Fareed Zakaria includes the following bit of silliness in
a column he writes for
Newseek:
This shift could be seen in microcosm in a report last week in The Wall Street Journal on the town of Tall Afar. Tall Afar was an insurgent stronghold, where last month American and Iraqi forces launched a major operation, killing and arresting hundreds. But to avoid the mistakes of the past, when cities were won only to be lost again in a few months, the commanding officer of the American squadron, Lt. Col. Chris Hickey, spent a great deal of time, energy and attention constructing a local political order that would hold. That meant empowering both the Sunnis and Shiites. Hickey reached out to the main Sunni tribal sheik, a man who only a few months earlier had been considered an insurgent leader and imprisoned in Abu Ghraib. "Reconciliation is the key to this thing," explained Col. H. R. McMaster, commander of U.S. forces in north-western Iraq. "This insurgency depends on sectarian tension to move and operate." McMaster articulates a strategy that is part military and part political.
Many military experts have weighed in on the need for a better counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq-one that defends towns and regions, thus securing people's lives, rather than simply killing bad guys. In fact, that strategy is being adopted, using Iraqi troops and local leaders as the crucial ingredients to keeping the peace. That's why conditions in several key trouble spots in Iraq-Sadr City, Mosul, Fallujah, Najaf and Tall Afar-are much, much better than they were a year ago. There is a general recognition even among many Shiite leaders that a purely military strategy will not defeat the insurgency.
Iraq is still in rough shape, but the Bush administration's strategy has moved in the right direction.
Zakaria gives the impression that the current "clear and hold" tactics that coalition forces are employing along the Euphrates River and elsewhere in the Sunni triangle are a novel development. He makes it sound as if the administration could have been setting up local forces in cleared towns all along but were too obtuse to see the value of it and are just now getting around to revising their strategy. This is nonsense.
The fact is that it has been administration policy from early on to train Iraqi troops to handle precisely this sort of mission, but it has taken time to prepare the Iraqis for that task. Now, however, there are dozens of battalions ready to fight the Islamists and provide security in Iraqi towns and more troops are coming on line every month. As the troops are becoming available the policy is coming to fruition, but the policy isn't new. It's only that people who are loath to give the present administration any credit for anything wish us to think that somehow they have just come to see what everyone else has been seeing for months, i.e. that we need a new strategy.
We didn't need a new strategy, the Henny-Pennys and Chicken Littles among us notwithstanding. What we needed was patience and resolve to see the strategy we already had through to it's culmination. Bush had it and it's now clearly paying off.