In the copious interviews that Bob Woodward has given promoting his new book, The War Within: Secret White House History 2006-2008, he has put forward a new reason meant to explain the success of U.S. forces in Iraq since January 2007: a "secret program" that the military used to kill terrorists. In a recent CNN interview, he compared this program to the Manhattan Project. As CNN reports, "Woodward disclosed the existence of secret operational capabilities developed by the military to locate, target and kill leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq and other insurgent leaders."
Woodward promises that "some day in history" the full details of the United States's top-secret enhanced operational capabilities will be "be described to people's amazement."
Generally the turnaround in Iraq has been attributed to the troop "surge," the shift in American strategy toward classical counterinsurgency operations, and the emergence of such local allies as the Iraqi Awakening movement. Does Woodward have his finger on a new explanation that has heretofore been overlooked?
On Tuesday, a senior U.S. military intelligence officer provided me with the following skeptical analysis of Woodward's claims:
I have been asking around to a lot of people in military circles who are in a position to know about Woodward's claims ever since his book officially came out. To make a long story short, none of these people, many of whom served in Iraq during 2006, 2007, and 2008, and are still there, have even the slightest idea what he is talking about when he compares whatever he thinks JSOC and SOCOM did in 2007 to the Manhattan Project during World War II. Without getting into any specifics, the techniques that we use to hunt down and kill HVTs [high-value terrorists] did not change significantly between June 2006 when we killed Zarqawi and January 2007 when Operation FARD AL-QANOON began. I am somewhat perplexed at this point as to just who told Woodward this that led him to adopt this view with such fervor, since it is nothing short of a mystery to many of the people involved with either the Awakening or the surge, which were the two major shifts by US and Iraqi forces on the ground that allowed for a reduction in violence.
Given that a lot of what passes for serious discussion on Iraq in the US popular perception is a mixture of misunderstanding, kabuki, and domestic political tribalism, I'm not too surprised that many policy-makers misunderstand the reasons why violence went down or the dynamics behind them. That said, I really do hope that no politician or prominent analyst starts adopting the position that the reduction of violence has less to do with the counterinsurgency theories of David Galula or the Awakening leadership but were instead due to the utilization of some magical new weaponry by our special ops teams. There are very dangerous consequences to such lines of thought, particularly when we are talking about how to deal with the situation in Pakistan.
