Bush to raise stakes with new Iraq strategy
By Edward Luce in Washington
Published: January 10 2007 02:00 | Last updated: January 10 2007 02:00
In a broadcast tonight, George W. Bush will gamble what remains of his presidency on a counter-insurgency strategy drawn up by the general he appointed last week to take charge of US forces in Iraq.
The 168-page manual, that Lieutenant General David Petraeus completed last month, provides the blueprint for what supporters of Mr Bush’s expected 20,000 troop “surge” hope the beefed up US forces will do in Iraq over the coming months.
The first US army counterinsurgency manual in 20 years, it recommends a starkly different approach to tackling the insurgency than most US commanders have followed since the April 2003 Iraq invasion.
It says that the principal goal of the US military should be to win the respect and support of the domestic population and that killing insurgents can often be counter-productive by creating even more to take their place.
Furthermore, it recommends that US soldiers and civilians learn Arabic and become culturally sensitive to the conditions of the local population as a way of improving critical intelligence. “Without good intelligence, counter-insurgents are like blind boxers flailing at an unseen opponent,” it says.
On previous tours in Iraq, most notably in command of US forces in the northern city of Mosul, Gen Petraeus has put much of this into practice with good effect, say analysts. This time around, he is expected to apply it across Iraq but particularly in Baghdad and Anbar province.
Kenneth Pollack, an Iraq analyst at the Brookings Institution, said: “He comes with two very big advantages, which is that the previous strategy of chasing al-Qaeda fruitlessly around Iraq has failed.
“Second, he won’t have Donald Rumsfeld breathing down his neck and vetoing everything he does. Bob Gates [the new defence secretary] is not like that.”
However, Gen Petraeus will also face three obstacles, they say. First, the surge – or “escalation”, as the Democratic party has called it – would need to be many times the expected 20,000 in order to pacify Iraqi population centres.
The report says the ideal ratio of troops to population in a counter-insurgency operation is 20 per 1,000. This would imply the US would need to add at least 250,000 to its existing force of 140,000 – a logistical and political impossibility. Iraq’s population is 26m.
Although Gen Petraeus is advocating what British strategists had long recommended, the UK’s 8,000 force level was never enough to control Basra, a city of more than 1m. “The UK had the right idea but never putits money where its mouth was,” said Mr Pollack. Second, Gen Petraeus cannot rely on the co-operation of all of Iraq’s security forces, many of which are riddled with sectarian death squads. Patrick Clawson, a former administration official at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, said: “The thing to watch out for is not the surge but the number of high-quality US trainers Mr Bush can provide for the Iraqi army.”
Third, the focus on counter-insurgency might be years too late. Mr Pollack said: “The Iraqi civil war has acquired a psychological dimension that may now be impossible to control.”
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