I'm taking a couple of days off of work to do, well pretty much nothing. Amazing how occupied I can become doing "Pretty Much Nothing.."
Anyway one of the things I'm doing is catching up on some long overdue Blog reading, commenting and writing.
One thing I would like to do in this post is point to a specific blog I came across in my pursuits to address the concerns of one of my extremely pacifistic liberal friends whom I found myself in a bit of an unfortunate spitting match at a party over the weekend.
I instructed young impressionable one that before he proceed to step into yon deepend, he should, well, you know... educate himself. Not from the likes of CNN, NBC, FOX News, MSNBC, NYT, but rather find some good credible intelligent well written "First Handers" to begin to gain a deeper understanding of what's actually happening in a war that... well he and a few million other Americans... "Don't Like." Which were pretty much his exact words... and as irony would have it, in the particular post I am about to point you all to, a commenter expressed this very notion.
This article was written by Dr. David Kilcullen a Senior Counter-Insurgency Advisor to the Commanding General, Multi-National Force Iraq. And based on the recommendations of a number of High Power "Been there Done That..." associates of mine, this is a guy who does not pull political punches... the guy know his stuff! Oh yeah, and is actually IN COUNTRY with his finger on the pulse! Read the whole thing here (highly recommend plowing through the comments too, lots to be learned from the dialog.)
Here's the lead-in:
I’ve spent much of the last six weeks out on the ground, working with Iraqi and U.S. combat units, civilian reconstruction teams, Iraqi administrators and tribal and community leaders. I’ve been away from e-mail a lot, so unable to post here at SWJ: but I’d like to make up for that now by providing colleagues with a basic understanding of what’s happening, right now, in Iraq.
This post is not about whether current ops are “working” — for us, here on the ground, time will tell, though some observers elsewhere seem to have already made up their minds (on the basis of what evidence, I’m not really sure). But for professional counterinsurgency operators such as our SWJ community, the thing to understand at this point is the intention and concept behind current ops in Iraq: if you grasp this, you can tell for yourself how the operations are going, without relying on armchair pundits. So in the interests of self-education (and cutting out the commentariat middlemen—sorry, guys) here is a field perspective on current operations.
Ten days ago, speaking with Austin Bay, I made the following comment:
“I know some people in the media are already starting to sort of write off the “surge” and say ‘Hey, hang on: we’ve been going since January, we haven’t seen a massive turnaround; it mustn’t be working’. What we’ve been doing to date is putting forces into position. We haven’t actually started what I would call the “surge” yet. All we’ve been doing is building up forces and trying to secure the population. And what I would say to people who say that it’s already failed is “watch this space”. Because you’re going to see, in fairly short order, some changes in the way we’re operating that will make what’s been happening over the past few months look like what it is—just a preliminary build up.”The meaning of that comment should be clear by now to anyone tracking what is happening in Iraq. On June 15th we kicked off a major series of division-sized operations in Baghdad and the surrounding provinces. [READ THE REST HERE]
As to the comment I mentioned before (for those who will not take the link...) A commenter (StevenL) to Dr. Kilcullen's Article wrote:
Dave,
I really appreciate your explanation. But I'm not buying it. Sorry.I'm not a military expert, I'm just an ordinary private citizen and taxpayer, who linked to your article from realclearpolitics.com.
But I have to say: You haven't convinced me. Not one bit. And I'll bet that would be the reaction from a lot of other ordinary citizens too. For the following reason:
From what you described, our men and women in uniform could do everything expected of them and more--and yet the war can still be lost if the Iraqi government itself and the various factions don't start thinking of themselves as a nation, and if the Iraqi government cannot make sufficient political progress. In other words, in your model, the fate of this war is largely out of our hands.
I don't like wars like that.
And I would prefer to look at other solutions.
So if you care what the ordinary American citizens think, maybe you should ask them what they consider to be most important here. After all, it's on their behalf that you are fighting.
Well that opened the flood gates of debate by a number of actual Military Experts. Reading their retorts, is an educational experience in philosophical debate. In the end you may still fell the same way as commenter StevenL and my young friend, however as stated by another writer MAHolzbach on Small Wars Journal:
It is a truism that no matter what your plan is, how brilliant it may be, or how great your soldiers are, the enemy always gets a vote. If one's goal is just to get out as soon as things stabilize, then you could see the Iraqi people and their government as the enemy. But this is a mistake. There is an underlying reason (several actually, but one more than any) why the Iraqi people and their government have a hard time making progress: they are being cowed, on a daily basis, by the terrorists. And that is what our guys are there to stop.
You say that you don't like wars like that? Well, neither do we. The military personnel who would actually PREFER to grind through something counterinsurgency style rather than blast the enemy, plant your flag in his eye socket, and declare victory, are few and far between, if they exist at all. I'm not one of them. But what I, and my comrades here at the Small Wars Journal are, are professionals who know that you cant always get what you want...
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