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| Iraq |
| NYT correspondent declares US strategy is too late to save Iraq |
| 2006-02-19 |
| When I recently spoke with Maj. Gen. Joseph Peterson at his headquarters in Baghdad, it was impossible not to be overwhelmed by a feeling of what might have been. Peterson, a big, witty officer in charge of training the Iraqi police force, spent two hours laying out a plan to bring order to a fractious country, a plan that was everything the American enterprise had always failed to be: bold, coherent and imagined all the way down to the hinges on the office doors. The general volunteered for this job, leaving his family in Washington, and he works every day and every night on an assignment that will probably keep him in Baghdad for a year. When we met, he was wearing a blue baseball cap that said "police" in English and in Arabic, and he keeps a woodcut of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king, on his office wall to make sure he doesn't get ahead of himself. "An eye for an eye" Peterson said. "This society has been living under that rule for 3,700 years. Are you going to change this overnight? Did we change it overnight in our country?" Peterson seemed utterly determined to succeed. And it was not terribly difficult to imagine that he could. And then you think: if only we had done this three years ago. In nearly every military and diplomatic realm, the American effort in Iraq is finally beginning to show the careful planning and concentrated thinking that seemed to vanish the moment American troops entered Baghdad on April 9, 2003. We've heard progress reports in the past, of course, and they have often preceded a stunning setback. But what is new is the level of sophistication that Americans are bringing to their work, and the intensity of their engagement across so many fronts. A more subtle response to the insurgency was a long time in the making. American generals were caught flat-footed by the resistance that bloomed in 2003; they didn't plan for it, and they had no playbook to fight it. The result in the field often amounted to a war of attrition, which was designed to kill and capture as many insurgents as possible but which ended up alienating Iraqi civilians. These days, however, the military is making new efforts to help local Iraqis feel safe and secure in their homes. The two top American commanders, Gen. George Casey and Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, are proponents of placing far less emphasis on killing guerrillas and much more on working with the locals. In Baghdad, General Casey has set up a local counterinsurgency school, through which American officers must pass before they can head into the field. Find an American officer these days, and he is likely to tell you about the police officers he is supervising or the local council he's helping to set up. A new approach is equally evident at the American Embassy, where the current ambassador and erstwhile neoconservative, Zalmay Khalilzad, is employing a hands-on strategy that is positively Kissingerian in its realism. On some days, Khalilzad, a native of Mazar-i-Sharif, Afghanistan, and a Sunni Muslim, sits with Iraqi leaders for hours, fingering his prayer beads and hearing their complaints. In that sense, Ambassador Khalilzad could hardly differ more from his two predecessors, L. Paul Bremer III, who dispatched orders with the curtness of a viceroy, and John Negroponte, who, on instructions from Washington, stood largely out of view. According to Iraqis and Western diplomats, Ambassador Khalilzad is orchestrating an extraordinarily ambitious power play: coaxing Sunni political leaders into the government while splitting the more moderate Iraqi insurgents from the beheaders and suicide bombers of Al Qaeda. If he succeeds, Khalilzad could remake the political landscape, curtail the insurgency and give the Iraqi government a bit of solid ground to stand on. If he doesn't succeed, the possibilities are endless, few of them good. Still, the ambassador's strategy is bolder than anything yet attempted. Meanwhile, General Peterson, along with his boss, Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, is trying to construct nothing less than a new national army, a police force for every city and the logistical and educational apparatus to support them. In earlier American efforts, an Iraqi policeman was considered "trained" if he had passed through a few days of schooling. These days, the training is much more extensive. On most mornings, the streets in Baghdad echo not just with the sounds of car bombs but also with shots fired from the police shooting range. So far, there are signs that the new strategy may be working. As the Iraqi Army has taken over substantial portions of Iraq, insurgent attacks have declined from their peak in October. Of course, it's not clear whether that trend will continue. In the past, such trends have not. And Peterson isn't operating under any illusions about how long it will take him to complete his work. The charts that he uses to brief traveling Congressional delegations offer no date for when Iraqi Interior Ministry forces will be able to take full control of internal security. And there's the rub: the Americans have already had three years in Iraq. It seems reasonably clear, given the opinion polls at home and the elections ahead, that they will not get three more, at least not with troop deployments at their current levels. The prediction floated by senior Iraqi officials is that American, British and other foreign forces, now numbering 160,000, will fall below 100,000 by year's end. Given the chaotic situation that prevails in much of Iraq, that might not be enough. And even if American troops were to stay, it's not clear that the new American approach could succeed anyway. It may be that there are too many Sunnis with too many memories of being the group in power. Even with the best of intentions, Americans are still foreigners in Iraq; every day they do things — shoot up a car approaching a checkpoint, for instance — that make the Iraqis resent their presence. And the sectarian violence, which is turning every mixed Iraqi neighborhood into a battleground, might be too far along to turn around. Some officers, in private conversations, concede that they could lose. In the classic arc of Greek tragedy, the hero rises to great heights, only to be brought low by his own hubris. In Iraq, the Americans may yet salvage a bloody success; commanders like General Peterson seem to believe to their bones that they can. But it's also possible that something more crushing is in the works, with a slightly different trajectory than the Greeks had in mind: the mighty country invades a smaller one, commits countless errors and wastes thousands of lives. After a time, the mighty country gathers itself and does everything right. And it is too late. |
| Posted by:Dan Darling |
| #7 General Joe Peterson is a great American. I served with him in Kuwait a few years back, and they don't come any better than him. |
| Posted by: Besoeker 2006-02-19 21:43 |
| #6 6 6 6 6 6 6 6.5 |
| Posted by: RD 2006-02-19 13:52 |
| #5 journalism is second to phys ed as the easiest degree to get in college. I had a journo fraternity roommate and he NEVER had homework, more worried about the braces so his teeth would be straight on graduation....looking for Tee Vee work |
| Posted by: Frank G 2006-02-19 12:11 |
| #4 Here's the rest of the stories from filly.com Infested kitchens of Manhattan with two new restaurants. BUSINESS Energy crisis strikes home NEWS UPDATE Pa. lags in access to crucial preschool Early education is both a key to success and a sound investment, research shows. Your own TV show? Anywhere but here Mystery for police, agony for families After stumbles, Swann seeks improved game plan And now, Terri Schiavo kin and others tell all A battle vital to Iraq's future seems futile » More headlines |
| Posted by: 6 2006-02-19 10:44 |
| #3 Sounds like victory is imminent. |
| Posted by: 6 2006-02-19 10:33 |
| #2 excerpts: Saturday Evening Post January 26, 1946 How We Botched the German Occupation By Demaree Bess Berlin Everywhere I’ve traveled recently in Germany I’ve run into Americans, ranging from generals down to privates, who ask perplexedly, “What are we Americans supposed to be doing here? Are we going to take over this place and stay here forever?” Judging by reports received here from the United States, this perplexity of Americans in Germany is matching by the perplexity of Americans at home. We have got into this German job without understanding what we were tackling or why. Imagine how incredulous we would have been if anybody had told us---even so recently as five years ago---that hundreds of thousands of Americans would be camped in the middle of Europe in 1946, completely responsible for the conduct and welfare of approximately 20,000,000 Germans? How does it happened that even some of our topmost officials in Germany admit that they don’t know what they are doing here? The answer can be expressed, I believe, in one word---secrecy. . . . Mr. Stimson probably has had more experience in international affairs than any other American. Before being appointed to head the War Department for the second time, he had also served as Secretary of State and had been Governor General of the Philippines. Thus he was familiar with the military requirements, the political implications and the practical problems involved in administering an alien and distant territory under wartime conditions. Mr. Hull, appreciating the value of Mr. Stimson’s experience in world affairs, was inclined to defer to his judgment in most of the matters under dispute. Mr. Morgenthau, on the other hand, gradually became the chief spokesman for the advocates of an American-imposed revolution in Germany. His so-called Morgenthau plan, which has since been widely publicized, was not just the personal policy of the former Secretary of the Treasury. It combined the ideas of a sizable group of aggressive Americans which included some conservative big businessmen as well as left-wing theorists. The group supporting Mr. Morgenthau’s ideas included Americans of all races, creeds and political beliefs. It is doubtful whether Mr. Morgenthau could recall today the source of some of the most explosive ideas which he gradually adopted. However that may be, the Cabinet committee soon found itself in disagreement, with Secretaries Stimson and Hull on one side and Mr. Morgenthau on the other. Hints of this disagreement leaked out at the time and the issue was represented as a “hard peace” versus a “soft peace,” but actually that was not the issue at all. In fact, the major disagreement then was over the question of procedure, and did not directly concern long-term economic and financial policies. The three Cabinet members were equally anxious to make sure that Germany should be deprived of the means for waging another war, nut Secretaries Stimson and Hull were determined not to bite off more than we could chew at one time. They wanted to reduce the original occupation plans to the simplest possible form, with three primary objectives in mind: (1) agreement by all the Allies upon a joint occupation; (2) provision of some hope for the German people that they might develop a decent life for themselves once they became completely demilitarized; and (3) the obligation not to burden the American people with more commitments than they might later prove willing to accept. While these discussions were proceeding, however, Mr. Morgenthau became convinced that we should go into Germany with a complete blueprint, worked out in exhaustive detail, providing for an economic and industrial revolution so drastic that it would affect not only Germany but almost every other country in Europe. He wanted us to adopt this blueprint for ourselves and to use every conceivable means to pressure upon our Allies to get them to accept it. Whenever he was outvoted in the Cabinet committee, he had the immense advantage---as an intimate friend of Franklin D. Roosevelt---of being able to go through the side door of the White House and sell his ideas directly to the President. . . . The French, unconvinced that the atomic bomb has opened an entirely new era, are insisting upon establishing buffer states between themselves and Germany. To this end, they’re trying to make a friend of the Germans in their zone and to encourage them to organize separatist movements. The British, conscious, of the broader aspects of Western Europe’s economic situation, are devising schemes to revive German economic life in their zones, particularly in the Ruhr. In order to provide immediately for some of the things which Western Europeans so urgently require, they’re trying to establish some kind of international combine to operate Ruhr industries and coal mines---a proposal which they compare to the Tennessee Valley Authority. The Russians, grappling with the enormous tasks of reconstructing their own war-wracked homeland, are carrying off from their zone all the machines and tools and animals which they can use in Russia. While the Russians reduce the labor surplus in their zone by sending skilled German workers to Russia, they also encourage the remaining Germans to revive political and economic life with due attention to Russian models. It is only in the American zone that the “pastoral economy” is emerging, which some Americans had visioned for the whole of Germany. Although the Potsdam Declaration technically superseded the American directive JCS 1067, in practice this directive never has been superseded, so far as Americans are concerned. We still are committed to apply in our zone a blue print which was designed for the whole of Germany, but which was never accepted by any of our Allies. This directive is chiefly concerned with tearing things down rather than building things up, and in the absence of any common policy for the whole of Germany, our particular zone is threatened with “planned chaos.” No wonder so many Americans are asking, “What are we doing in Germany?” They can see that the Russians and British and French are initiating projects which promise some direct benefits to them in their zones. But when they look at our zone they see only headaches. These peculiar problems of the American zone will be discussed in a subsequent article. more discussion here. |
| Posted by: Flaiting Slising8611 2006-02-19 07:18 |
| #1 This kind of crap really pisses me off. A journo, who has doubless never organized any thing more complex than a backyard barbeque. pontificates on re-engineering an entire country with all that has happened in its past. What a f***ing moron. |
| Posted by: phil_b 2006-02-19 06:04 |