Col. MacFarland's gamble wins Ramadi, Anbar

USA Today:

When U.S. strategy in Iraq called for pulling American forces back to large, heavily protected bases last year, Army Col. Sean MacFarland was moving in the opposite direction. He built small, more vulnerable combat outposts in Ramadi's most dangerous neighborhoods — places where al-Qaeda had taken root.

"I was going the wrong way down a one-way street," MacFarland says.

Soon after, MacFarland started negotiating with a group of Sunni sheiks, some of whom have had mixed loyalties in the war. His superiors initially were wary, fearful the plan could backfire, he says. He forged ahead anyway.

Today, with violence down in Ramadi and the surrounding Anbar province west of Baghdad, MacFarland's tactics have led to one of Iraq's rare success stories. Al-Qaeda's presence has diminished as Iraqis have begun to reclaim their neighborhoods. And Army officials are examining how MacFarland's approach might help the military make progress in other parts of the violence-racked country.

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"There are big changes coming," Mains says. "It's not like we turned into a debating party. … It's just the way we try to draw in other people to get the other viewpoint." The military's new counterinsurgency manual makes clear that firepower is only part of the equation.

Mains acknowledges that in the current Army, "not every brigade or battalion commander has gotten that." He says MacFarland, whose brigade returned to its home base here in Germany in February, "really understood this is an argument between us and the insurgents."

Last week, the Army sent a team here to interview MacFarland and other key leaders in the brigade to examine what they accomplished in their 14-month tour in Iraq.

"A lot of ideas are out there," says Col. Eric Jenkins, who headed the team from the Center for Army Lessons Learned. "Everybody's looking for solutions."

MacFarland said he was willing to try just about anything to win over the population and reduce violence in Ramadi. "You name it, I tried it," he says.

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Now it is the Democrats who want to order the military to go back to the failed policies of the past while the new policies are showing demonstrable results. The thrust of the story is about how the Army culture has changed is more open to new ideas and creativity in dealing with the enemy. It does not touch on how out of touch the Democrat party has become when looking at military operations in Iraq. I think it is because too many of them really want to lose the war in Iraq and are doing every thing they can to insure defeat.