In his op-ed in the New York Post this morning (registration required or use bugmenot), “Rollin’ On the Rivers”, Mack Owens puts the pieces together and explains recent Coalition military operations:
But while the outcome in Iraq is far from certain — and even a favorable one won’t come overnight — evidence suggests the United States and the new Iraqi government are on the right track to ultimate success. To understand why, it is necessary to grasp the essentials of the current U.S. strategy in Iraq and how it seems to be playing out.
The Globe’s problem, one shared by most of the American press, is the tendency to see events in Iraq as isolated. They fail to see the overall campaign: a series of coordinated events — movements, battles and supporting operations — designed to achieve strategic or operational objectives within a military theater.
As Owens explains it, the first step of the recent operations was denying the insurgents sanctuary in Fallujah:
Wresting Fallujah from the rebels was critically important: Control of the town had given them the infrastructure — human and physical — necessary to maintain a high tempo of attacks against the Iraqi government and coalition forces.
In and of itself, the loss of Fallujah didn’t cause the insurgency to collapse, but it did deprive the rebels of an indispensable sanctuary. Absent such a sanctuary, large terrorist networks cannot easily survive, being reduced to small, hunted bands.
Foreclosing Mosul where the insurgency apparently attempted to establish an alternative sanctuary following their loss of Fallujah was the next step.
After that came the rivers campaign: eliminating the ratlines along the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers:
May saw four operations within that campaign:
- The first, Operation Matador, was a week-long Marine action centered on Qaim, near the Syrian border. Matador sought to kill and capture followers of Zarqawi known to be located there and to interdict the smuggling routes they used to move downriver to Baghdad. Some 125 insurgents died in the fighting.
- Next came Operation New Market, another Marine operation, in the Haditha area southeast of Qaim. Here, a major highway from Syria crosses the Euphrates and then branches north toward Mosul and southeast toward Fallujah and Baghdad. While the insurgents did not stand and fight as they had in Qaim, the operation still netted substantial intelligence.
- The third was a joint U.S.-Iraqi operation in the Mosul-Tel Afar region that contains the Tigris River ratline.
- The fourth operation of this campaign was the aforementioned Lightning/Thunder in Baghdad itself, which led to the capture of a former general in Saddam’s intelligence service, who (according to the U.S. military) led “the military wings of several terror cells” operating in west Baghdad. Hundreds of other insurgents were captured as well.
He also suggests the likelihood of hot pursuit into Syria (which I predicted at the beginning of the year) if insurgents fall back there.
Military operations aren’t enough, however:
But while military operations have weakened the insurgency, military means alone cannot defeat an insurgency. That is why it is necessary to bring the Sunnis into the government. Recent evidence suggests that the steps so far have already begun to drive a wedge between the Sunni and the foreign jihadis who have come to fight for Zarqawi.
To this I would add the need to prevent continuing entry of prospective jihadi from neighboring countries and the control of rampant violent street crime (chores for the newly-trained Iraqi National Guard and police forces, respectively).
In my recent post, The Elephant, I suggested that too many politicians and pundits were confusing a part with the whole in the Iraqi insurgency. Owen’s article suggests the structure of the plan for the necessary dealing with the whole.
