StormWarning’s Counterterrorism

Even while the debate over funding of the effort rages in the U.S. House of Representatives and the Senate, and most if not all of the Presidential candidates (especially the Democratic candidates) posture about "their" strategies to end the war, it doesn’t seem that enough people are examining the reasons why this war must be won.

From the outset, everyone, including many of the Democratic candidates for President, supported the invasion on the basis of what everyone believed was an accurate National Intelligence Estimate that, with certainty, claimed that Hussein’s government maintained a stockpile of chemical, biological or nuclear weapons (whether or not this was never proven to be true is not the issue here). None, including Secretary of State, General Colin Powell who stood in front of the United Nations and presented the case for going to war, had any doubt. Further, it was clear that Hussein fully intended to ignore any resolution passed by the UN (Resolution 1441 being, I believe, the last of a series of resolutions ignored by Iraq). A few months after the invasion began, Hussein’s sons were "dispatched" and then we found the "rat bastard" himself in a spider hole, arrested him, and later had him hanged.

Regardless of any miscalculations, or mistakes, or strategic blunders, I don’t see any other alternative than to see this effort through to the point where there is a free standing and fully functioning government in Iraq (this, by the way, is the definition of winning, IMO of course). Is al-Maliki the guy to do it? I have no idea, frankly. But once the United States went in, the die were cast. To leave the task unfinished, would not only be perceived as a victory for the Islamists who have made Iraq the issue…in addition to the fact that the President made it clear that Iraq was a principal battlefield in the War on Terror.

Rather than rant on, this post will grab information and perspective from three articles.

Stratfor’s Iraq: Jihadist Perspectives on a US Withdrawal (follow it through the Google link)
Charles Krauthammer’s No Way To End A War
A foreign affairs piece from the Council on Foreign Relations, Iraq’s Civil War

First from Stratfor
…often missing in that discussion is the fact that Afghanistan and Iraq
were not entered into as self-contained discrete wars, but as fronts in
the wider U.S.-jihadist war. Therefore, though the Bush Administration’s troop srategy, the positioning of the Democrats
and the anti-war statements of potential presidential contenders are by
no measure unimportant, the intense focus on these issues means that
another important perspective on the war — that of the jihadists –
frequently goes unmentioned…

Very clearly, the jihadists, led by al Qaeda and its very strong propaganda and media machine would see a withdrawal of the U.S. forces, or the coalition forces, as a victory. Al Qaeda’s very philosophy is based on the premise that American resolve to fight and win the war will weaken…so the openness of the debate, certainly supported by the Internet and blogsphere that is open to everyone, including al Qaeda’s computer geeks, knows full well the trend of public opinion (they can see and read everything that we do). They have seen how this public opinion has influenced war policy in Vietnam, Beirut, Aden, and Somalia (note that in the Stratfor article, it is noted that bin Laden characterizes each of these as an American defeat).

It is widely believed that the U.S. withdrawal from Lebanon, following
the 1983 Marine barracks bombing, and from Somalia in 1993 were
important precedents in driving the 1996 bombing of the Khobar Towers
in Saudi Arabia. The jihadists believed that if they killed enough
Americans, U.S. forces would leave Saudi Arabia.

So…it is imperative for us all to understand that not only are we facing an enemy mounting a purely opportunistic and asymmetric war, but also one that has an outlook of "system, not organization" ("nizam, la tanzim") - see earlier post: Afghanistan & the Taliban: The "Rule Book" (Layeha) but also, as explained by the Stratfor article, sees the conflict as a "Fourth-Generation War."

"Fourth-generation warfare, the experts said, is a new type of war in
which fighting will be mostly scattered. The battle will not be limited
to destroying military targets and regular forces, but will include
societies, and will seek to destroy popular support for the fighters
within the enemy’s society. In these wars, the experts stated in their
article, ‘television news may become a more powerful operational weapon
than armored divisions.’ They also noted that ‘the distinction between
war and peace will be blurred to the vanishing point.’"

The premise is the the U.S. (and its allies) have neither the taste for, or the resolve, to fight a truly "long war" (see Ability to Wage ‘Long War’ Is Key To Pentagon Plan - Conventional Tactics De-Emphasized in which Ann Scott Tyson writes, "The Pentagon, readying for what it calls a "long war," yesterday laid
out a new 20-year defense strategy that envisions U.S. troops deployed,
often clandestinely, in dozens of countries at once to fight terrorism
and other nontraditional threats…" In reality, the very fact that al Qaeda is not constrained by country boundaries and no permanent bases, then traditional war tactics will not work (again, bin Laden’s philosophy as explained by Stratfor’s article). Further, bin Laden’s belief is that "the jihadists love death the way Americans love life."

In a July 2005 letter, al-Zawahiri outlined a four part strategy:

1) Expel the Americans from Iraq.
2) Establish an Islamic authority or emirate in Iraq.
3) Extend the jihad wave to secular countries neighboring Iraq.
4) Initiate a clash with Israel.

The conclusion is ever so clear. A retreat or withdrawal will bring victory in the eyes of the jihad. That we cannot allow. And in fact, Stratfor makes it fully clear that al Qaeda will not cease its jihad, even if or after a withdrawal from Iraq as they wish to rid the West from all of the lands of Islam. As expressed by al-Zawahiri, the jihad "…seeks to liberate Palestine, the whole of Palestine, and to liberate
every land which (once belonged to) Islam, from Andalus to Iraq…"

Withdrawal should be out of the question…if you read nothing else.

Krauthammer’s article examines the implications of the slow bleeding pull-out that is now being debated. He notes that in October 2002, both Houses of Congress ("with open eyes and large majorities") authorized the use of force in Iraq (at the time to enforce 1441, right?).

Now, more than four years later, the Democrats want out of the
resulting war. Most, such as Rep. John Murtha, want to do so for a
simple reason: They think the war is lost. If you believe that, then
getting out is the most reasonable and honorable and patriotic policy.

As will be discussed below, I don’t actually believe that the war has been lost. I believe that the nature of the war changed. We did not anticipate the "insurgency," I do not believe that we anticipated the conflicts between Shi’a and Sunni or the adamancy of the Kurds to maintain some control over the country’s natural resources and of Kirkuk.

The current effort to stifle spending could well leave the U.S and its Coalition "allies" handcuffed. But Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Carl Levin, rather than reduce spending, may propose a redirection of the mission.

Levin has a different idea — change the original October 2002
authorization. "We . . . will be looking at modification of that
authorization in order to limit the mission of American troops to a
support mission instead of a combat mission," says Levin. "That is very
different from cutting funds."

While this idea is not as perverse
as Murtha’s, it is totally illogical. There is something exceedingly
strange about authorizing the use of force — except for combat. That
is an oxymoron. Changing the language of authorization means — if it
means anything — that Petraeus will have to surround himself with
lawyers who will tell him, every time he wants to deploy a unit,
whether he is ordering a legal "support" mission or an illegal "combat"
mission.

If Levin wants to withdraw our forces from the civil war
in the cities to more secure bases from which we can continue training
and launching operations against al-Qaeda, he should present that to
the country as an alternative to (or a fallback after) the
administration’s troop surge. But to force it on our commanders through
legalisms is simply to undermine their ability to fight the war
occurring on the ground today.

Mission? As Krauthammer so ably states it: "Slowly bleeding our forces by defunding what our commanders think they
need to win (the House approach) or rewording the authorization of the
use of force so that lawyers decide what operations are to be launched
(the Senate approach) is no way to fight a war. It is no way to end a
war. It is a way to complicate the war and make it inherently
unwinnable — and to shirk the political responsibility for doing so."

(That’s why he does what he does and I write a blog commenting on what he writes.)

Civil War??? Civil war? Yeah! Isn’t that what we’re really facing now??? And no one, especially the Republicans, want to acknowledge that! But shouldn’t that have been obvious if we were all paying attention to the religious, tribal and ethnic differences that became the hodgepodge of the country that was formed by Great Britain from the dismantled Ottoman Empire (see Sykes-Picot Agreement)?

So, finally, from the CFR article, Iraq’s Civil War, we take this (noting that some readers will not agree with this perspective).

Summary:
The White House still avoids the label, but by any reasonable
historical standard, the Iraqi civil war has begun. The record of past
such wars suggests that Washington cannot stop this one — and that
Iraqis will be able to reach a power-sharing deal only after much more
fighting, if then. The United States can help bring about a settlement
eventually by balancing Iraqi factions from afar, but there is little
it can do to avert bloodshed now.

But even the last National Intelligence Estimate refused to outright call the "conflict" in Iraq a civil war. Clearly, though, avoiding that label also avoids what could well be the question, "If it’s a civil war, what are we doing there, mixed
up in someone else’s fight?"

This CFR article is long and I have slogged through the whole thing, but I’m not going to rehash it now or here.

In fact, there is a civil war in progress in Iraq, one comparable in important
respects to other civil wars that have occurred in postcolonial states with weak political institutions.
Those cases suggest that the Bush administration’s political objective in Iraq — creating a stable,
peaceful, somewhat democratic regime that can survive the departure of U.S. troops — is unrealistic.
Given this unrealistic political objective, military strategy of any sort is doomed to fail almost
regardless of whether the administration goes with the "surge" option, as President George W.
Bush has proposed, or shifts toward a pure training mission, as advised by the Iraq Study Group.

Even if an increase in the number of U.S. combat troops reduces violence
in Baghdad and so buys time for negotiations on power sharing in the current Iraqi government, there
is no good reason to expect that subsequent reductions would not revive the violent power struggle.
Civil wars are rarely ended by stable power-sharing agreements. When they are, it typically takes
combatants who are not highly factionalized and years of fighting to clarify the balance of power.
Neither condition is satisfied by Iraq at present. Factionalism among the Sunnis and the Shiites
approaches levels seen in Somalia, and multiple armed groups on both sides appear to believe that
they could wrest control of the government if U.S. forces left. Such beliefs will not change quickly
while large numbers of U.S. troops remain.

James D. Fearon is the author of the piece, and it is worth the time to read it, even if you’re of the camp that doesn’t believe that Iraq is now embroiled in a civil war (a position that I hold). Even with that belief, however, I believe that we must remain in Iraq until the government is stable. We cannot withdraw without the risk of simply handing al Qaeda and the jihad a perceived if not real victory. It is a dilemma for sure.

We find ourselves now more than five years since the last attack on the United States on September 11th. It is my contention that on that day, the rules changed and the conventional wisdom was no longer relevant. And yet, we clearly ignored the religious, ethnic and tribal differences that now threaten the rend Iraq into parts (we similarly failed to recognize the tribal influences in Afghanistan). If this "domino" falls, then I fear that others will also. We chose Iraq to do battle against al Qaeda and against Terrorism to prevent that terror from coming back to the United States. That is why "Winning is Everything" in Iraq.

If you’ve read this far, thank you for your patience and attention.