A year of counterinsurgency warfare in Iraq
...Al Qaeda has had a strategic defeat in Iraq. The Sunnis have turned against them not only in Iraq but elsewhere. Al Qaeda's brutal tactics will cause a similar rejection in Pakistan which needs to adopt the counterinsurgency program that has worked in Iraq.One year ago, "the surge" kicked off as a forlorn hope, our last chance to get it right.
The odds were against us. Terrorist violence was out of control. Baghdad was a toxic wreck. Militias ruled, with ethnic cleansing rampant. And Iraq's leaders couldn't even agree about which day of the week it was.
We had never applied a coherent military or political policy in Iraq. Dithering leaders, civilian and in uniform, squandered American and Iraqi lives. A unique opportunity to jumpstart change in the Middle East had collapsed amid ideological fantasies, a looting orgy for well-connected contractors and Washington's simple unwillingness to really fight.
Even the new US jefe maximo for Iraq, Petraeus, was a dark horse. He'd just signed off on a counterinsurgency manual suggesting that the key to defeating terrorists is to learn to pronounce Salaam aleikum (Peace be with you) properly.
And then it all went right. Confounding Dems who expected him to preside over a retreat, Petraeus took the fight to the enemy like a rat terrier on meth. Jettisoning all the p.c. dogma, he turned out to be the first true warrior we put in command in Iraq.
Luck turned our way, too - and luck matters in war. Al Qaeda had managed to alienate its erstwhile Sunni Arab allies in record time. Former insurgents decided that the Great Satan America made a better dancing partner than Osama & Co.
Although analysts have missed it completely, the execution of Saddam Hussein helped, too: It took away the rallying figure for Sunni hardliners and made it easier for former insurgents to switch allegiance. The shock of Saddam's hanging jarred Iraq's Sunni Arabs back to reality: Big Daddy with the mustache wasn't coming back.
Meanwhile, the rest of the population was just sick of the violence. The merchant class wanted to get back to business. Tribal sheiks felt betrayed by foreign terrorists. And mashallah! We had veteran commanders on the ground who recognized the shifts underway in Iraqi society and capitalized on them.
Petraeus manifested two stages of military genius: 1) He recognized exactly what had to be done. 2) He didn't imagine he could do it all himself.
Our new man in Baghdad had the wisdom to give subordinate commanders a long leash when they caught a good scent.
Without in any way detracting from Petraeus, the indispensable man, our success this past year rested heavily upon field commanders far from the flagpole having the savvy to realize that the local sheik just needed one last bit of encouragement to jump sides.
Oh, and the left turned out to be dead wrong, as usual. We hadn't created an unlimited supply of terrorists. In fact, the supply turned out to be very finite, to al Qaeda's chagrin. And killing them worked. (One of the great untold stories of 2007 was the number of al Qaeda corpses.)
And our former enemies have been killing them for us.
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Politically the Democrats have also suffered a strategic defeat. Unlike al Qaeda, they may be able to spin their way out of it, but eventually the voters are going to notice just how wrong they have been.
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