One of the most important aspects of Bing West’s new book—“The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq”—is his retelling of how the “surge” of American combat forces in Iraq actually came about. The popular imagination (and simplistic retellings by politicians and lazy journos) seems to have latched on to the idea that General Petraeus hatched the plan himself, and heroically dragged everyone else along with him on the road to victory.
Don’t be surprised if that’s how the surge is remembered in the decades ahead, when Iraq begins to fade from memory and only the roughest outlines of what really happened in the war survive in popular retellings.
Despite the fuzzy outlines of the narrative that has developed around it, West traces the true lineage of the idea of the surge, documenting that it came from a team that consisted of national security advisor Stephen Hadley, his Iraq hand J.D. Crouch, and staffers William Luti and Meghan O’Sullivan, who started briefing military and civilian leaders on an idea to temporarily send more troops to Iraq in the Fall of 2006. When briefed on the plan before assuming control of forces in Iraq, Petraeus agreed to it, since it fit with his own idea for a robust counterinsurgency (COIN) campaign.
West has done a remarkable job in explaining COIN strategy as actually practiced—or not practiced—by the American military in Iraq from 2003 to 2008. While COIN isn’t anything new for American forces, the lessons learned across the 19th and 20th centuries by Americans in places like China, Haiti, Mexico, the Philippines and Vietnam were seemingly lost in the rotor wash of the last American helicopter to flee Saigon.
In Iraq, the American military has had to re-learn these lessons through trial and error, and it’s done so at remarkable speed. As Army Lieutenant Colonel Gian P. Gentile—who has led troops in Iraq and has become a fierce critic of the recent obsession with COIN in military thinking—recently wrote, American forces in Iraq have been conducting COIN operations “pretty much by the book” since 2004. The problem was, while this was happening at the company and battalion level, it rarely filtered up much further, leading to an ugly, years-long divorce between tactics and strategy.
West, the veteran of over a dozen embeds with combat units in Iraq and author of the Vietnam counterinsurgency classic “The Village,” traces the individual initiatives that Lieutenants, Captains, and Lieutenant Colonels undertook to try and win the population over throughout the war. The problem was, even while they were waging this slow, steady fight, the guidance then-Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld was giving the generals fighting the war was find a way out, quickly. This led to lost years in which General George Casey, who commanded American forces in Iraq from June 2004 to February 2007, focused on training Iraqi troops while keeping American forces hunkered down on big, sprawling bases, separated from the Iraqi populace they were supposed to be securing. They could neither leave, because the Iraqis weren’t ready, nor effectively quell the insurgency, since they had little contact with the population during their high-speed forays from their superbases.
West says that “although the Rumsfeld-Casey-Abizaid strategy did not comport with the president’s objective, for years he had not challenged the contradiction. He wanted victory; they wanted to get out. President Bush and Secretaries Rice and Rumsfeld opposed using the U.S. military for “nation building,” and Casey agreed. Yet nation building was precisely what the president was doing in Iraq. Victory required it.”
This strategic drift led American commanders to rebuff several early attempts by Sunni tribal leaders to organize against al Qaeda, and caused the Coalition Provisional Authority’s Paul Bremer to reject a proposal by an American foreign affairs officer in early 2003 to organize the Sunni tribes in Anbar against al Qaeda—which in 2007 became precisely the strategy that had so much to do with the defeat of al Qaeda. The Anbar Sunnis made serious efforts to align themselves with the Americans in 2005, and then in late 2006, by which time 45 percent of American casualties in Iraq were occurring in the province. But each time they were rebuffed, since any deviation from strategy of training Iraqi forces and fighting insurgents was not to be tolerated.
By 2006 however, some American commanders began brokering their own deals with local Sunni sheiks to pay their tribes to stand up against al Qaeda, or consolidate gains American forces had won. West does a fantastic job of finding the small unit commanders who struck these bargains, and gives us, for the first time in book form, evidence of how the “Awakening” movement among the Sunni tribes actually got started. It wasn’t any great strategic insight on the part of American forces that turned the tribes against the al Qaeda, but rather the everyday brutalities the terrorist group visited on the locals, and the willingness of a few low to mid-level American officers to take a risk when nothing else seemed to work. This all became part of the overall American plan under Petraeus, of course, and the “surge” no doubt helped in clearing areas and holding them, but it was a process already well under way by time the “surge” began in early 2007, and West’s book is a invaluable resource in tracing this history of individual battles within the wider war.
While there is still daily violence in Iraq—more violence than some might like to admit—the recent relative quiet can only be seen as a success when measured against the unrelenting bloodletting and sectarian strife that made 2006 and 2007 seem so hopeless. But let’s be careful to get the story straight.
