Word: iraqization
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...just finished a remarkable book called The Good Soldiers, by David Finkel. It is the best grunt's-eye view of the war in Iraq that I've read; certainly, it's the best written. But it also raises, implicitly, the mystery of our qualified success there. Finkel follows an Army battalion through the 2007 surge, as it attempts to secure a particularly nasty and neglected area of Baghdad. This was the first attempt to implement the Army's new counterinsurgency doctrine, and the troops have their doubts about the new tactics. Major Brent Cummings, the second-in-command, reads...
...humvees, as before; they are blown up by IEDs, as before. The counterinsurgency manual gathers dust on the battalion commander's desk, then disappears. But somehow ... it works. A year later, the neighborhood is markedly quieter - but it's hard to say why. (See pictures of life returning to Iraq's streets...
...came to chewing over even the most unlikely questions were flat-out exciting. It was certainly at odds with the hidebound image of the military I'd grown up with. I became an auxiliary member of the counterinsurgency cult - in theory. When it came time to apply it in Iraq, I had my doubts. It seemed too little, too late. But I was wrong, and the surge's relative success was attributable in no small part to the general's creative flexibility...
...They have a track record," a member of Obama's decision-making team recently said of Generals Petraeus and Stanley McChrystal. "I tend to give them the benefit of the doubt." True enough, but the mystery at the heart of The Good Soldiers remains: By what magic process did Iraq turn around, especially since the counterinsurgency tactics were so unevenly applied? Was it merely the doctrine - or did the ethnic cleansing of Baghdad neighborhoods and the sheer exhaustion after five years of astonishing fraternal brutality have something to do with...
...These questions matter, which is why the President's strategy review is so important. Afghanistan, Petraeus has noted, is different from Iraq. It is much poorer, vastly illiterate, governmentally incoherent and spectacularly corrupt - and its President, Hamid Karzai, shows no signs of the growth in office that Iraq's Nouri al-Maliki achieved (another mystery). In addition, the U.S. military has made some serious strategic mistakes in Afghanistan this year. "Why are the Marines in Helmand?" General McChrystal asked at one of his first strategy briefings, I'm told. Helmand province is where the opium crop...