The Baker Hamilton strategy would get more people killed in Iraq

Michael Gordon:

Under the timetable embraced Monday by Gen. David H. Petraeus, the number of American combat brigades would decline by one-fourth by next summer, to 15 in July from 20 now, with the prospect of deeper, if as yet unscheduled, reductions to come.

But such a move would raise the question of how the United States can avert an increase in violence in Iraq while carrying out a gradual drawdown. One approach embraced by many lawmakers would be to modify the American mission to emphasize the training and advising of Iraqi security forces so that Iraqis would be pushed into the lead and a vast majority of American combat troops could be quickly withdrawn.

This proposal, which was offered last year by the Iraq Study Group, the bipartisan panel led by Lee H. Hamilton, a former congressman, and former Secretary of State James A. Baker III, has appealed to many Democrats and some Republicans who want to achieve a measure of stability in Iraq while shrinking the role of the American military.

But in his testimony on Monday, General Petraeus offered a very different vision. He proposed an American presence that would not only be longer and larger than many Democrats have advocated but would also provide for a greater American combat role in protecting the Iraqi population.

Redefining the American mission to focus primarily on training Iraqi forces and conducting commando raids against terrorists, General Petraeus said, would be premature. “We have learned before that there is a real danger in handing over tasks to the Iraqi security forces before their capability and local conditions warrant,” he added.

The American commander was not only rebuffing the demand for a firm timeline for withdrawing the bulk of American forces, but also putting critics on notice that even when reductions come he has a different vision of the manner in which many of the remaining troops would be used.

General Petraeus is not the only one offering such cautions. The National Intelligence Estimate issued last month made a similar point — and General Petraeus quoted from it in his testimony. “We assess that changing the mission of coalition forces from a primarily counterinsurgency and stabilization role to a primary combat support role for Iraqi forces and counterterrorist operations to prevent A.Q.I. from establishing a safe haven would erode security gains achieved thus far,” the estimate noted. A.Q.I. is the abbreviation the intelligence agencies use to refer to Al Qaeda of Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi organization with foreign leadership.

In his testimony, General Petraeus presented charts on suicide-bombing trends, sectarian killings, civilian deaths, roadside bombings and arms caches found. Though acknowledging that the road ahead would be difficult, he asserted that the United States so far had largely achieved its military goals to tamp down sectarian violence.

Yet a careful look at the charts illustrated the challenges faced by the military. The color-coded chart on attack trends showed a correlation between the decline of weekly attacks and the “surge” of offensive operations enabled by the deployment of five additional combat brigades and assorted other units.

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As I noted Sunday, counterinsurgency strategy requires a high force to space ratio and the ability to deny real estate to the enemy. By being with the people and protecting them we also get much greater access to intelligence making it easier to find and destroy the enemy. By getting reconciliation from many of the tribes we also gain access to their intelligence data on enemy locations and movements. The Baker Hamilton approach would pull us out of the neighborhoods and back into the Forward Operating Bases and back into the whack-a-mole chase which just drives the enemy from one part of the country to the other.

I think Congress's embrace of the Baker Hamilton strategy is not based on any understanding of counterinsurgency warfare and I am pretty sure that the people who drew it up don't have much of a concept of counterinsurgency warfare. I think they are just embracing it becasue it is a change and it is one that would give them some political cover. But, victory will supply its own political cover and Gen. Petraeus has adopted the correct strategy for fighting the enemy in Iraq and it is working. Democrats who oppose the strategy do so out of ignorance and their real opposition is to the policy of defeating the enemy in Iraq.