This will be two parts, because apparently it is too long for one post

I know, with this posted in the "Social Sciences, Moral and Religious" folder the focus should be on the morality and ethics of Sassaman's decisions. Nevertheless, after reading 2/3 of the book, Sassaman does raise a number of important points - which can't be cast away because he later made a bad decision or b/c he was mean to you once 20 years ago. Like most memoirs, Sassaman's does a fair amount of pinning the blame for what went wrong on other people - his brigade commander COL (now BG) Fred Rudesheim gets the overwhelming majority of it. Nevertheless, we discount what he has to say to our own detriment.

1) It occurs to me from reading this book that one of the biggest hurdles in the counterinsurgency debate is our inability to achieve a common understanding of what we mean when we use key terms. For example, what do we mean by the term “winning hearts and minds?” It’s almost become a throwaway term in the current political environment, to the point where we don’t even realize what we mean when we say it. It is no different with Sassaman. On page three, he argues, “Winning hearts and minds, and that sort of thing…had little or nothing to do with the root of the mission, or at least the mission as I saw it. The real mission was this: secure and stabilize the region.” One hundred pages later, however, on page 104, he lays out his battalion’s “game plan” of sorts:

a) Establish legitimate authority to secure and stabilize the province.

b) Train the local Iraqi community police forces and Iraqi Security Forces through the use of joint US-Iraqi patrols

c) Form credible Iraqi institutions of security, politics, economics, law, education, religion and speech

d) Transfer security and institutions to the total control of the Iraqis

While discussing the third step, Sassaman writes of the work of his battalion in building and rebuilding hospitals, fire stations, police stations, schools, electrical power distribution systems, roads, bridges, recreation areas and mosques. He criticizes the administration, the Secretary of Defense, the Pentagon, the CPA, etc. for not adequately planning and resourcing this critical phase of the war. He argues, “If we had been serious about winning this war and taking care of Iraq, we would have put the resources in place to rapidly develop and rebuild this war-torn nation…It’s just not acceptable in the twenty-first century to invade other nations on the premise of eliminating a dictator without first demonstrating a commitment to putting the nation back on its feet.”

If this isn't a desire to “win hearts and minds,” then what is? Furthermore, isn’t the simple act of being able to provide security and stability for a region “winning hearts and minds” in itself? As Bing West noted, during the recent political and military gains in Anbar, “The tribes chose to align with our soldiers because, as one sheik told me, ‘Marines are the strongest tribe.’” But it is interesting to note the examples Sassaman provides that he considered misguided attempts at winning hearts and minds: “It’s…sobering to have one of your men lose a foot to an improvised explosive device because, again, your senior commander decided that driving down the middle of the road backed up traffic for the Iraqis.”

He raises an interesting point here, and one I think is a major part of our problem, not only in creating the divides in the counterinsurgency debate, but with our national strategic communication plan as well. All too often we’ve decided that we’re going to become popular among Iraqis – or Arab society in general – for things like not causing a traffic jam. Another example is how we as a polity have fretted over the last seven years about the use of the phrase “War on Terror.” The phrase has gone through a number of iterations, including just this week when a high-level official suggested that we ban the phrase so as not to offend. Another example is the recent suggestion that we end the use of the term “jihadists” for Islamic extremists because it may offend moderates and cause them to join the extremists.

When initiatives like this get so much play in the news as examples of our attempts to “win hearts and minds,” it’s no surprise that some people then view the “winning hearts and minds” approach to counterinsurgency with incredulity. I would argue that it is safe to say that an Iraqi who was not already hostile to our presence is unlikely to join an extremist group simply because the Americans caused a traffic jam. If this were ever to happen, you would have to wonder if that person wasn’t already looking for any excuse to join the insurgents. Likewise, it seems unlikely to me that calling extremists “extremists” is then going to offend moderates so much that they would then actually join those extremists.

Don’t get me wrong – strategic communication is important – and an area in which there is vast room for improvement. But an effective strategic communication plan is not built top-down with silly initiatives like those mentioned above. They waste time, effort, manpower and resources. When we say we want to “win hearts and minds,” what we should mean are all of those projects Sassaman attempted to initiate in Salah-ad-Din – and others have tried to implement elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan. They need to start at the local level where the locals can see commitment put to action. It’s important to note that for all the time we’ve spent trying not to offend Muslims, they’ve had little to no effect on opinion of the United States in the Arab world. Instead, Muslim opinion of the US and the US military skyrocketed in 2004-2005 following the tsunami in Indonesia and in 2005 following the earthquake in Pakistan-administered Kashmir – when the military and other organizations were on the ground engaged in full-scale rescue and relief operations.

Another example Sassaman gives as to why he thought "winning hearts and minds" was bunk was the 2003 Ramadan ceasefire, and the decision that the US would stop patrolling cities in Iraq, limit patrols to the city outskirts and primary travel routes and halt all offensive operations. As he tells it, "this was a spectacularly disastrous military policy decision - the only way to defeat an insurgency is to live in the city...not only did you lose control, but you also lost the pulse of the overall situation" where the cells were operating, which cities seemed to present the most danger, and what individual targets to attack next...without access to the intelligence gleaned through routine patrols, we had no way of knowing what the enemy was planning." Sassaman also notes that this ceasefire was based on the ever-present (and still present) fantasy that we could turn over control of the counterinsurgency to the Iraqis. In other words, some misguided attempt from Washington, or from the generals, to "win hearts and minds" directly contributed to our inability to conduct sound COIN operations. And if I were to ask just how many hearts and minds we won with the Ramadan cease-fire, what would the answer be?