Surge needed in Senate

Jack Kelly:

Sentence first; verdict later," said the Queen of Hearts in "Alice in Wonderland." The Queen of Hearts isn't a member of the U.S. Senate, but she has the temperament for it.

Last week, Republican Sens. Richard Lugar of Indiana and George Voinovich of Ohio joined the vast majority of their Democratic colleagues in declaring the troop surge in Iraq a failure. This is curious because (a) the change in strategy has barely begun to be implemented, and (b) the initial signs are positive.

The troop surge formally began Jan. 10 with the announcement that five additional Army brigades would be sent to Iraq. The last brigade did not arrive until the week before last.

"What we've been doing so far is putting forces into position," said David Kilcullen, a former Australian army officer who advises our new commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, on counterinsurgency. "We haven't actually started what I would call the surge yet," he noted in an interview two weeks ago.

But the announcement of the surge and the arrival of its first units did have two immediate effects: Al-Qaida operatives began to leave Baghdad for other parts of Iraq (chiefly Diyala province northeast of Baghdad), and sectarian deaths within Baghdad plunged. (These rose in May, but remain at less than half their pre-surge levels.) Violence is also down significantly in Anbar province, which at this time last year was al-Qaida's foremost stronghold.

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As I write these words, several division-size offensives are under way in Iraq, the most important of which is "Arrowhead Ripper" in Diyala province.

"These operations are qualitatively different from what we've done before," Mr. Kilcullen said in a post at the Small Wars Journal. "Our concept is to knock over several insurgent safe havens simultaneously, in order to prevent the terrorists from relocating their infrastructure from one to another... Unlike on previous occasions, we don't plan to leave these areas once they're secured. These ops will run over months, and the key activity is to stand up viable local security forces ... to permanently secure them."

Al-Qaida had made Baqubah the capital of its "Islamic state of Iraq," and U.S. officials had hoped to bag a lot of its leaders with Arrowhead Ripper. But it appears that many of them read the tea leaves and fled before the operation got under way. This has caused some in the news media to portray Arrowhead Ripper as unsuccessful.

Mr. Kilcullen is unperturbed. "The 'terrain' we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain," he explained. "It is about marginalizing al-Qaida, Shiite extremist militias and other terrorist groups from the population they prey on. This is why claims that '80 percent of al-Qaida leadership have fled' don't overly disturb us: The aim is not to kill every last AQ leader, but rather to drive them off the population and keep them off."

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"Political progress is something that follows the establishment of security, not something that causes it," he said.

What we need is political progress and courage in the Senate and the House to stand up to the voices of defeat and retreat. The media holds Lugar out as a very serious man, but his speech this past week was a very unserious look at the surge and its effect. He should be ashamed and should be held to account.