Iraq and Afghanistan

The second taking of Falluja is well advanced. So far there are few surprises. Evidently about half the insurgents and most of their leaders left before the attack. It appears as though the city was not effectively cordoned off by coalition forces weeks ago when the military started talking of an imminent attack. Insurgent resistance is sporadic. The military acts surprised to find that the insurgents do not stand and fight, but simply melt away to reappear somewhere else. These are classic guerrilla tactics and one can’t imagine why they would do anything else given the disparity in equipment. The city is being heavily damaged from the air, and the fire of artillery and tanks. The military reports heavy casualties for the insurgents but very few civilian fatalities. One can be excused for not believing this. I am sure they are trying, but when there a building blocks progress it is destroyed with little actual knowledge of what is inside. The recent Johns Hopkins study suggests that there will be significant civilian casualties in a battle of this kind in a city, no matter how hard we try to avoid them.

The expected fallout on the political side is occurring. Several members of the government from the Sunni Arab community are quitting (but not all). Some of the Sunni Arab parties are saying they will not now compete in the elections (but not all are saying so). The major Sunni Arab religious association has condemned the attack and told all Arabs to abstain in the election. Even Muqtada al-Sadr has condemned the attacks on Falluja once again. All this is predictable. Of course, it brings into question the rationale for the attack, which was to make the elections possible in Falluja and everywhere else. There was certainly a problem with holding an election in a city under the complete control of the insurgents. But it has always been clear that political gains of “going in” to solve this problem might not equal the political costs. In Europe and the Arab world the attacks are being treated as just more American atrocities, a highly biased and thoughtless response. Yet the reality is not necessarily all that is important. What we are doing is bound to raise these issues. And once out there, the propaganda is what is remembered.

The other justification is that our plan of attack beginning with Falluja, and then carrying on to Ramadi and elsewhere in Anbar Province will break the back of the insurgency. Both the election and counterinsurgency arguments rest on assumptions that may prove wrong. We can kill insurgents month after month and still find there are more insurgents than when we began. We can take city after city. But if we do not hold what we conquer, or if the poorly trained and motivated Iraqi government forces do not hold onto our gains, then we will simply have to do it all over again — even for the purpose of the January elections.

As I have often suggested in these postings, with the number of troops we have on the ground, perhaps the best we can do is isolate the insurgents in those areas where they have the greatest popular support. This will leave our forces and “our Iraqis” available for securing the great majority of the country that is relatively peaceful. To make this work we will have to develop more effective control of the insurgents outside their home areas than we have now. It would seem to me that with our excellent night surveillance capability this should not be impossible. The second step here is to go ahead and hold the elections as best we can. We can provide voters in much of the Sunni Triangle with voting opportunities, particularly in Baghdad. The Iraqis intend to have overseas voting; perhaps they could also arrange for some people to vote outside their actual home territories. Where there is insufficient voting, the parliamentary seats in question should be held in reserve as open seats until such time as a more adequate process is available. It seems foolish to hold most of Iraq hostage to the bitterness of an insurgency that represents less than twenty percent of the population. But unfortunately, all or nothing thinking on the election still seems to hold sway. Falluja II is one of the results of this stubbornness. Of course, what I am proposing may be unrealistic. But what is being done in Falluja is equally unlikely to turn out to be realistic.