This long piece in the NYT Magazine by Michael Gordon has been getting attention. David Brooks cites it to help make one of his usual bullshit arguments that's just gnomic enough to make gullible readers think he knows what the hell he's talking about. Greater Wingnuttia chimes in with its usual halfwit triumphalism, declaring that Gordon's article proves we've Turned a Corner (which would make the 473rd Corner we've Turned so far, suggesting that the war planning was originally conceived by M. C. Escher). Rob Farley, who is smarter than David Brooks, reads the piece and is less optimistic and indeed aghast, arguing that we're now pursuing a policy that seems certain in the long run to torpedo the viability of any emergent multiethnic Iraqi state (a ship that was probably already dead in the water anyhow).
Rob is right, but he doesn't point out just how strange the article is. Gordon is of course a defender of The Surge in general, even to the extent of earning the praise of demented Cornerite Cliff May. That support is in and of itself not a problem. But when combined with what seems to be his overall inability to truly grasp that there may in fact be limits to American military power in general, it has apparently led him to write an article in which the lede does not match the conclusion.
Gordon begins in media res, with an account of how tribal leaders in Hawr Rajab, "A dusty town on the southern outskirts of Baghdad," have turned against Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, in the wake of the Anbar Miracle, and so on:
Hawr Rajab had been under the dominion of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia, a predominantly Iraqi group that took its inspiration from Osama bin Laden and whose senior echelons are filled by foreign jihadis. The group’s fighters in Hawr Rajab were armed with AK-47s, machine guns, rocket-propelled grenades, mortars and a seemingly endless supply of homemade improvised explosive devices (I.E.D.’s), many of which were concocted from urea fertilizer and nitric acid....
This day in early August, however, was to mark a turning point. Just a month earlier, the Americans acquired a new ally: Sheik Ali, a leader of the Dulaimi tribe. In an extraordinary development, a growing number of Sunnis who had sympathized with the insurgency or even fought American forces were now more concerned with removing Al Qaeda from their midst — so much so that they had chosen to ally with their supposed occupiers....
Ali had already provided valuable intelligence on Al Qaeda operatives and had been recruiting members of his tribe for what was to be a new, American-backed security force. Al Qaeda’s hold on the town had been weakened, and the sheik was one reason why. The trip to Hawr Rajab was to be a further demonstration that the group’s days there were numbered.
But exactly how "numbered" these days of AQM are is an open question. The article uses as a framing device an expedition into Hawr Rajb on the part of the newly allied tribal fighters and the US military, under the command of Lt. Col. Mark Odom (son of war critic Gen. William Odom). In the first paragraph Odom is "surveying the terrain" he and his men and their new Iraqi allies are about to enter; the mission is to clear out the AQM fighters and distribute food to the town's inhabitants. It's in the next few paragraphs that we get the stuff about the turning points and the numbered days.
But what actually happens on this mission? That's at the end of the article.
As I was scribbling some notes, there was a boom in the distance. Klascius ran over to me and instructed me to get back in the Humvee. “The colonel’s been hit,” he said.
We drove back toward Checkpoint 20 and came upon a terrible sight. The twisted wreck of a Humvee was in the middle of the road. Combat medics were hovering over two soldiers lying in the grass. One was the turret gunner. The other was Odom, whose face was swathed in bandages. The wounded soldiers were lifted by stretcher into waiting Humvees and driven back.
Another Humvee, meanwhile, drove down from Checkpoint 20 to guard our flank. Suddenly there was a massive blast. Much of that Humvee disintegrated into fragments that rained down around us. Nobody could survive such a blast. The radio traffic reported three killed in action.
We were trapped on a “Tier 1 I.E.D. site”— a stretch of road chockablock with buried bombs — with no air cover. There was no heading back to town: the soldiers who had stayed there had been attacked by small arms, and two had been wounded. They would need to be evacuated as well. Yet heading back to Checkpoint 20 was still problematic. A Humvee started to make its way, only to set off another bomb. This blast, at least, was not catastrophic. The front end of the vehicle had been blown off, but there were no casualties....
It was later determined that the militants had laid a defensive belt of seven I.E.D.’s. Hidden wires enabled them to activate the bombs so that they would not be blown up by civilian traffic. After being activated, the bombs were set to explode when the vehicles rolled over pressure-plate detonators. It was an ingenious and low-cost defense, and that day they had owned the road. It was, Klascius observed, his most violent day in Iraq, but it was but one day in a long war and not the end of the battle for the town....
I tracked down Specialist Collazo, the Husky driver, who was an outpatient in Texas and sounded as if he was recovering well. As for Odom, he had returned to his home base at Fort Richardson, Alaska. His left arm and his nose were broken, and he had suffered a concussion. Despite the Hawr Rajab setback, he said that the cooperation with the sheiks had the potential to reduce the attacks on his soldiers and stabilize the town.
I mean no disrespect to anyone, least of all Lt Col Odom, or the men under him on this mission, nor even to Gordon. But the "turning point" bruited in the lede of the article remains hypothetical. Despite the fact that local tribal leaders were supporting the Americans, the Americans and their new allies rather decisively lost this encounter.
Too much of course cannot be made of this one episode in a negative direction. However, it would be equally absurd to look at this article as evidence of wholly positive developments either -- and not just in terms of the wider issues of political reconciliation, either (which Gordon acknowledges). I mean in straightforward military terms.
At least in this area described, it seems abundantly clear that AQM has at least some local support -- the precise degree of which is impossible to determine, but at least enough to make guerrilla tactics against a far better armed foe extremely effective. And that's all that matters, on a practical level.
Even with the turn against AQM in the ANbar Miracle, I very much doubt that AQI failed to radicalize at least a significant minority of the Iraqi Sunni population, and that's going to be a long-term problem. AQI or some variant thereof will probably be a threat for generations, even in the best case scenario. Remember that the fact that they have controlled large swaths of territory in Iraq and that the US military for years has been unable to stop them from doing so is already a catastrophe of the first order, one that probably cannot be wholly undone. All they really need is the ability to plant a well-placed bomb and they can foment as much sectarian unrest as they like. They don't even need to control territory, and the fact that they have, and in some places they do, is probably far more than they ever thought they'd accomplish in their wildest dreams.
All of which is to say, is that the best-case scenario of The Surge, even militarily, where it's allegedly a tremendous rosy success, is to simply mitigate the appalling consequences of an utter disaster.
(Also at PaxAmericana)
