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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
By Michael J. Totten
BAGHDAD – American soldiers arrived in Iraq in 2003 with not much of a plan and little idea what to expect. The Iraqi government, military, and police were overthrown and disbanded under de-Baathification. Most Iraqis who knew how to run the country were either sent home or imprisoned. Americans were in charge of just about everything even though they had no experience running even their own country let alone a traumatized and suspicious Arab society. They were confounded by its exotic and dysfunctional ways. When Sunni and Shia militias launched wars against each other and against the Americans, confusion turned to bewilderment.
General David Petraeus fared better than other American commanders in cracking the code of Iraqi society and reducing the insurgency in Mosul from an explosion to a simmer. I saw some of the results of his strategy’s expansion to Baghdad with troops in the 82nd Airborne Division. Instead of staying on base and training Iraqis while security disintegrated outside the wire, they moved into a neighborhood in Baghdad where they now live and work among the civilian population 24 hours a day.
Clear, hold, and build is the strategy now. The Graya’at neighborhood has been cleared of active insurgents, although there still are dormant cells in the area. The Army is working on several modest community and urban renewal projects and is planning larger ones in the near future. Constant patrols and intelligence gathering are the two crucial pieces of the hold part of the strategy.
I went out one night with Lieutenant Larry Pitts and his men one of their intel gathering missions.
“We’ll collect info on Shias in Sunni areas and Sunnis in Shia areas,” he told me. “We make the best of it by going out and meeting the local people. It works because we have a decent reputation around here that we’ve been cultivating for a long time. Reporters would get it more if they were with us from the beginning.”
We saddled up in Humvees, drove down quiet residential streets, and dismounted on a street near a palm grove.
Children came out of their houses to meet us.
We walked, and kept walking, so the parked Humvees would give no indication whose house we were going to visit. When we eventually reached our destination, some of the soldiers dispersed and set up checkpoints several blocks away in each direction.
“We’re trying to make it slightly less obvious that wread
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Tuesday, 21 August 2007 |
Muqtada al Sadr admits direct involvement with Lebanese Hezbollah, and by default Iran Qods Force logo, click to view. While recent press reporting has been skeptical of the Mahdi Army's involvement with Hezbollah and Iran, Muqtada al Sadr and members...read
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
Just last september a "secret" intelligence report, that somehow reached the hands of the mainstream media, declared the former Baathist stronghold "lost" to American forces.read
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
Today in my biweekly quot;Conservative Columnistquot; feature for National Interest online, the web edition of the foreign policy journal The National... . . .read
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Monday, 20 August 2007 |
I think my man Petraeus is stealing a march on the left and the Democrats. He has already been floating the idea of troop reductions next year, but the beauty is that he is considering them because his cunning plan...read
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