Clear, Hold Build: Not So Clear Posted by Heather Hurlburt

In the last two weeks we've had a few more attempts to put forward explicit strategies for Iraq: Secretary Rice's "clear, hold and build," presented in Senate Foreign Relations Committee testimony two weeks ago, and varied proposals for drawdowns from Senators John Kerry and Russ Feingold.

These are all good developments: let the American people understand what it is we think we're doing and what other options might be.  So this post is going to ask questions of all of them.

First, Secretary Rice's three-part strategy, "clear, hold and build:"

We know what we must do.  With our Iraqi allies, we are working to: Clear the toughest places -- no sanctuaries to the enemy -- and to disrupt foreign support for the insurgents.  We are working to hold and steadily enlarge the secure areas, integrating political and economic outreach with our military operations.  We are working to build truly national institutions by working with more capable provincial and local authorities.  We are challenging them to embody a national compact -- not tools of a particular sect or ethnic group.  These Iraqi institutions must sustain security forces, bring rule of law, visibly deliver essential services, and offer the Iraqi people hope for a better economic future.

Let's take this one piece at a time.

Clear: the U.S. military is conducting operations in the "toughest places" -- no argument on that.  The casualty figures show it.  But for a year now, military sources have been telling reporters that "it doesn't do much good to push them out of these areas only to let them go back to areas we've already cleared."  Exhibit A has to be Fallujah.  Have we now solved this problem, and if so, how?  With Iraqi troops?  I'd sure like to know.

Hold:  See above.  Also, Mike O' Hanlon and Brookings' Iraq Index say that while U.S. casualty rates are holding steady, Iraqi security force and civilian casualties have been high in recent months.  Overall rates of insurgent attacks, O' Hanlon writes, are the highest they have been.  That doesn't sound to me like a strategy of expanding safe ares militarily is working.  And if we have, as military leader and leader has requested, a political strategy to blunt hte insurgency, it's not obvious to me.

Build: If, as the New York Times reports, 93 percent of U.S. reconstruction funds are now committed, but "hundreds of millions" are needed to complete and maintain what has been done, according to the special Inspector-General for Iraq reconstruction, exactly what are we "building" with?

Perhaps the upcoming parliamentary elections count as building "truly national institutions."  It's hard to portray the flawed constitutional process as that.  Is the constitution the "national compact" that we are "challenging" Iraqi leaders to embody?  If not, what is the national compact that Sunnies, Shiites and Kurds all buy into, the one that will help de-fang the insurgents?  If it doesn't exist yet, are we helping it come into being, and have we figured out a more effective way to "help" than we displayed in the constitution-drafting process?

So I'd like to ask Secretary Rice to come back and explain how we are really carrying out this strategy.

Now, to complete the bipartisan gloom, I have some questions for Senator Kerry as well.  He said last week:

The way forward in Iraq is not to pull out precipitously or merely compromise to stay "as long as it takes."  To undermine the insurgency, we must instead simultaneously pursue both a political settlement and the withdrawal of American combat forces linked to specific, responsible benchmarks.  At the first benchmark, the completion of the December elections, we can start the process of reducing our forces by withdrawing 20,000 troops over the course of the holidays.

20,000, by the way, is one division.  I looked and looked for some rationale on why one division and some explicit reasoning on why we can/should expect that the challenges the day after the elections will be 20,000 troops easier than they were the day before.  (Assuming, of course, that we're not putting 20,000 extra troops in to police the elections and then just taking them out again.)

Mind you, I think there are reasonable arguments for both of these positions.  In the best possible scenario, the elections are a resounding victory for Sunni political participation and drive a much stronger wedge between insurgent leaders and average Sunnis.  This then leads to a sharp redution in insurgent recuritment and violence -- though I don't think it happens overnight.  Maybe Kerry reckons the rate of progress in Iraqi military training allows for a 20,000 troop pullout by the end of the year.  Smart people I know and lke advise Kerry on these issues, and I'm sure they were considered.

I can see -- maybe -- a rhetorical or polling-based arguemtn about not cluttering up an elegant, simple, understandable policy in a speech text.  But surely there should have been some substantive stuff for the press, at minimum, to show that Kerry is thinking about the complexities and grasps the military and strategic concerns.  Whigh God knows he does.

And while I'm at it, Senator Feingold, why is December 31, 2006 your magic number?

What are we doing that takes exactly 14 months to accomplish?

I know, I know, all of these folks are trying -- and I see all three statements as significant progress in letting Americans understand and judge exactly what it is we think we are doing in Iraq.  But as I said last week, we are very short of hard facts.  We need to be sure we know where our assumptions came from -- so we know when we need to change them.  And progressives above all need to show that we are deploying facts and military experience wisely and strategically, not cynically and for short-term political advantage.

Comments

[JohnFH]

I nominate Heather Hurlburt for national security advisor in the next administration (that of John McCain, I suspect). All of her questions are right on target.

Still, I'm not sure the kind of hard facts we all want are available. We are clearly taking the fight to the enemy. A newly constituted Iraq is about to hold decisively important elections. But a tipping point has not yet been reached. We are still in the thick of battle, politically no less than militarily, and it is not clear what might lead the insurgency to pack it up.

I am inclined to think they never will, unless we cede the victory to them. The wound we have inflicted upon their understanding of how things should be in an ideal (Muslim) world by our invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq is as grievous as the one they suffer every day the state of Israel still exists.

Were it not so, but we are engaged in a global war of epic proportions of which Iraq is arguably the most important but by no means the only epicenter. If it were not for Iraq, Palestine-Israel would occupy center stage yet again.

We will not of course cede the victory to the insurgents. The chief result of such a move would be to embolden militant extremists of every stripe to take a piece out of our hide in the future.

So we are stuck. If there is an easy way forward, I do not see it.

[Cal]

Anyone who advocates staying should be required to tell us what our mission is. Even the administration has given up on democracy, and the Shia parties in power are busy establishing Sharia law in the south. Why should we defend this gov't?

And -- given the lack of progress for the past 30 months, what reason is there to believe that things are going to get better? This crisis developed when we were at maximum strength in terms of manpower and financial resources. In the future we will have fewer troops and less money as we attempt to turn this situation around.

[J Thomas]

The central most important fact in the iraq war is that any politician who suggests we should accept defeat will have about 20% of the population deeply and personally offended at him for the indefinite future. And that includes essentially all of the fanatics who talk about taking matters into their own hands and shooting america's internal enemies.

For most legislators it would be political suicide to admit we've lost and to look for ways to cut our losses.

So we can't do that yet. Any politician who wants to cut our losses has to talk about gradual withdrawal as part of a strategy to win. And they have to be vague on details because there are no details that could make it plausible.

[Dan Kervick]

Let's see if we can get rid of the bold font. There, did that work?

[Dan Kervick]

Hmm... How about that one?

[Dan Kervick]

OK,let's be frank about what "clear" means in the context of the Iraqi insurgency. Insurgents don't come with scarlett "I"s pinned to their shirts, or with the mark of Satan engraved on their foreheads. They don't wear military uniforms, unlike some of the guerillas in Latin American conflicts of the past. Aside from the fact that the vast majority are young men, they look pretty much like all the other young men in Iraq. Most of them probably live in the places in which they are operating, among their friends, relatives and neighbors in their own house or their parents' house.

The way you clear an area of insurgents is to force the people there to reject them, spit them out, turn them in, or help the American and government forces kill them. You get their friends, relatives and neighbors to reject them and even betray them.

Imagine: you're a Sunni Arab, and you're being badgered for information on the insurgents by a young SCIRI Shiite tough, now all decked out in a fancy new "Iraqi" uniform, but only a couple of months removed from the life of a hood or a guerilla militiaman himself. The insurgents he wants to identify are your sons, or your nephews, or your neighbors' sons and nephews. How many such Sunni Arabs are going to help, without the proper "incentive"?

So you know where that incentive comes from? Terror. The only way to get people to turn on their own - to turn on their friends, relatives and neighbors - is to terrorize them. If you get intelligence that tells you an attack was planned at a certain house, you bomb the house and kill everyone in it - as well as some people at a neighboring house. If you find a 8-year old boy serving as a lookout for an ambush, you take the kid to his mom, hold a gun to his head and make her tell you where his older brother is. If you are conducting house to house searches, and you find an incriminating weapon in somebody's room, you kill that guy on the spot in front of his family, and maybe his brother too unless he tells you where you can find another insurgent in the neighborhood, and then drag everyone else off to prison, or bulldoze the house.

It's called collective punishment. It's illegal. But it's the only way to get people to betray their brothers and sons and friends. Of course, unless the tactics are surpassingly brutal and terrifying, it can also have the counterproductive consequence that as many insurgents as you "clear" away, that many more are created by the embittering effect of the atrocities on those who remain.

Now most Americans find this sort of behavior revolting. They don't have the stomach for it. That's a good thing about Americans. That's why a lot of think we should try to stay out of these hellish messes altogether.

Now another possibility in fighting an insurgency is that we somehow induce the insurgents themselves to stop being insurgents. I suppose we could say this is the "idealistic" approach, and like a lot of idealistic solutions it looks good on paper, but is, let us say... a challenge to implement in practice. It also doesn't sound as tough and resolute as "Clear, Hold and Rebuld" when presented before Congressional committees.

[J Thomas]

How many sunnis would we have to kill for them to give up?

Algeria lost 10% of their population and didn't break, and then they killed off another 10% after the french left. But some others have given up after losing only 10%.

So, about 5 million sunnis, maybe we can win by killing half a million of them.

And assuming we're getting a kill ratio of 10:1 (it might be considerably higher than that) for our 2000 casualties they'll have taken about 20,000. So we've made a real good start. If you figure in our extremely high survival rate among casualties, we could easily have a kill ratio of 50:1 and they'd be at 100,000 insurgent casualties (not counting noncombatant civilians). That's within shouting range.

We might be getting close. We just need to improve public confidence by explaining the strategy and publishing body counts.

[J Thomas]

How many sunnis would we have to kill for them to give up?

Algeria lost 10% of their population and didn't break, and then they killed off another 10% after the french left. But some others have given up after losing only 10%.

So, about 5 million sunnis, maybe we can win by killing half a million of them.

And assuming we're getting a kill ratio of 10:1 (it might be considerably higher than that) for our 2000 casualties they'll have taken about 20,000. So we've made a real good start. If you figure in our extremely high survival rate among casualties, we could easily have a kill ratio of 50:1 and they'd be at 100,000 insurgent casualties (not counting noncombatant civilians). That's within shouting range.

We might be getting close. We just need to improve public confidence by explaining the strategy and publishing body counts.

[Frank WIlson]

The kill ratios here are fantacy. The US is getting its but kicked and does not have the guts to draft the brave people who suport the war from a distance.

Get the helocopters ready for another humiliating retreat like Saigon in 1975.

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