The Surge

The so-called Surge in Baghdad has already begun.

A few Iraqi brigades, understrength and smaller than American brigades even when at full strength, have arrived in Baghdad to support an additional American brigade that has been deployed. More are scheduled to be sent.

In a city of 6 million, how is it possible that these first units, fewer than 10,000 additional troops, could count as a surge?

And how could these troops do anything when the loyal opposition claims there is no new strategy for these troops?

Yet already Sadr has fled to Iran and the Mahdi Army appears in disarray due to arrests of senior leaders and small numbers of the army itself. Sadr's forces are certainly quiet.

And jihadis have made for the exits in anticipation of the surge.

So deaths are down in Baghdad.

All this was achieved before our troops even really engaged the enemies and actually started operations.

All this is possible because, as I've argued, a surge of effort is necessary and not a surge of new American troops.

We have a better approach that recognizes that the Shia death squads are the primary obstacle to reaping the fruits of victory over enemy Baathist and jihadi attempts to defeat the new Iraqi government. There really is a cycle of violence in Iraq right now. The jihadis and die-hard Baathists with blood on their hands must be killed or driven from Iraq, but most Sunnis know thay can't shoot their way back into power. Even a couple years ago, it was possible to see that the Sunnis were attempting to surrender and move on.

But the Samarra mosque bombing of a year ago ignited the enemy strategy of provoking a Shia onslaught on the Sunnis so that the Sunni Arabs would embrace the jihadis as a source of protection rather than give up. Iranian and Syrian help to the Shia thugs helped this along nicely, of course. No point in leaving things to chance when you can support both sides involved in the killing. The Sunni Arabs became too afraid of the Shia death squads to surrender to the Shia-dominated government.

So knocking back the Shia death squads, of which Sadr's Mahdi Army is the most famous, is necessary to get the Sunni Arabs to quit the hopeless fight. The continuing flight of Sunni Arabs shows that the Sunni Arabs know that the jihadis don't actually provide protection, however. The jihadis just keep the cycle of killing going. The cooperation we've gained from Sunni Arab tribes in Anbar to fight the jihadis shows that the Sunni Arabs can be brought at least partly in from the cold.

So with Baghdad the key objective, we have new rules of engagement that allow us to fight both the Shia death squads the Sunni terrorists who still bomb innocents.

And we have political support in Iraq to do what is necessary. Not scorching the Earth as the Russians did in Grozny--but what is necessary.

The very fact that our surge is being spread out over several months should be a clue that the new American troops themselves are not the key to winning. Yet the focus on the new troops means that the surge of effort has some time to defeat the enemy before people impatiently ask if the surge has worked once all the new American troops are in place.

The talk of military force being necessary to militarily defeat the enemy is wrong. Military force is necessary--I would never say that is is not important. But the enemy which is indistinguishable from surrounding civilians (which is why they are unlawful combatants, if you remember) can disperse and hide when hit too hard, making military defeat of insurgents extremely difficult. A conventional enemy that is hit hard and dispersed loses its effectiveness because being organized and large is what generates power. Irregular and terrorist enemies don't lose their inherent strength when they hide.

What is important is that other elements of government power then exploit the limited achievement of the security forces. Military force is a shield that allows the non-military efforts to succeed in strangling the enemy by ending public support for the enemy. To be sure, the non-military efforts can't succeed without the shield that kills the enemy and atomizes their force as much as possible. But killing is not the measure of success.

The key to winning has been the political decision by Maliki to actually pacify Baghdad, including Sadr. Once that political decision was made, with the support of political decisions made by the Bush administration, the enemy wilted when faced with our newly focused power. This has nothing to do with the numbers, though numbers will help.

This does not mean the fight is over and won. The enemy will regroup and try to cope with the new situation in Baghdad. They will strike back. It will take time to win this new phase of the war. And winning will require the non-military efforts to exploit the atomization and fear of the enemy inside Baghdad. Unfortunately, victoryphobia at home encourages the enemy and undercuts what we try to achieve in the field.

But remember that we keep knocking down the primary threats inside Iraq. We will knock down the threat this time, too.

The victoryphobic among us actually seem to feel more comfortable losing even to vicious enemies who oppose every ideal our Left holds dear, except for a shared hatred of our president. That shared hatred is enough for our Left to overlook the ideology of the jihadis that would send women back to the 14th century, end our freedoms that the jihadis view as immoral, and kill homosexuals.

The enemy of their enemy is our anti-war movement's friend. Or if not "friend," then close enough for government work.

Let's not be so eager to surrender to the enemy that we are battering down every day.