Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Standing tall in Tal Afar

Ralph Peters:

PERHAPS the only blessing of Hurricane Katrina was that the media, smelling blood at home, reduced their attacks on our efforts in Iraq. Meanwhile, over the past few weeks, our troops conducted one of the finest operations since the fall of Baghdad.

The city of Tal Afar near the Syrian border had become a terrorist refuge. Foreign fanatics wanted to turn it into a new Fallujah. But they repeated a mistake they've increasingly made: They alienated the local population.

Tal Afar needed a clean-up. But it had to be done cleverly. Fallujah was a fortress. Tal Afar was a city held hostage. Firepower had to be used wisely. Leveling Tal Afar wasn't the answer.

Enter our 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment. Teaming up with the 3rd Iraqi Division, the 3rd ACR faced the mission of defeating the terrorists without destroying the city.

In addition to the finest soldiers in the world — our own — and Iraqis willing to fight for their country, we had another ace in our tactical pocket: a brilliant regimental commander of a distinctly American breed.

Col. H. R. McMaster planned to take the city in stages. A tough fighter when he has to be, McMaster is also the sort of leader who never wastes a life. With Iraqi troops leading many of the tactical actions, the 3rd ACR bit chunks out of the city until all that was left was a sprawling neighborhood stronghold of international terrorists.

Even then, McMaster and his team didn't want to win the battle but lose the population's future support. In a fight like Fallujah, you have to do it fast and hard, but in Tal Afar there was time to draw the civilians away from the pockets of resistance.

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Col. McMaster understood his enemy, his own forces and the civilians caught in between. He was playing chess, not checkers. The end result: Our forces entered the last quarter of the city virtually unopposed. The terrorists not yet captured or killed had fled. And Tal Afar is free.

Inevitably, we'll hear complaints about terrorists getting away. But the few who did escape were a small cost to pay for preserving most of the city. Every battle has its own terms. You've got to know when to hold your fire, and when to kill everything that moves. Restraint is the hard part.

For all his abilities on the battlefield, McMaster has another side that may surprise civilians: Far from the swaggering, blustering commander Hollywood loves to mock, he's a soldier-scholar with a doctorate in history. He's also the author of the most respected book written by any military officer of his generation — "Dereliction of Duty: Lyndon Johnson, Robert McNamara, the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the Lies That Led to the Vietnam War." It's a courageous book. Soldiers read it. But McMaster rarely mentions it.

McMaster's book is one of the best books written about Vietnam. Almost all the action in the book takes place in Washington where the war was lost.