The war against the free world
By Melanie Phillips on Diary
Those who said, when the Democrats routed the Republicans in the US mid term elections, that the celebrations by the surrender brigade were premature and that President Bush was made of sterner stuff, may be in the course of being proved correct. There are now signs of a debate taking place in Washington, which might just move the US away from self-delusion and towards hard-edged sanity. The outcome of this debate could not be more critical.
Encouragingly, there are signs that Bush may have now accepted what has long been apparent – that he has been ill-served by his top brass in Iraq. The US commander–in-chief wants to win – but has realised that his generals merely want to manage a retreat. Now there's been a shake-up. The head of US Central Command, General Abizaid, was retiring anyway. According to this story in the New York Times, General Casey, the general commanding the coalition forces in Iraq, is also to leave Iraq very soon and earlier than planned. Gen Casey, it appears, wanted America to leave Iraq before the country was secured. Now it's Gen Casey who is leaving Iraq instead.
The fight in Washington with the army top brass has not just been over whether more or fewer troops are needed in Iraq. It's also been over a major difference in strategic perception. In order to win in Iraq, it is essential to defeat Iran. This is for the blindingly obvious reason that the principal instigator of the war in Iraq is… Iran. I have never understood how anyone could think that you can win a war by refusing to fight the aggressors and instead running around trying vainly to put out the fires they are starting. As I said last month here and on many other occasions, the coalition cannot secure Iraq without first defeating Iran.
It has also long been clear that Iraq is merely a front in wider regional — and indeed, global — war. Iran declared war on the west in 1979, when Ayatollah Khomeini announced his intention of conquering the west for Islam. The response of the west has been to ignore the fact that war was thus declared upon it, as was demonstrated by attacks upon it ever since by Iran — along with the Sunni/Wahhabi Islamists, who were both its deadly theological rivals for regional hegemony and at the same time its allies in the war against the free world. Ahmadinejad is the true heir to Khomeini; and is it any wonder that he feels able to cock a snook at the west on the assumption that it is toothless and will not prevent him from acquiring nuclear weapons, when for more than two decades the west refused to defend itself against Iranian aggression – and even now, when Iran is fighting the west through proxies in Iraq, it is still flinching from taking the fight to the enemy?
The problem has been, however, that the American generals have been resistant to such a strategic analysis. They have refused both to extend the war in Iraq to Iran and to reconceive their tactics away from the use of conventional to unconventional forces. The argument that it is essential for the west to fight what is an unconventional war against it by unconventional means is made in this article by two security analysts, Fred Gedrich and Paul Vallely:
Unlike U.S.-led coalition troops, the adversaries in this war do not carry arms openly, wear uniforms or insignias and abide by other laws and customs of wars specified in Geneva Conventions and protocols. They instil fear in military opponents and local populations through use of suicide bombings, improvised explosive devices, kidnappings and beheadings. And they disguise themselves as civilians and hide among civilian populations with weapons stored and discharged from mosques, schools, hospitals, marketplaces, private residences and public roads.
To prevail, the United States has to transition from a conventional to an unconventional war footing and make the enemy pay a heavy price for its despicable tactics. In Iraq and elsewhere, traditional troops, weapons and tactics are less useful than tools of influence, covert operations and intelligence brought to the battlefield by special operators working harmoniously with indigenous forces and local populations. The prime objective is to create a climate of fear within enemy ranks that breaks its will to continue the armed insurrection against the freely elected Iraqi government.
Special Operations Forces (Rangers, Seals, Delta Force and other special units) leaders and troops are uniquely qualified for this mission. Special operators played prominent and successful roles in removing Afghanistan's Taliban regime from power and disrupting al Qaeda's terror base. In Iraq, they have spent most of their time searching for the infamous 'deck of cards,' the elusive WMD arsenal, and high-value insurgents and terrorists. Joint special operators (from all military branches) are also trained in local cultures and languages, making it easier for them to embed in local populations and Iraqi security forces and collect information which in turn may be used to 'hunt and kill' hostile forces. In addition, they can win 'hearts and minds' of local populations through civil affairs work and performance of psychological operations against enemies of the freely elected Iraqi Government.
In January 2003, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld designated the U.S. Special Operations Command (USSOCOM) as the lead military organization to prosecute the global war on terror but unfortunately that has not materialized. Although stellar Army commanding Gens. John Abizaid (retiring early next year) and George Casey continue to lead Middle East war operations and troops in Iraq respectively, they are products of the traditional warfare school. Moreover, nearly all of the 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are, too. It's time to alter U.S. strategy by putting USSOCOM generals and admirals truly in command of the global war.
The question now is whether the change in military brass will bring about a change in strategy. In the New York Post, Ralph Peters extols the brilliance of Casey's replacement, Gen David Petraeus, but enters a disturbing caveat:
In my contacts with Petraeus, we've sometimes agreed and sometimes argued. But we diverged profoundly on one point: The counterinsurgency doctrine produced under his direction remains far too mired in failed 20th-century models. Winning hearts and minds sounds great, but it's useless when those hearts and minds turn up dead the next morning.
Gen. Petraeus truly is a brilliant talent. Faced with the reality of Iraq, he may be able to shake off the Pollyanna thinking in which our government and military have become mired. God knows, we all want the general to succeed…Of course, even three- or four-star generals can only do what our civilian leaders order and allow. Half of Petraeus' struggle is going to be with Washington's obsolete view of the world, with our persistent illusions about the Middle East and mankind.
There, in that last sentence, lies the rub. All depends on whether Bush has finally got it, or whether he will continue to be influenced by people who clearly haven't got a clue.
And it's not just the military strategy that has been misconceived. Once again, American intelligence has been shown to be woefully — and lethally — useless. It has now been discovered that — surprise, surprise — Iran is far more involved in Iraq than had been thought. The admirable Eli Lake reports in the New York Sun that secret Iranian documents, seized when the US captured Iranians last month in Iraq, have revealed that Iran is working closely with both Shi'ite and Sunni militias.
The news that Iran's elite Quds Force would be in contact, and clandestinely cooperating, with Sunni Jihadists who attacked the Golden Mosque in Samarra (one of the holiest shrines in She's) on February 22, could shake the alliance Iraq's ruling Shiites have forged in recent years with Tehran. Many Iraq analysts believe the bombing vaulted Iraq into the current stage of its civil war…
Michael Ledeen, who says this is a good moment to exploit the power struggle going on in Iran through the illness and now death of President Khamenei, also reports that US officials have been shocked — shocked! — at the vast scale of Iranian activity in Iraq revealed by these documents.
It seems that our misnamed Intelligence Community had grossly underestimated the sophistication and the enormity of the Iranian war campaign. I am told that this information has reached the President, and that it is part of the body of information he is digesting in order to formulate his strategy for Iraq… I am told that, at first, there was a concerted effort, primarily but by no means exclusively from the intel crowd, to sit on the evidence, to prevent it from reaching the highest levels. But the information was too explosive, and it is now circulating throughout the bureaucracy… We are in a big war, and we cannot fight it by playing defense in Iraq. That is a sucker's game. And I hope the president realizes this at last, and that he finds himself some generals who also realize it, and finally demands a strategy for victory.
Indeed; but the President also needs an intelligence service that actually delivers the goods. The chaos in US intelligence — and the resulting Beltway in-fighting — that has characterised this entire saga has clearly not been resolved by the even more chaotic new structure imposed on the intelligence community to sort it out. Now the official appointed to oversee this new structure, John Negroponte, is also being moved, as the New York Times reports. But will this presage the long overdue clearing out of the clandestine Augean stables — or will the CIA continue to play the lethal role of America's rogue shadow foreign service, continuing to mire the defence of the west in serial incompetence and even (see the stream of books and briefings against the President by former agents) rank treachery? How can the free world be defended when its principal intelligence agency is surprised by developments which are obvious to anyone with eyes to see?
None of this is necessarily irreparable. Wars are often characterised by mistakes in analysis and strategy. This one can be won — provided the President now understands the strategic and operational errors that have been made, and puts them right. Putting more troops into Iraq will not be enough unless the Iranian regime is taken out. Clearly, this is not a great prospect. But it is a prospect which as time goes on will become even less palatable as it becomes ever more unavoidable. The longer it is left, the more difficult it will be. We are now in a world where the only calculation to be made is between rocks and hard places. There are no good options. The only sane course of action is the least worst option.
There will be scant support for this, it goes without saying, from the British media which remains largely on a different planet. Thus Anatole Kaletsky in the Times thinks war with Iran would be
…a disaster on [sic] the Middle East, beside which the war in Iraq would be a mere sideshow… What now seems to be in preparation at the White House, with the usual unquestioning support from Downing Street, is a Middle Eastern equivalent of the Second World War. The trigger for this all-embracing war would be the formation of a previously unthinkable alliance between America, Israel, Saudi Arabia and Britain, to confront Iran and the rise of the power of Shia Islam…
The fact that the 'Middle Eastern equivalent of the Second World War' has already been declared and is being waged upon the west does not seem to occur to him. No, the war-crazy villains of the piece are 'trigger-happy' Israeli 'hotheads' who are 'hell-bent' on stopping Iran from developing nuclear weapons. Yes, these are actually the terms he uses. Clearly, on planet Kaletsky it is those who seek to protect their country from the nuclear genocide that is being openly prepared for it — of which he makes no mention whatever — who are to be blamed for 'trigger-happy' aggression rather than those who are planning such a holocaust. No mention, either, of the fact that Iran has directly threatened America, has for years attacked America and in Iraq is currently waging war on America, which all might be thought to constitute a somewhat overdue reason for a response by America. But no, it's those wretched Jews again. What moral and intellectual sickness is this?
Alas, it is the default position in British media and political circles. It is also rampant in the US, but there at least there is now an argument going on. On the outcome of that argument the course of this war — and the fate of the free world — now depends. |
