Richard Lugar, Meet David Kilcullen
EDITORIAL Richard Lugar, Meet David Kilcullen Indiana senator Richard Lugar is, if he may say so himself, a thoughtful fellow. Not, to be fair, that he quite says so himself. In his speech on the...
...It fails to deal seriously with the real strategic choices the United States faces in the war we're fighting...
...Now finishing up his tour of duty, Kil-cullen offered "personal views" of "what's happening, right now...
...Yet in the same breath he accepts as a given "the short period framed by our own domestic political debate...
...Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they're secured...
...And last year we patrolled rarely, mainly in vehicles, and got hit almost every time we went out...
...These are long-term operations: the enemy will adapt and we'll have to adjust what we're doing over time...
...military effort...
...Baq'ubah, Arab Jabour and the western operations are progressing well, and additional security measures in place in Baghdad have successfully tamped down some of the spill-over of violence from other places...
...credibility...
...These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces in partnership with Iraqi Army and Police, as well as political and economic programs, to permanently secure them...
...Students of American politics should read Lugar's 50-minute speech as a case study in pseudo-thoughtful-ness, full of cheek-puffing and chin-pulling...
...Now this is the voice of a serious and thoughtful man, working with other serious and thoughtful men to change the situation in Iraq...
...Who drives our "domestic political debate...
...He has either to come out of the woodwork, fight us and be destroyed, or stay quiet and accept permanent marginalization from his former population base...
...Don't senators have any influence on this...
...Can't they try to shape, or reshape, the political debate—especially if it threatens the success of a major U.S...
...It is about marginalizing al Qa'ida, Shi'a extremist militias, and the other terrorist groups from the population they prey on...
...These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before...
...It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action...
...If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK...
...David Kilcullen, a former Australian military officer, is one of the world's leading experts on counterinsurgency warfare...
...Who "framed" that time period...
...we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation...
...The appropriate response of a serious and thoughtful political leadership in Washington would be to give Petraeus, Odierno, and the troops at least a fighting chance to implement the surge—and to succeed...
...now we have almost 160,000 troops in country but deaths are under 120 per month, much less than a proportionate increase, which would have been around 150 a month...
...Time will tell, though...
...In his speech on the floor of the Senate last Monday night, he simply chose to point out that unnamed others had been engaged in "sloganeering rhetoric and political opportunism" and had failed to appreciate "the complexities at the core of our situation...
...He, by contrast, chose to offer "a thoughtful revision of our Iraq policy," "a thoughtful Plan B" for Iraq...
...The politics of the matter then can be decisive, provided the Iraqis use the time we have bought for them to reach the essential accommodation...
...Lugar acknowledges that the security strategy is working and probably could achieve its goals...
...Apparently that would be too much to ask...
...The relatively muted response (so far) to the second Samarra bombing is evidence of this...
...Now we patrol all the time, on foot, by day and night with Iraqi units normally present as partners, and the chances of getting hit are much lower on each patrol...
...And he can't just "go quiet" to avoid that threat...
...Absolutely...
...We are finally coming out of the "defensive crouch" with which we used to approach the environment, and it is starting to pay off...
...But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing...
...When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it...
...That is still true...
...The speech is hollow at its center, and unserious to the core...
...I have often said that we need to give this time...
...We have to play the hand we have been dealt as intelligently as possible, so we're doing what has to be done...
...We have chosen to accept and manage this risk, primarily because a low-risk option simply will not get us the operational effects that the strategic situation demands...
...But too many of our politicians are not serious...
...But the population-centric approach is the beginning of a process that aims to put the overall campaign onto a sustainable long-term footing...
...Is there a strategic risk involved in this series of operations...
...All this may change...
...But so far, thank God, the loss rate has not been too terrible: casualties are up in absolute terms, but down as a proportion of troops deployed (in the fourth quarter of 2006 we had about 100,000 troops in country and casualties averaged 90 deaths a month...
...The point of the operations is to lift the pall of fear from population groups that have been intimidated and exploited by terrorists to date, then win them over and work with them in partnership to clean out the cells that remain—as has happened in Al Anbar Province and can happen elsewhere in Iraq as well...
...Why...
...A sharp critic of the previous U.S...
...As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual "surge of operations...
...Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent terrorists relocating their infrastructure from one to another, and to create an operational synergy between what we're doing in Baghdad and what's happening outside...
...This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led...
...Every single loss is a tragedy...
...Contrast Lugar's speech with an assessment of the situation in Iraq posted the very next day on the Small Wars Journal website (smallwarsjournal.com...
...strategy in Iraq, he was asked by General Petraeus to serve as an adviser during the development and early execution of the new strategy...
...The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain...
...That's the intent here...
...The really decisive activity will be police work, registration of the population and counterintelligence in these areas, to comb out the insurgent sleeper cells and political cells that have "gone quiet" as we moved in, but which will try to survive through the op and emerge later...
...I would only qualify Keane's statement in this way: Such a frivolous and thoughtless betrayal of our fighting men would be too contemptible to be called tragedy...
...As retired General Jack Keane told the New York Sun last week, "The tragedy of these efforts is we are on the cusp of potentially being successful in the next year in a way that we have failed in the three-plus preceding years, but because of this political pressure, it looks like we intend to pull out the rug from underneath that potential success...
...Personally, I think we are doing reasonably well and casualties have been lower so far than I feared...
...Of course, we still go after all the terrorist and extremist leaders we can target and find, and life has become increasingly "nasty, brutish, and short" for this crowd...
...Lugar also fails to explain how the partial withdrawal and redeployment of U.S...
...It's worth reproducing much of Kilcul-len's report, "Understanding Current Operations in Iraq": On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces...
...troops that he recommends, along with various diplomatic initiatives, would actually achieve the fundamental goals he identifies— preventing horrendous violence in Iraq, denying victory to al Qaeda and/or Iran, and avoiding great damage to U.S...
...Nothing in war is risk-free...
...It will be a long, hard summer, with much pain and loss to come, and things could still go either way...
...William Kristol...
...That puts him on the horns of a lethal dilemma (which warms my heart, quite frankly, after the cynical obscenities these gang members have inflicted on the innocent Iraqi non-combatant population...
...But we realize that this is just a shaping activity in support of the main effort, which is securing the Iraqi people from the terrorists, extremist militias, and insurgents who need them to survive...
...B]ecause [the enemy] needs the population to act in certain ways in order to survive, we can asphyxiate him by cutting him off from the people...
...Except it's not thoughtful...
Vol. 12 • July 2007 • No. 40
