Tracing progress in Iraq
Max Boot:
This is in an area that last August an intelligence report was leaked suggesting the situation was grim to hopeless. Even as the situation beginning improving in the fall with the Sheiks openly turning against al Qaeda the old pessimistic report was leaked again to the Washington Post. Now the Sheiks want to take this cooperation to a national level. That is bad news for al Qaeda and the Democrats who want to lose. This is an image of Marines at work in Ramadi.
Frederick Kagan also discusses the progress of the surge in Iraq.
...There is much more.
Each of the Ramadi offensives began with troops staging raids into the targeted area to eliminate "high value individuals"--local al Qaeda leaders. Then the troops would place three-foot-high concrete blocks known as Jersey barriers around the targeted neighborhood to prevent insurgents from "squirting out." This would be followed by a clearing operation, with U.S. and Iraqi troops advancing from multiple directions to root out the enemy. Combat was intense. Insurgents fought back with everything from homemade bombs to AK-47s, rocket-propelled grenades, and heavy machine guns. Ten American soldiers were killed and another 40 wounded.
"The price was heavy but worth it," says Colonel John W. Charlton, the burly commander of the 1st Brigade who directed the operations. "The enemy lost massively."
To illustrate the point, he shows me a page of closely printed type listing all the arms caches seized by his men. These included 10,250 pounds of homemade explosives, 2,347 pounds of high explosives, 2,265 feet of detonation cord, and 6,000 gallons of chlorine. U.S. troops discovered and dismantled entire factories devoted to the production of IEDs, and they killed hundreds of insurgents.
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It is a horrific scene but also a hopeful one. "A few weeks ago you couldn't drive down this street without being attacked. When I went down this street in February, I was hit three times with small-arms fire and IEDs," Colonel Charlton tells me over the intercom system of his up-armored Humvee. Even though this is an unlucky day--Friday the 13th--we do not experience a single attack on our convoy. The only violence the entire day occurs when a rocket lands on the other side of the Euphrates River without hurting anyone. The previous week, Ramadi saw a much-publicized attack--a suicide bomber drove a truck filled with explosives and chlorine gas into a police checkpoint, killing 12 people (not the 27 or more cited in most news accounts). But such violence has become the exception; it used to be the norm. Ramadi, which used to see 20 to 25 attacks a day, now sees an average of 2 to 4 a day--and falling. Entire days go by without a single attack. By the time I visited, no U.S. soldier had been killed in the town for weeks.
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Yet, for all the difficulties that remain (and it would be a serious mistake to underestimate them), the overall trend in Anbar is positive. Startlingly so. According to briefings I received at Multi-National Division-West in Camp Falluja, attacks in the province are at a two-year low. More than 13,000 police officers have been deployed, and more are on the way. Tips to Coalition forces are soaring. Whereas U.S. troops used to find only 50 percent of IEDs, they are now defusing 80 percent before they detonate. Al Qaeda in Iraq has responded with chlorine gas bombs, in other words using chemical weapons against Sunni civilians--not a tactic likely to win over the populace.
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This is in an area that last August an intelligence report was leaked suggesting the situation was grim to hopeless. Even as the situation beginning improving in the fall with the Sheiks openly turning against al Qaeda the old pessimistic report was leaked again to the Washington Post. Now the Sheiks want to take this cooperation to a national level. That is bad news for al Qaeda and the Democrats who want to lose. This is an image of Marines at work in Ramadi.
Frederick Kagan also discusses the progress of the surge in Iraq.
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