Winning in Ramadi

Michael Fumento:

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... Ramadi is both a litmus test for the counterinsurgency effort in Iraq and a laboratory. If we can defeat the insurgent and terrorist forces here, there is no place we cannot defeat them. And from what I found, we are defeating them. It's painfully slow, and our men there are still dying in inordinate numbers from a broad variety of attacks. But a multitude of factors, including tribal cooperation, the continual introduction of more Iraqi army and police, the beginning of public works projects, the building of more Forward Operating Bases (FOBs), the installation of more small operational posts (OPs), and plunking down company-sized Combat Operation Posts (COPs) smack in the middle of hostile territory are destroying both the size and the mobility of the enemy. This time the rats are dying in place.

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Even the Los Angeles Times--hardly pro-war or pro-Bush--in an October 5 article reported that local tribes are mad as hell about the insurgency and are not going to take it anymore. It observed that Abdul Jabber Hakkam, spokesman for a coalition of 11 tribes in Al Anbar, was saying locals were capturing and executing the anti-Iraqi forces on their own initiative. "People have done this with their own personal weapons," he said. "Now each house that hosts a terrorist, they will force all the residents of the house outside, so they're on the streets." When that is done, he predicted, the insurgents will "have no one to keep them, and they will withdraw." Further, said Hakkam, "we are not just targeting al Qaeda, but terrorists in general, because people miss real stability and freedom." Importantly, he not only urged the locals to work with the tribes, but also said the tribes need to work closely with the government in Baghdad.

If you're thinking this doesn't reflect doomsaying media interpretations of Marine Col. Peter Devlin's unreleased August intelligence report indicating there's no functioning government in the Anbar, you're right. The province has long been the domain of nomadic tribes. They have no EPA or Department of Education certainly. We're not going to change that system soon and there's little reason to do so. (Residents, for one thing, can simply establish a business overnight and taxes are low to nonexistent.) If they cooperate in the war effort, we've achieved our goal.

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There is much more. Fumento gets in tot he nitty gritty of the war in Ramadi and how the US counter insurgency program is turning things around. His reference to the leaked intelligence report also shows how the media is misleading the public about the situation in Anbar. Fumento has several photos from Ramadi at this link.