The Way Ahead: Kissinger, Abizaid, Changing the Strategy, and Iraq

I suppose-- by the time I post this-- you'll all be rather acquainted with Henry Kissinger's recent statement that "Military Victory in Iraq [is] 'Not Possible'." The statement couldn't have been older than five minutes when a buen amigo-- who knows that Dr. Kissinger, and US covert operations in the Angolan civil war, was the subject of my senior thesis at West Point-- forwarded it to me. I should note that while USMA's Department of Social Sciences still has the picture of me and Kissinger on their alumni collage (that's us in the bottom right of the picture), regular readers of this blog will be well-aware that I'm not the stark Realist that my subject was (and actually, neither are the anti-war activists, but that's a different story). Being in Iraq, I don't have the luxury to surf the 'Net and read what the anti-war activists are saying about this, but I suspect that they're praising Nixon's most senior statesman for "seeing the light" that they-- in their infinite wisdom-- have always known. But, of course, nothing is ever quite that simple, is it? And I would caution you to read everything he says before jumping to the conclusion that the architect of the Grand Design has already consigned us to failure. For starters, he specifically noted that:

"A dramatic collapse of Iraq — whatever we think about how the situation was created — would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region."

In other words, he's not supporting the anti-war activists misguided calls for an immediate withdrawal, but repudiating it. Moreover, if you read the context in which he notes that victory is now unreachable, it's really very interesting. Says Kissinger:

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible." [bold added for emphasis]

That last part is most significant because it means that what Dr. Kissinger is saying is not that our strategy itself is inherently doomed for failure; he's saying that the strategy cannot achieve victory because the public will not support the length of time it will need to take to produce such a victory. Put another way, if the US only had the political will to support our European campaign during World War II for, say, twelve to eighteen months, then it would have been entirely accurate if Charles Evans Hughes (Kissinger's rough historical equivalent for that time period) had said: "We can't defeat the Nazis in a time period that political processes of the democracies will support." That's because it actually took about forty-two months to defeat the Nazi regime, and we did defeat the Nazis. To be sure, the fault for this predicament lies squarely with the President who failed to mobilize the nation in support of the cause or to have implemented a strategy that would have been more insulated from the fickleness of politicians and public opinion-- but it's important to put everything in context here.

Out of context, for example, one might interpret the Democratic victories in Congress as a mandate for an immediate withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. I'm not so sure that this was what they received, though (and even if they did, I'd still think it's a bad idea: the right choice, the smart choice, and the popular choice are not always the same thing). But according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll, most Americans-- by an almost two-to-one margin-- don't believe the Democrats have a plan for Iraq; 57% said they didn't think so, 29% said they did. And this is probably true-- Democrats don't have a clue about what to do about Iraq, they just used American body counts and diassatisfaction with the war to propel themselves into office. To the extent that they have any semblence of a plan, Reuters reports that it's as simple as a withdrawal, which would be a bad idea, but it sure would make the misguided anti-war activists happy. And again, since the world is not a bipolar system, it's not only possible, but likely that the Democrats can be wrong and the Republicans are wrong, too.

Back to the doomsayers that have likely coalesced around Kissinger, I'm not sure how much attention is being focused on the words of my former Commandant, CENTCOM commander General John Abizaid, who testified that he was "optimistic that 'we can stabilize Iraq.'" He also warned against "warned Congress against setting a timetable for withdrawing U.S. troops from Iraq," and reiterated that victory is going to require more Iraqi troops-- a fact that US Marine Colonel Larry Nicholson has already figured out and begun to address in his area of operations. I'm not sure whose opinions the American public, the press, or the bloggers have chosen to emphasize, but I'll say that for my own amateurish opinion, I've long since come to the conclusion that what is needed is not more American troops, but fewer troops-- albeit strategically assigned to the Military Transition Teams (MiTT) as advisors embedded in the Iraqi Security Forces, backed up by three to five Brigade Combat Teams for quick reaction response and deliberate operations, and supported by the incomparable firepower of the US airforce (to turn the tables-- fast-- in a decisive engagement). If you combine the MiTTs with the expansion of interagency Provincial Reconstruction Teams (PRT)-- like my own-- which are charged with overseeing reconstruction and development of infrastructure, building the capacity of Iraqi political and administrative institutions to stand on their own, and maintaining information superiority at the lowest levels, and (for that matter) an overhauled and proactive information operations campaign that is supported by kinetic operations (and not vice versa), and-- oh by the way-- the proliferation of improved counterinsurgency operations and tactics in an organization that still has too many who think that we can use kinetic operations to achieve victory through the application military force alone, well, then I think we'll be on to something.

But what do I know.