Phil Carter Debriefs After His Year In Iraq
Phil Carter, an Army Reserve officer, founded his informative blog Intel Dump on military affairs while still in law school at UCLA. Not long after graduating and passing the bar exam he was recalled to active duty for a year in Iraq. Sunday he offered his views on the Iraq mess in an Op Ed in the New York Times. Here are some of the highlights:
Despite these successes, I still left Iraq feeling uncertain about what we had accomplished. In theory, security should have improved with the development of capable Iraqi Army and police units. That did not happen. This is the central paradox of the Iraq war in fall 2006: we are making progress in developing the Iraqi Army and police, yet the violence gripping the country continues to worsen.
This paradox raises fundamental questions about the wisdom and efficacy of our strategy, which is to “stand up†Iraqi security forces so we can “stand down†American forces. Put simply, this plan is a blueprint for withdrawal, not for victory. Improving the Iraqi Army and police is necessary to prevail in Iraq; it is not sufficient.
Counterinsurgency is more like an election than a military operation; the Iraqi government must convince the Iraqi people to choose it over the alternatives offered by Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish militants. To do so, the Iraqi government and the coalition must deliver public goods — security, public works, commerce, education and the rule of law, to name a few. The campaign must convince not just a majority or super-majority but virtually everyone, for as the noted insurgents T. E. Lawrence and Mao Zedong have noted, it takes the support of just 2 in 100 citizens to sustain an insurgency.
At this point, and with this strategy, it may not be possible to win in Iraq. America gained a spectacular victory in 2003, toppling the brutal Saddam Hussein regime. But there are limits to what military force can accomplish. You cannot plant democracy with a bayonet, nor can you force Iraqis to choose a particular path if their democracy is to mean anything at all.
Yet Carter is reluctant to give up. He closes with some suggestions for radical changes of tactics (in the broadest sense), but this attempt at optimism (or at least minimizing pessimism) is belied by the overall thrust of the piece.