this point in my article to read Bill Roggio’s assessment of these developments. I believe this Iraq-based pushback against foreign meddlers is the devil’s bargain. Unless the New Sunni Friends are quickly integrated into the body politic, they will morph into a force far more terrible than their Ba’athist predecessors. Yes, the USA was headed for defeat at the end of 2006. The Sanchez / Bremer policy of alienating the Sunni failed horribly. Have we been guided by geopolitical common sense, or the short-term goal of reducing casualties and withdrawing from Iraq? By arming condottieri, who have no lasting commitment or incentive to form a united Iraq, have neither a victory over the terrorists nor a safe withdrawal from Iraq. We arm the Sunni militias, Iran arms the Shiites. So much for Victory over anybody, we are merely preparing for another round of war.
Mr. Kagan, you are badly informed. Our commanders and soldiers are not continuing this fight to ensure Al Qaeda does not recover. Al Qaeda was unwelcome in Iraq from the start. The USA is quite likely trading one enemy for another, making the same mistake the British did in 1920, steering Iraq back onto the old rutted circular path of a Sunni-dominated regime, installing the pliant Sunni King Feisal the First. The Shiite militias of Moktada Sadr are fractured, and have been since March. We now attack them in Sadr City, where they appear.
Our New Sunni Friends are not all they seem to be. Sunni militias continue to operate with impunity inside Baghdad: Joshua Partlow observes in today’s Washington Post:
Lt. Col. George A. Glaze, the battalion commander, says his soldiers are playing the role of a bouncer caught between brawling customers. Alone, they can restrain the fighters, keep them off balance, but they cannot stop the melee until the house lights come on -- that is, until the Iraqi government steps in.
"They're either going to turn the lights on or we're all going to realize they've moved the switch," he said.
Mr. Kagan, this war in Iraq is not about Al Qaeda, and never was. Iraq was infinitely more complex. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have thrust the American military into a sea of feuding militias, and our soldiers just another militia in that landscape. We join the dozens of other Great Powers who tromped armies across those landscapes, and like them, we will disappear. Like them, we have made alliances with various and sundry: the New Sunni Friends are no friends of Iraq-the-nation. It is good to see Al Qaeda on the run, but that was really not our doing, and will have no lasting impact on the geopolitics of the soi-disant War on Terror.
Coming to Terms with Reality, and a personal excoriation of Frederick Kagan.
After the American Civil War, President Johnson asked Gen. Ulysses S Grant, "At what time can Lee and Beauregard and other leading Rebels be arrested and imprisoned?"
Grant replied, "Mr. President, so long as these men remain at home and observe the terms of their parole you never can do so. The Army of the United States stands between these men and you."
There are good men on the ground in Iraq, men with far more common sense than you, Mr. Kagan. Would that a few of them would stand up to the current crop of vindictive SOBs in the White House and make such a reply. Bush, Cheney, Wolfowitz, Condy Rice, and the rest of that sorry crew created this mess, a completely avoidable mess, based entirely on a pack of disproven lies.
And while it was being created, you and your now-discredited PNAC buddies rah-rah-ed this goddamn war and all its mistakes. Your much-vaunted Surge has only replaced Al Qaeda with rogue Sunni militias, our New Sunni Friends, who now take their fight to Baghdad.
Do not now come out in public to proclaim a Great Victory over Terrorism: it was you and your ilk who created this nightmare. "Choosing Victory in Iraq", had you and the maniacs you now praise listened to reason, in the form of Jay Garner, paroled the Iraqi Army, established security and set in motion a proper reconciliation, there would be victory in Iraq, and we could leave with our heads held high. The Sunni need never have been alienated. Al Qaeda would never have gotten a toehold in Iraq. Thousands of American soldiers, and tens of thousands of Iraqis would now be alive.
Again quoting Joshua Partlow’s article:
Many of the soldiers from the battalion are on their second tour in Iraq. Three years ago, they were based in Tikrit, the home of Saddam Hussein, a city they entered expecting to fight a determined Sunni insurgency. By the end of their tour, with much of the violence contained, many of them felt optimistic about progress in Iraq.
"I honestly thought we were making a difference in Tikrit. Then we come back to a hellhole," Marino said. "That was a playground compared to Baghdad."
The American people don't fully realize what's going on, said Staff Sgt. Richard McClary, 27, a section leader from Buffalo.
"They just know back there what the higher-ups here tell them. But the higher-ups don't go anywhere, and actually they only go to the safe places, places with a little bit of gunfire," he said. "They don't ever [expletive] see what we see on the ground."
And neither, Mr. Kagan, do you.