After weeks of following the race, I've spent the past couple of days thinking about how Paul Hackett came so close to representing my overwhelmingly Republican district in Congress. Leaders of both parties have discussed the power of his tough, straight-shooting image, his anti-Bush message, his just-back-from-Iraq credibility. While I agree that his message and image were compelling, I want to focus on one simple aspect of his message that John Kerry struggled so much with last year: the Hackett Iraq Strategy.
We all remember the pundits' complaints that Kerry lacked a clear Iraq strategy different from the President's. Though he often criticized Bush's handling of the war, we kept seeing headlines like "Kerry still hasn't made his case on Iraq strategy" (Sep. 26, Roll Call, via SD Union-Tribune) and "Bush, Kerry have similar postwar strategies" (Oct. 6, USA Today). His somewhat vague arguments that the conflict needed to be internationalized, and that the training of Iraqi security forces had to be expedited, never seemed to gain much traction with the public. So the question "What would you do differently in Iraq?" dogged Kerry during the campaign, and a solid answer eluded him.
But Paul Hackett, just back from having volunteered to serve in Iraq, has an answer to that question, an answer that could be adopted and echoed by other Democrats. Right at the beginning of WKRC's televised interview with the two candidates, Dan Hurley asked the question: "What are we doing right, and what are we doing wrong, in Iraq?"
Hackett's response to what we need to do differently is very simple: have American and Iraqi units live and train together.
Well I think the [thing] that we're doing right is attempting to train the Iraqi security forces, and I think that the way that the military is being directed by the civilian administration, in how we in the military train the Iraqi security forces, is not right....
[T]he training as it works today, as it's dictated to the military, is such that we send out three or four advisors and a couple of interpreters to a 300-person Iraqi security force battalion. And then we expect those military personnel--three or four of 'em and a couple of interpreters--to effectively train 300 Iraqi bodies, and they work--those advisors work 24 hours a day practically, 7 days a week, throughout their entire tour. And that's not enough support for those advisors. I highlight the fact that that didn't work in Vietnam, and I can tell you from my personal experience, having been a trainer in Falluja of the Iraqi security forces that I lived with, that that doesn't work, and it's not working.
The way...that it can work is if we match the Iraqi security forces to an American force, match 'em one-on-one. Now obviously, you're not going to get a perfect body-on-body match, but if you match the units one-on-one so they live together, eat together, sleep in the same facilities, do all their personal things in the same facilities, importantly train together day in and day out and then fight together, I predict that in about a year and a half to two years of that type of intensive, co-location training 24/7, that we would be able to substantially reduce the numbers of American fighting men and women over in Iraq.
Not only is this answer simple—it also makes a lot of sense. I'm no military expert, but if Hackett and others with his level of hands-on experience training Iraqi forces believe that this is what's necessary to get the job done, I think we should continue Hackett's call for a unit-to-unit matching policy.
Approval ratings of the President and Congress have been declining steadily, but the Democratic Party come 2006 and 2008 still needs to present itself as an alternative with new ideas. This should be the Democratic message about future progress in Iraq: if you're serious about staying the course, Mr. President, get serious about training the Iraqi security forces. A few advisors to train a 300-person battalion won't cut it.