by Frank James
U.S. policymakers and the military may be launching a new round of Iraq whack-a-mole, only on a larger scale.
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That’s the take of Anthony Cordesman, the national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has been oft-cited in this blog because of the respect he gets from many in the nation’s capital as one of the best thinkers on security issues.
Cordesman has been observing the latest state of play in Iraq, including the current Operation Ripper launched by U.S. and Iraqi forces to take out insurgents and al Qaeda outside Baghdad.
While he’s impressed with how much the U.S. military has transformed itself to fight a counterinsurgency, he’s concerned still by some of what he hears from top U.S. military officers.
So far, the claims of success to date have been tenuous to meaningless. As of June 23rd, MNF-I claimed that, “at least 55 al-Qa’ida operatives have been killed, 23 have been detained, 16 weapons caches have been discovered, 28 improvised explosive devices have been destroyed and 12 booby-trapped structures have been destroyed.” These figures are far too low to matter.
It also really doesn’t matter if insurgent casualties are much higher than our own unless such casualties include substantial cadres of leaders and experts that cannot be easily and rapidly replaced. The insurgents can simply disperse, stand down, and regroup. The domestic political realities in the US also make it clear that unless the US is successfully taking out cadres and insurgent infrastructure, the US is now so sensitive to American casualties that tactical victories can result in the same kind of political and strategic defeat that occurred in Vietnam.
This risk is all too apparent from the recent statements of Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq. If, as the general said on June 22nd, some 80 percent of the top Qa’ida leaders in Baquba fled before the American-led offensive began, it is not clear that it matters if “80 percent” of the recruits remained when the offensive attacked the western half of the city.
It also is silly to call the leaders and cadres who leave “cowards.” Iraqis are not foolish and they understand that such actions are an inevitable insurgent reaction to US military superiority and a key element of asymmetric warfare.
Cordesman doesn’t say this, but when Gen. Odierno was rattling off the statistics about the insurgents killed and the bombs found last week, it had a real feel of what the U.S. military did in Vietnam when it attempted to demonstrate progress in that war by providing the media with bodycounts for North Vietnamese Army troops and Viet Cong guerillas.
Cordesman’s bigger point is that the U.S. can have all the tactical success in the world, but unless Iraqi politicians can get their act together and progress is made in other areas as well, such as an end to the sectarian violence, Iraq, if not effectively lost, still won’t be stable enough for the surge to be declared a success. And it’s going to take much longer than September for the kind of progress that’s needed to happen.
Here’s Corderman’s entire article: