What Can America Salvage in Iraq? By Ray Close and others

The following commentary was sent to me by Ray Close. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Ray Close worked for the CIA in the Middle East. As a young man in 1957, he and his brother flew Ibrahim al-Hussayni, President Shishakli's former head of police, from Rome to Damascus to help organize Operation Straggle, an abortive coup attempt against the top Syrian officers guiding Syrian politics. It was meant to keep Syria from "going communist," but had the reverse effect. A day after the conspiracy was nipped in the bud by Syrian intelligence, Syria's "conservative" Chief of Staff, General Nizam al-Din, resigned and was replaced by `Afif al-Bizri, who the New York Times described as a "ranking Communist." This was not true, but Bizri did help engineer Syria's unification with Egypt several months later. By trying to isolate and destabilize Syria, the US was partly responsible for de-legitimizing Syria's remaining pro-Western politicians and driving the country toward the East Block, Nasser, and socialism.

Syria was already headed in this direction, but it is quite possible that without the failed British-Iraqi coup attempt at the time of the Suez Crisis in 1956, followed by the US plot in 1957, Khalid al-Azm would have become president of Syria in 1958 and not Nasser. Azm was one of the greatest Syrian politicians of the early independence era. He hoped to steer Syria on a neutral course balancing between the USSR and the West on the international stage and between Iraq and Egypt in the local Arab arena. He was against unification with Egypt.

Anyway, Ray Close is a long-time student of Middle Eastern affairs. He is highly critical of the US role in the region and of his own participation in that role during the 1950s. He was one of the most outspoken American opponents of the United State's invasion of Iraq.

Here is Ray Close's commentary:

The article in the current issue of Foreign Affairs magazine entitled "How to Win in Iraq", by Andrew Krepinevich, is a "must" read. But it is even more important to study the following commentary about that article, written by the highly respected conservative columnist David Brooks, found today on the op-ed page of the Sunday New York Times (28 August 2005). Brooks summarizes the main points of the Krepinevich thesis very accurately and succinctly, and adds his own personal agreement that the present U.S. strategy for "winning" the Iraq war that has been pursued from the beginning by Bush, Rumsfeld & Company, is fundamentally flawed, and must be completely revised.

Point taken. If "winning" the war is still a rational and reasonable objective, then the Krepinevich method should indeed be employed, and I commend David Brooks for his persuasive advocacy of that point of view. But please note a critically important point: David Brooks fails to acknowledge the all-important caveat contained in the last paragraph of the Krepinevich essay.

I have appended that last paragraph for all of you to read at the end of the David Brooks op-ed piece. After thinking about what Brooks has to say, read Krepinevich's final summation, and then ask yourself if his new formula for "How to Win in Iraq" is a strategy to which you yourself would subscribe if the decision were yours today. And finally, after doing that, please take a few minutes to formulate in your own mind an explanation of exactly what you understood were our reasons for launching a war of choice against Iraq in the first place. Exactly what were our goals and expectations then? Are any of them still realistic today?

Ray Close

New York Times -- op ed page -- Sunday, 28 August 2005
Winning in Iraq
By DAVID BROOKS

Andrew Krepinevich is a careful, scholarly man. A graduate of West Point and a retired lieutenant colonel, his book, "The Army and Vietnam," is a classic on how to fight counterinsurgency warfare.

Over the past year or so he's been asking his friends and former colleagues in the military a few simple questions: Which of the several known strategies for fighting insurgents are you guys employing in Iraq? What metrics are you using to measure your progress?

The answers have been disturbing. There is no clear strategy. There are no clear metrics. Krepinevich has now published an essay in the new issue of Foreign Affairs, "How to Win in Iraq," in which he proposes a strategy. The article is already a phenomenon among the people running this war, generating discussion in the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the American Embassy in Baghdad and the office of the vice president.

Krepinevich's proposal is hardly new. He's merely describing a classic counterinsurgency strategy, which was used, among other places, in Malaya by the British in the 1950's. The same approach was pushed by Tom Donnelly and Gary Schmitt in a Washington Post essay back on Oct. 26, 2003; by Kenneth Pollack in Senate testimony this July 18; and by dozens of midlevel Army and Marine Corps officers in Iraq.

Krepinevich calls the approach the oil-spot strategy. The core insight is that you can't win a war like this by going off on search and destroy missions trying to kill insurgents. There are always more enemy fighters waiting. You end up going back to the same towns again and again, because the insurgents just pop up after you've left and kill anybody who helped you. You alienate civilians, who are the key to success, with your heavy-handed raids.

Instead of trying to kill insurgents, Krepinevich argues, it's more important to protect civilians. You set up safe havens where you can establish good security. Because you don't have enough manpower to do this everywhere at once, you select a few key cities and take control. Then you slowly expand the size of your safe havens, like an oil spot spreading across the pavement.
Once you've secured a town or city, you throw in all the economic and political resources you have to make that place grow. The locals see the benefits of working with you. Your own troops and the folks back home watching on TV can see concrete signs of progress in these newly regenerated neighborhoods. You mix your troops in with indigenous security forces, and through intimate contact with the locals you begin to even out the intelligence advantage that otherwise goes to the insurgents.

If you ask U.S. officials why they haven't adopted this strategy, they say they have. But if that were true the road to the airport in Baghdad wouldn't be a death trap. It would be within the primary oil spot.

The fact is, the U.S. didn't adopt this blindingly obvious strategy because it violates some of the key Rumsfeldian notions about how the U.S. military should operate in the 21st century.
First, it requires a heavy troop presence, not a light, lean force. Second, it doesn't play to our strengths, which are technological superiority, mobility and firepower. It acknowledges that while we go with our strengths, the insurgents exploit our weakness: the lack of usable intelligence.
Third, it means we have to think in the long term. For fear of straining the armed forces, the military brass have conducted this campaign with one eye looking longingly at the exits. A lot of the military planning has extended only as far as the next supposed tipping point: the transfer of sovereignty, the election, and so on. We've been rotating successful commanders back to Washington after short stints, which is like pulling Grant back home before the battle of Vicksburg. The oil-spot strategy would force us to acknowledge that this will be a long, gradual war.

But the strategy has one virtue. It might work.

Today, public opinion is turning against the war not because people have given up on the goal of advancing freedom, but because they are not sure this war is winnable. Why should we sacrifice more American lives to a lost cause?

If President Bush is going to rebuild support for the war, he's going to have to explain specifically how it can be won, and for that he needs a strategy.

It's not hard to find. It's right there in Andy Krepinevich's essay, and in the annals of history. [End of David Brooks column]

Last paragraph of Krepinevich article in Foreign Affairs:

"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.”