Iraq War: Counterinsurgency

This is a good piece by a couple of Iraq War fans. They are speaking from the point of view of those known as "neoconservatives," a term which I've always disliked a bit. How old does a line of thought have to be before it's no longer "neo"?

The Right Fight Now Washington Post 10/26/03 (also in the Weekly Standard 10/27/07 and the Web site for the Project for a New American Century [PNAC])

[A] real counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq entails
risks. It would concentrate forces in the Sunni regions that are the hot spots.
Rather than reducing the U.S. presence, it might require putting an even greater
American face on the war in those places. That could mean that, in the short
term, the Pentagon might have to put on hold its plans to reduce the number of
troops in Iraq to lessen the burden on the Army. The Marine Corps also might
need to send fresh units back into Iraq.

A successful counterinsurgency campaign also would
require American ground forces to carry out tasks and operations that today's
"transforming" military, which increasingly is trading manpower for precision
firepower, finds hard to perform. As one Army colonel in Iraq recently said to a
New York Times reporter: "We are not trained to fight a war like this. We're
training to fight an army face to face, to engage in direct combat, an enemy we
can see." But that's not the kind of enemy we now face in Iraq.

The article is by Tom Donnelly of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI) and Gary Schmitt of the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). Both AEI and PNAC are influential conservative think tanks whose views carry great weight in the Bush Adminstration. Both groups are identified with the Bush Doctrine of preventive war and with grand schemes to impose pro-Western and democractic governments by force in the Middle East.

But whether one is a war advocate or a war skeptic, the US is in a difficult spot in Iraq. Are the war fans ready to advocate a draft and an escalation of the US presence in Iraq? Are the supporters of the Bush Doctrine, which relies on extremely good and publicly credible intelligence, willing to have an honest reckoning with the intelligence failures leading up to this war?

Tags: iraq war