Tuesday, August 24, 2004

The Battle For Najaf

It's difficult to find news coming out of Najaf and Fallujah. The major media seem uninterested in ferreting out anything which requires their reporters to leave their hotels in Baghdad's Green Zone and get out into the field. Consequently, unless one does a little digging all he'll hear about are car bombings and it seems like that's all that's happening in Iraq. We do hear vague, general reports about battles raging in Najaf and Fallujah, but nothing about what is actually happening there and what the Iraqi people think of it all.

Thus, when a report like this one from former Marine veteran W.Thomas Smith comes along it gives us a rare glimpse into the circumstances surrounding the current military operations in Najaf. Here are some excerpts from Smith's report which can be found in its entirety on National Review Online:

The past 24 hours have seen U.S. warplanes and helicopter gunships pounding Mahdi positions. Fighting continues on the ground in various sectors of the city, and the consensus among U.S. military personnel is that the insurgency is weakening. The latter is due in large measure to an increase in solid intelligence, a more formidable Iraqi national military force, and positive developing relationships between U.S. forces and Iraqi civilians. Not good for al Sadr.

"Two nights ago on a patrol from midnight to 3 A.M., we actually saw Iraqis sitting out on rugs watching and listening to the Coalition aircraft doing their work in the cemetery," 1st Lt. Jeremy T. Sellars - a platoon commander with Battalion Landing Team 1st Battalion, 4th Marine Regiment - told National Review Online on Saturday. "Despite the obvious level of destruction they were inflicting, I watched Iraqis cheer every time the aircraft fired."

In the rural communities just beyond Najaf, the farming families are comforted by the presence of Americans. "The farmers are some of the most supportive of our patrols," said Sellars. "In these areas you can see women who respond to waves, babies and small children being held up to see the Americans. So in the sense of the local populace, I would say they look forward to the end of this conflict, but they understand why it is happening so close to their homes."

First Lt. John B. Johnston of the U.S. Army's 25th Infantry Division has experienced similar interaction with Iraqi civilians. In a Saturday conversation with NRO, he recalled a recent patrol in which his platoon was followed by droves of children. "There were about a hundred of them," he said. "They were chanting 'USA' and shouting great things about President Bush. These kids are the future of Iraq, and they clearly want us there."

He added, the "friendliness" witnessed by Americans in Iraq is rarely understood back home. "There is a lot editorial license being taken in terms of the media choosing what to report. I feel like a lot of the positive things we've been doing have been glossed over for more dramatic actions elsewhere. Car bombs are a lot more fun to report than our painting schools or whatever. But the positives definitely outweigh the negatives. If you want compare the bad days to the good days, I'd have to say 90 percent to the good."

Though some would argue otherwise, time - and the fact that positive news stories will eventually see ink - is in many ways on the side of the Americans in Iraq and the new Iraqi interim government. Not so for al Sadr.

"It appears to me that in April and May we killed the best and brightest [of the Mahdi army]," 1st Lt. Brian Suits of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division in Najaf, said during a radio interview with talk-radio host Kirby Wilbur on Seattle's KVI radio, last Thursday. "What al Sadr is doing now is sending in the guys who are left behind to make a statement. He's running out of guys. The guys he has are frankly running out of motivation. They are ill-prepared and ill-trained. They are beginning to question their authority. I think they're saying 'wait a minute, you told us that God was going to guide our bullets, but we haven't killed one American soldier in our area and we are dying left and right here.'"

Asked if Iraqi national military forces and police are measuring up to their U.S. and British allies on the battlefield, Suits said, "I've been in combat with these guys over the last couple of days, and I was as wary as anyone else. I saw their performance in the first Gulf War, but they have since coalesced into an effective force. I'm not lying. I'm not propagandizing. I'm not delivering a message someone else said. I have confidence in them being on my left or my right. They will go forward. They will close with the enemy. They will fix him. And they will kill him. They do not retreat. They do not cower. They support each other. They drag their wounded out of the line of fire. And I have confidence that these guys will be able to defend their country because they are doing it now."

As the Iraqi forces continue to improve and as the Iraqi people continue to taste the benefits of freedom the situation there will continue to improve. Iran and Syria will continue to try their best to destabilize it because they know that as long as we're tied up in Iraq we won't turn our attention toward them. This is a two-edged strategy, however, since the more apparent it becomes that Iran and Syria are thwarting the aspirations of the Iraqi people the more the Iraqis will resent both the insurgents and their neighbors and the more likely they will be to welcome American military action against them from our bases within Iraq.