Democrats do not understand the enemy

Pete Hegseth:

The Democratic leadership in Congress haven’t got their facts straight on Iraq. They continue in failing to account for the surge’s dramatic success here, and persist in using a public rhetoric stubbornly suited to conditions in the past. This week, Democrats will bring two bills to the Senate floor whose aim is to immediately redeploy U.S. troops out of Iraq under the mistaken notion that doing so will serve our broader (and presumably, legitimate) fight against al-Qaeda. If success against al-Qaeda is the goal, Senators Russell Feingold, Harry Reid, and Barack Obama need to catch up on their reading and acquire all the relevant facts. I know two important books that are a good place to start.

While traveling to Baghdad, I had plenty of downtime to re-read large portions of House to House, Staff Sergeant David Bellavia’s memoir of urban combat in Fallujah, and the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual authored by General David Petraeus and (new Vets for Freedom board member) Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl. The two books highlight fundamental aspects of the Iraq war today — and are must-reads for anyone who wants to understand the enemy we face and the strategy we’re currently employing against them, with great success.

Congressional Medal of Honor nominee David Bellavia’s first-person account of deadly hand-to-hand combat in Iraq paints a realistic and detailed picture of the enemy he faced in Fallujah — what he called “an insurgent global all-star team” that included “Chechen snipers, Filipino machine gunners, Pakistani mortar men, and Saudi suicide bombers.” The insurgents were not ordinary Iraqis fighting for their freedom against an invading power — but international Islamic militants supported by al-Qaeda. “They seek not only to destroy us here in Iraq, but to destroy American power and influence everywhere. They revile our culture and want it swept clear, replaced with Sharia law.” If only certain U.S. Senators truly understood the global nature of our vicious enemy in Iraq.

The second book outlines the military doctrine behind our counterinsurgency strategy in Iraq — and is a testament to military adaptation and leadership. In the military theater, Petraeus’s manual calls for “securing and controlling the local populace,” but also for “providing essential services” and “supporting government reforms and reconstruction projects” — all of which requires “a high ratio of security forces to the protected population” (i.e., enough troops). Meanwhile, on the home front, the manual warns that “protracted counterinsurgency operations are hard to sustain. The effort requires a firm political will and substantial patience by the government, its people, and the countries providing support.” In light of today’s Senate fights, these words are painfully prescient.

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The first bill would mandate that national-security leaders create “a comprehensive strategy to combat and defeat al Qaeda globally.” An excellent idea: We all want to defeat al-Qaeda wherever they exist — Pakistan, Afghanistan, Syria, everywhere. America needs a more comprehensive military, political, and cultural strategy to deal with modern Islamic radicalism, which promises to be a Long War (as Maj. Gen. John Batiste and I have argued in the Washington Post).

But it’s not 2003 anymore. Given the fact that today we are facing a determined al-Qaeda effort to destabilize Iraq, wouldn’t any rational person include Iraq in their list of places where al-Qaeda must be defeated? Not Obama, Feingold, and Reid, who believe “we need to safely [i.e., immediately] redeploy U.S. troops from Iraq.” Whatever misgivings these senators may have felt about the invasion of Iraq in the first place, today we are there. And so is al-Qaeda. Any “strategy to combat and defeat al Qaeda globally” must begin there.

The second bill entails an immediate timeline for troop withdrawal, regardless of conditions on the ground. The supporting evidence for this approach is thin — “the key to ending [the violence] is political reconciliation, not a huge U.S. troop presence.” When Senate Democrats refuse to recognize the gains we’ve already made, it’s impossible for them to understand the way counterinsurgency warfare develops.

Contrary to Senator Obama’s assertion that Sunni sheiks in Anbar Province rose up against al-Qaeda because of the Democrats’ midterm election victory (yes, he actually said that), the reason for the “Sunni Awakening” was a commitment of troops in patrol bases throughout Ramadi (reported first by Wade Zirkle and Sgt. Bellavia in July of 2006 — months before the midterm elections), followed by an increase in troops and sustained commitment throughout Anbar and Iraq in 2007.

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When you hear Democrats like Nancy Pelosi talk about "war without end" it is clear that she does not have an comprehension of counterinsurgency warfare. It appears that she and her democrat colleagues in the Senate or willfully ignorant on the subject and the progress we have made through using counterinsurgency tactics in Iraq. Obama's naive statement on Anbar should be an embarrassment since it shows how uninformed he is on the facts on the ground.

One of the tasks of the coming campaign is to educate the public on the use of counterinsurgency warfare and the benefits of winning. We are not challenged by conventional forces now because our adversaries know they cannot win. We need to demonstrate that insurgency strategies can also be defeated or we will be faced with more adversaries ready to use them to thwart US policy.