When will folks like John Nagl stop using hurtful and inaccurate statements like this one that follows in which he characterizes combat forces in Iraq prior to the Surge (and implicitly 2006)?

“Things worsened as U.S. commanders withdrew our forces from the cities to large, comfortable bases from which they commuted to war.”

While I acknowledge that the Casey plan had American units concentrating on larger fobs the implication of the above sentence (and its obvious domestic political connotation in this presidential campaign season) is that prior to the Surge American forces had pretty much quit the country while the Iraq civil war raged around us, content to be hunkered down on comfortable fobs eating ice cream. This is an unfair characterization of American forces prior to the Surge. As I have stated many times before, even though the Casey plan was to concentrate on larger fobs, for combat forces our primary purpose was protection of the Iraqi people. General Casey himself gave those instructions to my Brigade commander Colonel Mike Beech in Spring of 2006. I did not “commute” to the fight off of comfortable bases. I fought and conducted best practices in counterinsurgency and my men, and many others bled in our effort. The battalion commander, LTC Dale Kuehl, from 1st Cav who took over Ameriyah from me in December 2006 has himself acknowledged that the imams and local sunnis that I had introduced him to were critical in developing his later contacts with the sons of iraq. So if I was hunkered down on fobs, if I was commuting to the fight, if I was concentrating on comfort instead of coin operations, how did these contacts occur, through magic? And what I was doing many, many other combat battalion were doing the same thing throughout Iraq. The methods that the combat battalion in Dora that Nagl mentions as part of the Surge were actually started by Colonel Beech and his troopers in 2006.

What changed were not new tactics, methods and strategy as part of the Surge but other more important conditions that wrapped around the Surge. Was the American leadership correct to capitalize on these changed conditions? Absolutely. But we will never advance our knowledge of where we were and where we are headed if we continue to raise the bloody shirt of the Surge-triumph-myth, especially when done at the expense of brave units that came before.

And Nagl needs to get his facts straight in this oped on the specific issue of Route Irish. He implies that prior to the Surge it used to be the “most dangerous road in the world.” Not true, exactly, since it was extremely dangerous in 2003 and 2004 but in 2005 a Cavalry Squadron under the command of LTC Mike Harris as part of the 3ID cleared and pacified it so that when I took it over from Mike in January 2006 it no longer was deserving of that sobriquet. But to suggest that it was until rescued by the Surge is factually incorrect and representative of the ongoing Surge-triumph saga.

So facts are important, clear thinking is important, not super-charged language that clouds instead of clarifies, and most importantly hurts.