Posted on Thu, Oct. 19, 2006

Iraq: How will the mystery end?
By Paul Akers
The Free Lance-Star (Fredericksburg, Va.)
(MCT)

How goes the war in Iraq? What is it like to fight there? Few Americans are better equipped to answer such questions than Francis J. "Bing" West.

West's experiences as a Marine combat officer in South Vietnam became the basis for the highly praised memoir "The Village." After leaving the Corps, West served as assistant secretary of defense under Ronald Reagan. He has written about military strategy for the RAND Corp. and is president of GAMA Corp., which specializes in combat-simulation products to train U.S. forces.

West's other books include two nonfiction works about the current war in Iraq - "The March Up: Taking Baghdad With the U.S. Marines" and "No True Glory: A Front-line Account of the Battle of Fallujah."

West last month returned from his 10th trip to Iraq, embedding, as before, with Marine units. Before leaving, he spoke with Paul Akers, editorial-page editor of The Free Lance-Star in Fredericksburg, Va.

Akers: When the Marines took over from the 82nd Airborne in part of the Sunni Triangle, they expected to make civic action - winning hearts and minds - a large component of their strategy. What happened?

West: Well, when the Marines took over from the 82nd in March 2004 in al-Anbar Province, you're right, their concept had been to go in "as soft as fog" - just to work with the local Iraqi police and soldiers and gradually move into the cities, especially Fallujah, a block at a time. That whole strategy went out the window in four days.

Four days after they got there, four American contractors were lynched and their bodies were terribly burned in downtown Fallujah, and the president lost his temper. You could understand why to an extent, but then the Marines were ordered to seize Fallujah by force, and there were 300,000 people in Fallujah. The Marines said, "That's the wrong strategy." But they were ordered in, and that was the end of "hearts and minds."

Akers: Sir Robert Thompson said that to defeat an insurgency, you needed about a 10-to-1 ratio of friendly troops to insurgents. We've got only about 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq now. Is the insistence on maintaining that level of troop strength, regardless of what occurs on the ground, a major reason Iraq is deteriorating?

West: Sir Robert Thompson, the British general who put down the (communist-led) Malayan uprising in the 1950s, was my mentor at Princeton. You're quite right. Sir Robert said you needed a ratio of 10-to-1, but that is yesterday's newspaper.

What happened in Iraq would have caught anyone by surprise because it was an entirely different notion of an insurgency.

Radical Islam is infusing the other side, and there was no model for dealing with that. If we had had 500,000 Americans there, they still would have been called "the infidel invaders," so I am not persuaded that just putting more American troops on the ground would have made a difference - because we cannot win the hearts and minds of people in the Islamic world who dislike and hate us.

I do not believe it is possible for the Americans to win the popular support of the Sunnis in Iraq, because the Sunnis had the power and then we came in and said, "We're going to give you a democracy." That meant the Shiites, whom the minority Sunnis had dominated for 400 years, were suddenly going to be in charge.

Akers: Well, if you have this huge block of Sunnis who are intrinsically hostile toward us, what do you do?

West: You do exactly what the United States did in 1865. After the Civil War is over, you declare a winner - the Union - and a loser - the Confederacy. And then, if you have to, you occupy as the Union occupied the South. You occupy the cities in the Sunni area. For 10 years or more, the Union army occupied the cities in the South - from 1865 until 1878.

Anyone who thinks that the Sunnis in the next year or two are going to start singing "Kumbaya" for a democracy really is missing the degree of the resentment.

Akers: How would you define victory in Iraq?

West: I do not believe "victory" in Iraq is possible. I believe that the United States can prevail to the extent of building up an Iraqi army tough enough to push down the insurgents and tough enough to push down the Shiite militias, who are equally dangerous.

If you are looking for models for the future, see South Korea in 1954-1955 or Turkey in 1965. You may have a democracy, but behind that democracy is the army, the real power in the country, establishing the rules of the road.

Akers: What about this idea of Iraq's becoming a pluralistic, prosperous society and a model for political reform for the region? Is that gone?

West: It's not. But the Middle East has 23 countries, and 21 of the 23 have a Sunni-led government. Most of those governments are autocratic, and if we are serious (about pluralistic democracies), then we have to be serious.

But I think the president got halfway between first and second and was picked off. You basically cannot say, "We Americans are going to transform the Middle East," and then say, "Oh, but I didn't really mean it toward your country, I just meant it toward some other country."

Akers: I thought establishing a democratic model was worth trying, but that the resources never matched the size of the operation, the scope of the ideal.

West: I still believe that the goals for us going into Iraq were noble. I also agree that the resources were never there for the scale of the problem we undertook, but that's kind of coulda-shoulda-woulda.

There is no way that I want us to leave Iraq with our tail between our legs. There is such a thing as persistence, and if you are persistent, you will prevail.

I believe the only thing that is keeping al-Qaeda going in Iraq right now is that the real hard-core (enemy), who are vicious murderers, believe we are going to leave.

The thing that scares them most is feeling that there will always be a residue of special-operations forces somewhere in Iraq tracking them down.

The special-operations forces often wear this light gray uniform, and when they drive into a town, all the Iraqis know they're not there on a joy ride; they have specific targets in mind and they are going to be knocking on doors.

Akers: One theme in your writing has been that the individual soldier, Marine and Navy corpsman is not getting his due for courage and professionalism. Why not?

West: The individual soldier and Marine deserves enormous credit. I think that in the mainstream press there does creep in this anti-President Bush bias (that extends) to the policies. So something like Abu Ghraib will receive 1,000 times more attention than all the acts of valor of our soldiers.

We had better be awfully careful about that, because 75 percent of all our front-line soldiers get out at age 22 or 23. They come back into society and they get nothing for doing that. They get a GI Bill for three years that is worth $12,000 a year.

They get nothing else. They take pride in each other, they take pride in their units and in their tribe. And the American public is pretty good about them, but the public is not getting the stories.

Akers: Thank you.

Ellie