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thedrifter
11-24-07, 08:45 AM
Winning the war
Gary Rust
Saturday, November 24, 2007

From Forbes magazine: Congress is in full-throated debate over the Iraq war. The media are loaded with war-related stories. Ignore all of it.

The best media coverage of the war in Iraq was supplied recently in the New York Post by Ralph Peters, a retired Army officer turned consultant/pundit (click on Opinion at nypost.com for stories). He spent more than a week living with Marines and soldiers doing the nitty-gritty patrolling, fighting and rebuilding there. Having been a career military officer, Peters quickly saw the real situation. His conclusion: Finally, after four years, we're getting the prosecution of this war right. Our troops are making remarkable progress in routing the insurgents. If we stay the course, al-Qaida's forces in Iraq will soon suffer a catastrophic defeat, and the whole Muslim world will know it.

It's not that we've just poured in more troops. Thanks to Gen. David Petraeus, commanding general of the Multi-National Force-Iraq, we have adopted a coherent and effective military strategy. Instead of clearing out a bad area and quickly turning it over to ill-prepared Iraqi troops or militias, we're staying. We're also pursuing the bad guys, preventing them from regrouping, gathering reinforcements and coming back after us.

This is Counterinsurgency 101: You can't win until you secure the population. Once people feel safe, they'll have every incentive to cooperate with us. They'll also start to create local self-governments, civil society and commerce.

Even though Iraq's national government remains weak, with endless bickering over patronage and too many officials seemingly intent on lining their pockets, effective governance is starting to reappear at the local level. Al-Qaida and its allies now have no more safe areas in Iraq. They will continue to slaughter civilians to create the impression that the situation is deteriorating, but their ability to take control of large swaths of Iraq has been obliterated. Their very cruelty, by the way, is a critical reason that more and more tribal leaders are now eager to work with us instead of fighting us.

Given its history and ethnic animosities, Iraq will not become a Jeffersonian democracy in our lifetime. But it could well grow into a thriving, tolerably governed nation with a weak central government and very effective local rule, a positive and vivid contrast to many other Middle East states, especially Syria and Iran.

The real danger now lies not in Baghdad or onetime al-Qaida-infested Anbar Province but in Washington, where political pressures may force us to draw down U.S. Forces prematurely.

American public perception is growing that the war is at last taking a turn for the better. But this change may not happen fast enough to stave off stupidity on Capitol Hill. Thankfully, President Bush's stirring throw-down-the-gauntlet speech in August at the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention and his surprise visit to Iraq in September demonstrate that the Commander in Chief has no intention of undercutting our newfound successes in Iraq.

One big rap naysayers repeat is that the Iraqi government still doesn't have its act together (the fact that Iraq's U.S.-conceived constitution makes the prime minister a weak figure is overlooked). But badly governed or militarily weak allies haven't led to disaster in the past. American troops have remained on the Korean peninsula since the armistice in 1953. For decades after that truce, South Korea was incapable of defending itself against North Korea on its own. And Western Europe needed a U.S. Presence against the Soviet Union from the end of World War II to the end of the Cold War.

Even though we are now succeeding in defeating insurgents in Iraq, the White House still isn't getting everything right. Max Boot, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations and an expert on guerrilla warfare, in an otherwise favorable Wall Street Journal piece, takes the Administration to task for not doing more to stop Syria from being a sanctuary for Iraqi insurgents.

And, of course, President Bush has yet to deal with the biggest font of Islamic fanaticism today and soon-to-be nuclear power, Iran.

-- Steve Forbes

Ellie