Moment of Truth in Iraq

A review of Michael Yon’s new book by Michael Totten:

Iraq is where ideologies go to die. Arab nationalism, Baathism, anti-Americanism, al-Qaidism, Donald Rumsfeldism, and Moqtada al-Sadrism have either died there or are dying. Conventional liberal opinion, more or less correct about the foundering American war effort from 2004 to 2006, has been severely bloodied—along with Iraq’s worst insurgent groups and militias—by General David Petraeus’s leadership of the American troop surge. Even post-9/11 fear of Islam has proven unsustainable for those who regularly interact with ordinary Iraqis. Independent journalist Michael Yon, who has spent more time embedded with combat soldiers in Iraq than any other reporter, is a refreshingly unideological analyst of the war. His self-published dispatches have earned him a loyal following around the world, and he has set out to reach even more people with the publication of a terrific new book, Moment of Truth in Iraq…

…Yon’s book isn’t just about explosions and carnage. It’s also about the new counterinsurgency strategy and, more important, the Americans and Iraqis who risk their lives to make it work. When Iraq was degenerating into its worst levels of violence, American soldiers spent too much time behind their bases’ walls, hoping to keep casualties to a minimum and to avoid being seen as occupiers by the Iraqis. Today, they live and work inside Iraq’s cities and neighborhoods, where they tend to be welcomed, if not as liberators then as protectors. Counterinsurgency is as much about nation building and community policing as it is about war making.

“The American soldier is the most dangerous man in the world,” Yon writes, “and the Iraqis had to learn that before they would trust or respect us. But it was when they understood that these great-hearted warriors, who so enjoyed killing the enemy, are even happier helping to build a school or to make a neighborhood safe that we really got their attention.” Images of the despicable abuse of prisoners at Abu Ghraib have become iconic for many around the world. But anyone who has spent significant time with American troops in Iraq, as I have, will recognize the truth in Yon’s descriptions of U.S. soldiers as usually decent and caring. “There are lots of kitchen accidents in Iraq,” he points out. “Kids get burned. American soldiers can’t take it when they see a kid get burned. If they are in the neighborhood on a mission and they see a burned kid, they will cancel the mission to get the kid to an American aid station, which, technically they shouldn’t be doing.”…

…Yon convincingly argues that the U.S. is winning in Iraq, at least for the moment. “The enemy learned that our people and the Iraqi forces would close in and kill them if they dared stand their ground. This is important: an enemy forced to choose between dying or hiding inevitably loses legitimacy. Legitimacy is essential. Men who must always either run or die are no longer an army and are not going to found a caliphate.” The outcome, though, is still in doubt. If Petraeus’s surge strategy fails or is prematurely short-circuited by Congress, the American and Iraqi forces will almost certainly lose. “Maybe creating a powerful democracy in the Middle East was a foolish reason to go to war,” Yon concludes. “Maybe it was never the reason we went to war. But it is within our grasp now and nearly all the hardest work has been done.” Which makes the present moment the moment of truth in Iraq.

Rumsfeld does get a lot of flack these days for how things went from 2003 until 2006, but he never uttered a truer statement when he opined that you go to war with the army you’ve got, not with the army you wished you had. This has been put down to cruel indifference on Rumsfeld’s part, but the meaning of it is that war comes, some times, very suddenly and you can’t ask the enemy to wait until you’ve constituted your forces for the sort of battle they want to engage in. Not only do we go to war with the army we’ve got, but we also go to war with the generals we’ve got - we went to war in Vietnam with Westmoreland, who made a “body count” hash of it; Abrams took over and very nearly won that war in spite of all efforts to cause defeat on the American political front; we went to war in the Pacific with Kimmel, he was caught with his pants down at Pearl Harbor; Nimitz took over and forged the most splendid naval force in human history. Its like that in war - its a bit of the luck of the draw as to whether your general or admiral will be a man of rare genius…and given that genius is rare, you’re more than likely going to have a man of lesser gifts in charge when the guns go off. The defeated commanders weren’t cowards, and they weren’t fools - they were just men overmatched by their awesome responsibilities; command in war is a function requiring intense mental ability, an gigantic sense of detachment, moral courage of a high order.

The generals we went into Iraq with were all fine men - brave commanders of great skill, but for one reason or another, they were unable to put together the winning combination that Petraeus has developed. The upshot of all this was that there were failures - tactical, political, economic - in the early going (some of these, of course, initiated by the civilian authorities, who were also brave and skilled…but also lacked that rare genius which is often the difference between success and failure during war)…this, in turn, gave grist to a leftwing political mill which was determined that Iraq be a failure prior to the campaign beginning. Coupled with a Democratic party establishment which just wanted something - anything - they could use to hammer President Bush with in the 2004 election, we had the perfect storm of opposition which brought us to our situation today…a war being won, but a public disgusted with the whole thing after 5 years of relentless anti-American and defeatist propaganda about the war.

It is the moment of truth about Iraq - victory is ours, if we just grasp it firmly and refuse to let it go. Obama is pledged to lose. Hillary is, too, but she won’t be the Democratic nominee and, at any rate, it would be completely characteristic of her to break her word and go ahead and allow us to win the war. McCain is pledged to victory. We Americans have fought for years at great cost - and our Iraqi allies have also fought at great price - and only our own action can cause our defeat. We have mastered the enemy; the Iraqis have mastered their internal differences to the point where peace is possible, if not brotherhood; our military has proven itself the most magnificent instrument of war ever forged; the American people are willing to see this thing through, at least for a long enough period of time to secure our gains…

What will we choose?

Tags: Defeaticrats, HillBama, Iraq, John McCain, Michael Yon

25 comments May 19th, 2008

Michael Yon on Iraq

From an interview over at NRO:

Lopez: What is al-Qaeda’s view of masculinity and how does it differ from the American military’s?

Yon: Al-Qaeda models a street gang notion of masculinity in which the cruelest, most destructive and bullying are seen as the toughest and most admired. Raping children and murdering their parents is a gang-banger’s way of asserting his masculinity. And a lot of al-Qaeda recruits are young gang members who join up for the money, the drugs, and the guns.

For the American soldier the ideal of masculinity is “protect and serve,” especially the weak, and women and kids. It means killing the bad guys.

When al-Qaeda murderers detonate a bomb in the middle of a crowd of school children, our guys rush the kids to the medics. Then they go kill the terrorists. They are really good at both. They may enjoy hanging out with kids more than killing terrorists, but it’s a close call. Our guys really like killing terrorists…

…Lopez: Why do you spend most of your time with infantry troops and not special forces?

Yon: Our Special Forces are great. I used to be one of them. But a lot of what they do can’t be written about. I did a Special Forces mission a few weeks ago. In fact it was my last mission to date. Meanwhile infantry soldiers are great to talk to because they really don’t have time for anything but the unvarnished truth. Some army or state department bureaucrat might issue a memo like “The tenuous security situation in Ramadi makes it advisable to don protective headgear in situations in which visitors may be exposed to hostile fire.” The infantry will just put up a sign that says “The last dumbass who didn’t duck got shot in the head.”…

…Lopez: Tell me about the Iraqi security forces.

Yon: Well here’s the good news: whatever problems they have, lack of courage is not one of them. Iraqis are brave fighters. Any badly led or badly trained unit can panic under fire, but few Iraqi soldiers are cowards. I have seen Iraqi regulars and even militia perform courageously under fire. Some units are better than others, but some like the Iraqi 2nd and 3rd Divisions have solid reputations.

The bad news is that it takes a long time to train a modern army and the hardest skills to train don’t necessarily have to do with engaging the enemy in combat on any given day. There is an old saying “amateurs talk strategy, professionals talk logistics.” Logistics, administering a base that is really a small city, moving 20,000 men cross-country to attack “from the march”: those are partly MBA skills and they just take a while.

Bottom line: They have improved amazingly. On my first stay in Iraq in 2004-05, I would often take cover whenever I saw an Iraqi soldier with a gun. In 2007 Coalition forces held the city of Mosul, against heavy terrorist opposition, with one U.S. battalion, about 750 men. We could do that only because Iraqi security forces, army and police, bore most of the burden. The Iraqis do most of the fighting these days….

Read the whole thing.

The truth about Iraq is not what we see in our conventional MSM reporting, and it certainly isn’t what we see on television - even the most honest and informed MSM reporters (and there are some who are quite good) simply can’t tell the whole story. To get the whole story you have to piece things together from a wide variety of sources, and constantly check the view your getting with those who have been there the longest and seen things at their worst - Michael Yon is one such man, and his contribution to understanding the war - for those who want to take the time to do so - has been invaluable. In a normal world, Yon would already have a couple Pulitzer’s…he’ll, instead, have to settle for the respect of those who have read his work over the years (which, in the end, is probably better than a Pulitzer, anyways).

Tags: Iraq, Michael Yon

59 comments April 22nd, 2008

More Pressure on Sadr to Disband His Militia

And yet more evidence that Sadr lost big time in Basra:

Iraq’s Cabinet ratcheted up the pressure on anti-American Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr by approving draft legislation barring political parties with militias from participating in upcoming provincial elections.

Al-Sadr, who heads the country’s biggest militia, the Mahdi Army, has been under intense pressure from Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, also a Shiite, to disband the Mahdi Army or face political isolation.

Al-Sadr’s followers are eager to take part in the local elections because they believe they can take power away from rival Shiite parties in the vast, oil-rich Shiite heartland of southern Iraq.

And in a new move to stem the flow of money to armed groups, the government ordered a crackdown on militiamen controlling state-run and private gas stations, refineries and oil distribution centers.

It is believed that gas stations and distribution centers, especially in eastern Baghdad and some southern provinces, are covertly controlled by Shiite militiamen dominated by the Mahdi Army.

While the linked MSM report goes on to claim that Sadr won, the fact that Sadr is under increasing pressure from Iraq’s political class to quit indicates the true state of affairs. And here’s something from Michael Yon - who has spent a lot of time in Iraq over the past five years - about the attitude in Iraq:

The change goes far beyond the statistical decline in casualties or incidents of violence. A young Iraqi translator, wounded in battle and fearing death, asked an American commander to bury his heart in America. Iraqi special forces units took to the streets to track down terrorists who killed American soldiers. The U.S. military is the most respected institution in Iraq, and many Iraqi boys dream of becoming American soldiers. Yes, young Iraqi boys know about “GoArmy.com.”

As the outrages of Abu Ghraib faded in memory – and paled in comparison to al Qaeda’s brutalities – and our soldiers under the Petraeus strategy got off their big bases and out of their tanks and deeper into the neighborhoods, American values began to win the war.

Iraqis came to respect American soldiers as warriors who would protect them from terror gangs. But Iraqis also discovered that these great warriors are even happier helping rebuild a clinic, school or a neighborhood. They learned that the American soldier is not only the most dangerous enemy in the world, but one of the best friends a neighborhood can have.

You liberals - you just keep on saying its all been a disaster and that the only solution is a HillBama-orchestrated surrender. On our side, we’ll rejoice in a President who had the courage to do the right thing, and a nation which can produce the men and women who made the turn-around in Iraq happen.

Tags: Iraq, Michael Yon, Sadr

8 comments April 14th, 2008