[Mb-civic] A Better Strategy For Iraq - David Ignatius - Washington Post Op-Ed

[William Swiggard]

A Better Strategy For Iraq

By David Ignatius
Friday, November 4, 2005; Page A23

It's a telling fact that the hot book among Iraq strategists this season 
is "A Better War," an upbeat account of American counterinsurgency 
policy in the last years of the Vietnam conflict. I noticed that the 
head of Central Command, Gen. John Abizaid, was reading it when I 
traveled with him in September. The influential State Department 
counselor Philip Zelikow read the book earlier this year. And I'm told 
it can be found on the bookshelves of senior military officers in Baghdad.

Perhaps it's a measure of just how badly things are going in Iraq that 
the strategists are looking to Vietnam for models of success. But it's 
interesting that the Iraq team, like its predecessors in Vietnam 35 
years ago, is getting serious about counterinsurgency doctrine after 
making costly initial mistakes.

"A Better War" was published in 1999. The author, Lewis Sorley, a former 
military and intelligence officer, drew on an extensive collection of 
documents and tape recordings from legendary Army warrior Gen. Creighton 
Abrams, who commanded U.S. forces in Vietnam from 1968 to 1972. The 
book's contrarian argument is that after Abrams replaced Gen. William 
Westmoreland -- and scuttled his "search and destroy" tactics in favor 
of a pacification strategy of "clear and hold" -- the Vietnam War began 
to go right.

Indeed, Sorley argues that by early 1972 the United States had 
effectively won the war and could turn the fighting over to its South 
Vietnamese allies.

By Sorley's account, it was politics back in America that turned victory 
into defeat, by blocking U.S. support for the Saigon government after 
North Vietnamese troops invaded the South en masse in 1974 and '75. That 
seems to me a considerable stretch -- many other analysts argue that the 
South Vietnamese army was never strong enough to prevail against Hanoi. 
A Vietnamization that required continuous American life support wasn't 
much of a victory.

But Sorley offers some fascinating evidence that Abrams's strategy of 
securing South Vietnam village by village was working better than is 
generally understood. He quotes William Colby, who ran the pacification 
effort (including its controversial "Phoenix" counterinsurgency 
program), assessing its success: "By 1972, the pacification program had 
essentially eliminated the guerrilla problem in most of the country."

What caught my eye in Sorley's book was the phrase "clear and hold." For 
the identical words appeared in Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice's 
Oct. 19 testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, in which 
she laid out the clearest articulation of U.S. strategy in Iraq that 
I've seen. "Our political-military strategy has to be to clear, hold and 
build: to clear areas from insurgent control, to hold them securely, and 
to build durable, national Iraqi institutions," she said.

In Vietnam, Abrams's version of "clear and hold" replaced Westmoreland's 
ruinous idea that with ever-larger U.S. troop levels and a bigger "body 
count," the United States could bleed its adversary into submission. 
Abrams's approach included a sharp drawdown in U.S. troops, an emphasis 
on training and advising local security forces, a focus on securing the 
capital, stress on intelligence operations over main-force battles and 
an aggressive effort to interdict enemy supply lines from neighboring 
countries. All those factors are evident in planning for the Iraqi 
version of "clear, hold and build."

The U.S. ambassador to Iraq, Zalmay Khalilzad, appears to be 
enthusiastic about this counterinsurgency approach. U.S. commanders are 
working with Sunni tribal leaders in Anbar province to create a force 
known as the "Desert Protectors," as well as a new Sunni-led army 
division there. Khalilzad has brought from his previous post in 
Afghanistan a plan for provincial reconstruction teams that could 
combine military, economic, legal and other tools to provide jobs, 
social welfare and eventually stability. That plan is eerily reminiscent 
of some of Colby's ideas about pacification.

The trick is to move from "clear" to "hold." A senior administration 
official tells me the United States is managing precisely that 
transition in Mosul, Kirkuk and parts of the Euphrates Valley -- 
bringing in well-trained Iraqi police to fill the vacuum once the 
insurgents are pushed out. The next big project is for U.S. and Iraqi 
forces jointly to try to stabilize the Baghdad area. "Clear, hold and 
build" will fail if it's seen as an exit strategy, this official argues. 
It must be seen as a strategy for victory, much as Abrams saw his 
earlier version.

The new focus on counterinsurgency is good, but that doesn't mean it 
will work. The Vietnam analogy is instructive and also haunting. At the 
end of the day, the challenge is for Iraqis to build a government that 
works and an army that can stand and fight. Otherwise, "clear and hold" 
will run into the same brick wall it did a generation ago.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/11/03/AR2005110301971.html
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