Gen. Petraeus' Achievement -- And Its Limits
by Martin Sieff (more by this author)
Posted 04/16/2008 ET



Tuesday's wave of terror bombings across Iraq provides a sobering corrective to much of the nonsense that our usual armchair pundits have been flooding the op-ed pages with on Iraq.

The attacks serve notice that al-Qaeda, while crippled and rolled back from its old dominant role, remains alive, kicking and deadly in Iraq. A U.S. evacuation of that unhappy country would not magically turn al-Qaeda into Gandhi pacifists or Obama liberals by the wave of a magic wand. It would unleash new waves of horror from terrorist groups that found themselve freed from the restraints imposed on them by U.S. military operations.

But the attacks should also teach cosnervatives that while the U.S. security achievements in Iraq over the past 15 months were very real, they had their limits too. Gen. David Petraeus’ much-awaited testimony before Congress about the state of war in Iraq last week in fact made this very clear.

The general's testimony was honest and accurate, illuminating and impressive. It was predictably ignored, distorted or played down by the liberal media. Conservatives expected this. But much of the acclaim from their own side comes from sheltered little boy-strategists who ignore the still vast uncertainties, complexities and dangers inherent in Iraq.

Conservatives are correct in recognizing that Gen. Petraeus’ achievements were real. Those achievements were also unexpected and unanticipated by the Democrats and the media. And they fly in the face of the Politically Correct “wisdom” that guerrilla insurgencies around the world can never be contained, rolled back and defeated, especially in Third World, or “developing” countries by Western armies.

But the British defeated the communist insurgency in Malaya in the 1950s and the Indonesian-backed guerrilla war against Malaysia in the 1960s. The Russians have pulverized the Chechen secessionist movement despite facing terrorist outrages that killed thousands of innocent people, including the monstrous Beslan massacre of hundreds of school-children. The Indians are holding on to Jammu and Kashmir and by following the Israeli example of beefing up border security by a strong fence system have slashed terror attacks there by 90 percent. And -- for that matter -- we smashed the Viet Cong as an effective guerrilla force with our Phoenix program in the 1960s. After the VC’s military defeat in the 1968 Tet offensive, it was transformed by the U.S. liberal media and President Lyndon Johnson’s panic into a strategic victory. But even then, the rest of the war was effectively fought by the regular North Vietnamese Army, and they only won in the end by mounting an old-fashioned conventional heavy-tank-led offensive that conquered Saigon in 1975.

Gen. Petraeus has not written closure to the Iraq war by any means but in only 15 months his genuine achievements have been extraordinary. He has undermined and rolled back al-Qaeda as a serious force in central Iraq and broken its hold on the region, especially in its heartland, Anbar province. He has slashed levels of violence in the capital Baghdad. Yet he has done this while dramatically reducing rates of U.S. casualties being suffered at the same time. These are immensely impressive achievements. But al-Qaeda and similar groups have been rolled back but not annihilated. Tuesday's wave of bombings shows what they are still capable of.

Gen. Petraeus has already achieved what he set out to do and confirmed his reputation as the senior U.S. general who best understands how to cope with guerrilla insurgencies, or what the British liked to call “low intensity war.” His request to keep U.S. troop levels in Iraq relatively has to be seen in the context of al-Qaeda's continuing capabilities to launch the kind of attacks it carried out this week.

But conservatives should recognize that there are other, far different and vastly more dangerous threats looming against our army in Iraq -- and they are there because of the disastrous “nation-building” policy to “create democracy” that we have pursued there over the past five years.

First, as I document in my new book “The Politically Incorrect Guide to the Middle East,” Bush administration policymakers ignored classic, cautious conservative principles in their Woodrow-Wilson and Jimmy Carter-style, madcap dash to try and create instant democracy in Iraq (Just impose a theoretically perfect liberal constitution, add water and microwave.)

Instead, as I describe in my book, they only succeeded in doing two very different things: First, they empowered the extreme Shiite factions in Iraq that had always been supported by Iran. The new Iraqi army and police in which we take such joy is in fact controlled by the Badr Brigades, that were funded for many years by Iran as their weapon against Saddam Hussein when he ruled Iraq.

Second, the Bush neo-liberals assumed that a genuinely free, and fair democratic parliamentary election would produce a moderate, peaceful government in a country that had not had any elections in half a century. And from 1932 to 1958, as I also describe in my book, free elections in Iraq only produced civil wars, genocidal inclined governments and ethnic massacres. Just as it did after the elections at the end of 2005.

What we eventually got this time was the current Iraqi government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, a government that is such a responsible and loyal ally to the United States that it just played host to Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, the openly genocidal president of Iran who makes no secret of his determination to incinerate American cities and the entire state of Israel with his nuclear program.

The biggest danger we face in Iraq is not the Sunni insurgency there. Even after Tuesday's bombings, it remains vastly reduced in its capabilities and strategic threat: Gen. Petraeus rolled it back as surely as Gen. Bernard Montgomery, the future British war hero of World War II, broke the three year Arab Revolt in Palestine in 1939. (Monty, like Petraeus, was an expert on counter-insurgency war).

The real danger we face is that the Iraqi army and police we have armed and equipped at such effort and cause will rise up and stab us on the back if we get involved in a shooting war with their fellow Shiites and long-time supporters in Iran. And that the Shiite militias who have vastly more numbers and firepower controlling all of southern Iraq than the Sunni insurgents ever had in Baghdad and Anbar will cut our land supply lines to our army forcing us to rely on an airlift that will be vulnerable to ground-fired, man-held surface-to-air missile (SAM) attack.

We should also note that our army in Iraq is now configured to fight a classic counter-insurgency war against the Sunni minority in the center of the country -- which it has done exceptionally well. But it lacks sufficient armor and heavy artillery to respond immediately to any major Iranian land forces attack.

Gen. Petraeus has done better and achieved far more even than his admirers correctly anticipated from him when he was appointed. His success is also far more than tactical. It is strategic in that he has already changed the balance of power in Iraq and greatly-reduced what was still a formidable al-Qaeda led and influenced threat to take over the entire country only 18 months ago. It is not his fault that the 160,000 brave American soldiers in Iraq still face little-understood, unanticipated but potentially far greater threats there. For their sake, and ours, White House and Pentagon planners need to address those problems next.

They should also heed the counsel of Winston Churchill -- no mean authority on such matters:

“Never, never, never believe any war will be smooth and easy, or that anyone who embarks on that strange voyage can measure the tides and hurricanes he will encounter… Always remember, however sure you are that you can easily win, that there would not be a war if the other man did not think he also had a chance.”

Ellie