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 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.
Except it's not thoughtful. Students of American politics should read Lugar's 50-minute speech as a case study in pseudo-thoughtfulness, full of cheek-puffing and chin-pulling. It fails to deal seriously with the real strategic choices the United States faces in the war we're fighting. Lugar acknowledges that the security strategy is working and probably could achieve its goals. Yet in the same breath he accepts as a given "the short period framed by our own domestic political debate." Why? Who "framed" that time period? Who drives our "domestic political debate"? 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. military effort? Apparently that would be too much to ask.
Lugar also fails to explain how the partial withdrawal and redeployment of U.S. 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. credibility. The speech is hollow at its center, and unserious to the core.
Contrast Lugar's speech with an assessment of the situation in Iraq posted the very next day on the Small Wars Journal website. David Kilcullen, a former Australian military officer, is one of the world's leading experts on counterinsurgency warfare. A sharp critic of the previous U.S. strategy in Iraq, he was asked by General Petraeus to serve as an adviser during the development and early execution of the new strategy. Now finishing up his tour of duty, Kilcullen offered "personal views" of "what's happening, right now." It's worth reproducing much of Kilcullen'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. As General Odierno said, we have finished the build-up phase and are now beginning the actual "surge of operations." I have often said that we need to give this time. That is still true. But this is the end of the beginning: we are now starting to put things onto a viable long-term footing.
These operations are qualitatively different from what we have done before. 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. Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they're secured. 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. 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. This will take operational patience, and it will be intelligence-led, and Iraqi government-led. It will probably not make the news (the really important stuff rarely does) but it will be the truly decisive action.
When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation. If we don't get every enemy cell in the initial operation, that's OK. 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.
