Neo Challenges the Matrix

[Cavguy]

This article is a very great puzzlement to me.

COL. MacGregor seems to decry the "Anbar Awakening" but what was the alternative to the men on the spot at the time? They adroitly took advantage of a political rift, a big one, in the Sunni community and induced the tribes to overtly join with the coalition forces to mostly destroy AQI; an AQI that was, contrary to a statement in the article, almost wholly composed of Iraqi, not foreign fighters.

From what I've read there is much more too this than cash payments to sheiks. In Ramadi at least, AQI was very much disliked but the tribes weren't strong enough to overthrow them. An alliance with the coalition enabled them to get rid of AQI. If cash were the only incentive to stop attacking the coalition, how come this didn't happen in 2 or 3 years ago? .... If COL. MacGregor is going to caution us about this, he should at least suggest what should have been done instead.

"It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the
strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better.
The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face
is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs
and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without
error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great
devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best,
knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the
worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his
place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither
victory nor defeat."
Theodore Roosevelt
Source:Speech at the Sorbonne, Paris, April 23, 1910

Couldn't resist one of my favorite quotes. Thanks for the lead in. Hopefully I will be able to answer some of the questions addressed soon - COL MacFarland and I just finished the final edit of an article on the subject to be published in Military Review during the next months.

Carl captures the facts (from my seat) correctly regarding the Awakening. It was not about money, and money was not the instrument used to convince the tribes. Really it came down to interest and power (of which a component is money). Money was/is used to sustain the effort through reconstruction projects in areas friendly to coalition forces. Money is a weapon system as well, to be used judiciously.

When I first arrived in Baghdad in May 2003, you could hire an Iraqi laborer for $2/day, a king's ransom at the time. ($60/mo was 4x the average Iraqi's salary at the time). We tried to start employment programs (cleaning trash, repairs, etc) to employ the masses of unemployed, especially the poor Shia. We ran into roadblock after roadblock from CPA, who was opposed at New Deal style programs and scoffed at mass employment programs to otherwise occupy idle hands that may be recruited to the devil's work.

Flash forward to April-May 2004. My BN is killing these same poor, unemployed, uneducated Shia by the hundreds during the Sadr rebellion. In two months we expended over 200,000 rounds of 7.62, over 300 tank rounds, and an unbelievable amount of maintenance funds to sustain an Armor BN during a three month extension. For a fraction of those costs I could have employed several thousand people and addressed one of the root causes of the Sadr rebellion.

I know we can't directly correlate cause to effect on this, but I still believe that if we had employed the masses early we wouldn't have faced the Sadr problem, and worse, we knew that at the tactical level in 2003. Not even 20/20 hindsight, in my opinion.

I digress into the path of what might have been.

I am with Carl though - for the critics - what is the alternate COA that SHOULD have been done? Would an Anbar in chaos actually be of greater benefit to the USA than one at peace? I personally don't see how, and make no apologies for what we did. It was good for Iraq and good for the USA, and had transformative effects on Baghdad and Dialaya.

[Rank amateur]

I am with Carl though - for the critics - what is the alternate COA that SHOULD have been done? Would an Anbar in chaos actually be of greater benefit to the USA than one at peace? I personally don't see how, and make no apologies for what we did. It was good for Iraq and good for the USA, and had transformative effects on Baghdad and Dialaya.

I agree. You did an excellent job playing the hand dealt you. Professional poker players fold: frequently and quickly. Strategically, it seems to me that we just keep upping the ante.

[Uboat509]

Why was it not possible to extend the Anbar model to the rest of Sunni-held Iraq? Or did the generals in Baghdad begin cutting deals with the Sunni insurgents only when the mounting casualties from the surge in the spring and early summer of 2007 compelled them to do so?

As a matter of fact the Sawah has spread to other parts of Sunni Iraq. I know this for an absolute fact because I was there at the beginning. Granted it is not on the same scale as Anbar but then the realities on the ground are much different. I can't speak to the situation in Anbar, I haven't been there, but I have been in the North. Up there, the Sawah has arisen primarily in response to an ineffective/biased/corrupt military and police force. It was already showing some early successes when I left in October. It has been slow to get started in the North in part because of resistance by some US military comanders who do not understand tribalism and also some local political/tribal leaders who feel their power threatened by the Sawah.

By the way, can someone explain to me how Turkey is the is the "natural leader of the Sunni Muslim world"? Did I miss something? I have yet to hear an Arab say anything nice about the Turks. That would seem to be somewhat of an obstacle to "natural leadersip."

SFC W

[Ken White]

. . .
By the way, can someone explain to me how Turkey is the is the "natural leader of the Sunni Muslim world"? Did I miss something? I have yet to hear an Arab say anything nice about the Turks. That would seem to be somewhat of an obstacle to "natural leadersip."

SFC W

Turks are even more hated than the Iraniha. There is no leader of the Arab world because it is so fractured, every potential 'leader' has adverse historical events that preclude any leadership in that sense. Just look at all who've tried in the last 60 years or so to assume that position from Nasser forward -- all failed.

That's really good news of a sort, though we weren't smart enough to exploit it. The West finds the ME thought processes so very different they cannot get their arms around the monster. Few in the west are willing to accept that an entire nation will do something that is antithetical to itself out of pride or that the western art of compromise is seen as a glaring weakness in the ME...

[carl]

"Few in the west are willing to accept that an entire nation will do something that is antithetical to itself out of pride or that the western art of compromise is seen as a glaring weakness in the ME..."

I am not sure the peoples of the Mid-East have a monopoly on warring for prideful reasons. The War of 1812, WWI&II, the Argentine attack on the Falklands, the Succession of the Southern States and others might well fall into that class of conflict.

[tequila]

Just look at all who've tried in the last 60 years or so to assume that position from Nasser forward -- all failed.

Well, Nasser is the only one who really tried. Even Saddam, despite his bombast, never really took such things seriously - the seizure of Kuwait, for example, was an Iraqi nationalist dream since Qasim. As for the inscrutable mind of the Arabs - the spectacle of local rulers scrambling for power and advantage to the detriment of the ruled combined with constant and violent intervention by foreign powers is a tableau repeated throughout history, including in the West - the examples of pre-unification Italy, pre-Bismarck Germany, Poland, and other such unhappy lands comes to mind.

Up there, the Sawah has arisen primarily in response to an ineffective/biased/corrupt military and police force.

Uboat - without violating any OPSEC, could you provide a little more detail in this respect? In your experience, is this viewed primarily as a local rising against corrupt forces imposed by a national government, or is it seen through a sectarian lens: i.e. the Shi'i militias acting through the government are seen as the enemy? What time period are we talking about, and what about the recent movement of AQI-blamed attacks to Salahuddin and Nineveh?

[PhilR]

I've been following the discussions on Iraq and the COIN doctrine from my desk and computer in the International Zone (I want to say in the bowels, but I do have a window). While I'm definitely not doing tactical stuff, I've had the opportunity to get out and listen to what BCT and battalion commanders are saying on the ground.
I guess I need to go back and re-read the COIN manual. What I see are commanders making the pragmatic decisions along kinetic (kill/capture) and non-kinetic lines (support services, support local security efforts, support local governance). I don't sense that the new COIN doctrine has shied people away from military action, its just they may be viewing it from a more comprehensive lens--and its not that the commanders before did any less, its just that there's been some more thought and doctrinal guidance put into place over the elapsed time.
With regards to the Awakening and whether we caused it or we were just lucky, I'd say yes to both (and recall which type of General Napoleon would have rather had). I don't think that you can discount our presence in Iraq, and in Anbar, fighting over the past years. It was a part of the calculation that tribal leaders made when they decided to fight AQI. it wasn't the only factor, but I think it ranks pretty high up there--as I've seen it written, they realized that we were the really strong tribe in the region and we weren't going away.

[Ken White]

...
I am not sure the peoples of the Mid-East have a monopoly on warring for prideful reasons. The War of 1812, WWI&II, the Argentine attack on the Falklands, the Succession of the Southern States and others might well fall into that class of conflict.

People are people -- there are indeed other examples -- just that the ME provides so many in the last half century. That and the seeing compromise as weakness factor in combination...

Tequila said:

"Well, Nasser is the only one who really tried. Even Saddam, despite his bombast, never really took such things seriously - the seizure of Kuwait, for example, was an Iraqi nationalist dream since Qasim. As for the inscrutable mind of the Arabs - the spectacle of local rulers scrambling for power and advantage to the detriment of the ruled combined with constant and violent intervention by foreign powers is a tableau repeated throughout history, including in the West - the examples of pre-unification Italy, pre-Bismarck Germany, Poland, and other such unhappy lands comes to mind."

Gamel may be the only one that tried in your book but I think you're selling the goals and delusions of everyone from the Shah of Iran through the Al Sauds to the Assads and the odd Egyptian or two -- not to mention our friends Ruhalla and Muammar -- a little short. Perhaps what you meant was that Nasser was the only who who was overt and said it aloud and publicly; we could agree on that.

As for the only one? We can disagree on that.