What is ahead in Iraq

David Ignatius:

...

The problem, senior officials acknowledge, is that Iraq isn't coming together as a nation. So they are trying a different approach -- more decentralized, more local, more "bottom-up," to use the phrase of the month. Officials recognize that this will mean a weaker central government than the United States had previously sought, but they don't seem unhappy about that. They reject the term "soft partition" but concede that the new Iraq will be a loose confederation.

When Petraeus was training the Iraqi army, he liked to talk about "pop-ups" -- the militia units that appear unexpectedly with charismatic commanders and more fighting zeal than the regular military. Unlike more rigid commanders, he was willing to go with the flow -- to conform his strategy to these pop-up realities rather than try to make things fit his own big picture. That's one of his strengths. He's basically winging it in Iraq -- exploring what works and then going with it.

This bottom-up style of Petraeus and his group represents a decisive break with the cocksure, top-down ethos of Donald Rumsfeld's Pentagon -- and with a military leadership that bought into Rumsfeld's idea that technology had transformed the nature of warfare itself. Nonsense, said the colonels who advised Petraeus, many of whom, like him, are on their third tours in Iraq. They have learned the hard way to be skeptical of big ideas.

Petraeus and his team understand, too, that this war is about people -- and helping them one by one to break the cycle of intimidation. When I asked Col. H.R. McMaster, a key Petraeus adviser, to name a turning point in Anbar, he cited the day in February when al-Qaeda deposited at a Ramadi hospital an ice chest containing the severed heads of the children of several sheiks who had been cooperating with the United States. Rather than submitting to this barbarous act, the enraged sheiks deepened their alliance with the U.S. military.

...

It is clear that al Qaeda has not figured out how to get the Sheiks back into their corner. CNN reports that al Qaeda has killed one of the leading Sheiks in the Anbar Reawakening. This will only make al Qaeda's situation worse in Anbar as the tribe seeks revenge against his killers. The tribes will be even more opposed to al Qaeda. They will be even more supportive of our efforts to purge the area of al Qaeda. It will be even harder for al Qaeda to hide in the area. Right now al Qaeda's best hope remains Democrats in Washington. W. Thomas Smith has similar thoughts on the killing of the Sheik.