Stretching Rules of Warfare Paid Off in Ramadi
Friday, 25 June 2010
Jim Michaels
Jim Michaels came to the OPC two weeks before the release of his latest book, A Chance in Hell: The Men Who Triumphed Over Iraq’s Deadliest City and Turned the Tide of War. Those who attended the book night received a free copy of his book from the publisher, St. Martin’s Press.
Michaels covers military issues for USA Today and has made about 20 reporting trips to Iraq and Afghanistan as well as supervised the paper’s six embedded reporters. As a former Marine Corps infantry officer, he brings unique insight into the mechanics and soldiers involved in war. During the talk about his book, Michaels set the scene taking listeners back to 2006 Iraq when civil war was raging. Colonel Sean MacFarland arrived in Ramadi and was told to do only one thing: keep a lid on Ramadi.
Michaels said that MacFarland is not the Hollywood ideal of a military commander. “He looks more like a high school biology teacher than Patton,” Michaels said. MacFarland had a legacy of not seeming the commanding type, even at West Point where he “didn’t fit in and didn’t impress superiors.”
Given his background, then, it’s easy to see where MacFarland’s resistance to just “keeping a lid” on Ramadi was not his style. “He wanted to defeat the enemy.”
He ordered men into Al Qaeda strongholds and sent in tanks and armored vehicles. “Not a hearts and minds approach at all,” Michaels said. The death toll went to 1,500 and by summer, it was a stalemate. This paved the way for MacFarland to “roll the dice,” as Michaels put it, to forge a partnership with Sheik Abdul Sattar Bezia al-Rishawi and his growing band of fighters. Working with American troops, they drove Al Qaeda from Ramadi. The system worked because MacFarland “stretched the rules. “They took confiscated weapons and gave them to tribes,” Michaels said.
In September 2007, President George W. Bush came to Iraq and went to Anwar and Fallujah and met with government officials and Sattar. During the meeting, Sattar told Bush that he appreciated the sacrifices of U.S. troops. “When we’re done in Anwar, we’ll fight with you in Afganistan,” Sattar said. But this was not to be. Soon after Sattar was killed in a roadside bomb and threw “the Awakening” in peril. Sattar’s brother Ahmed said, “Although they killed Sattar, there are one million Sattars in Anwar.”
“And there were,” Michaels said. “The movement had spread.”
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With respect to my colleague Aimee Vitrak, I feel the title of her July/August recap of Jim Michaels’ book night, “Stretching the Rules of Warfare Paid Off in Ramadi,” is misleading.
[Aimee reminds me that the “stretching the rules” quote is from Michaels. The title is a paraphrase.]
The title of the piece states—and the article implies—that the tactics used by the U.S. military in the 2007 surge “paid off.” Unless one is focusing purely on the tactical level, this is simply not the case. President Bush’s goal, in his own words, was to create "the breathing space [the Iraqi government] needs to make progress in other critical areas." It didn't.
During the Q&A I prefaced a question to Mr. Michaels by saying that while one can argue that deploying more U.S. troops to Anbar and arming Sunni militias achieved some tactical and operational successes, the surge itself was a strategic failure. You may recall that Mr. Michaels agreed with me.
By almost any metric other than the decrease in violent attacks, the American mission in Iraq, surge included, has been an abysmal failure. “While the number of security incidents fell significantly compared to 2006-2007, human rights violations, absence of the rule of law, and lack of access to essential services, shelter and employment opportunities in Iraq continue to pose major challenges,” the UN Secretary General reported in February. Yes, Iraq held elections this March, but elections don’t equal democracy, nor have they achieved any degree of reconciliation among the various adversaries.
And Ramadi itself? A female suicide bomber blew herself up yesterday, July 4, outside the provincial governor's office, killing four people and injuring 23 others. Another bomb was detonated in Mosul. All this while Vice President Joe Biden was visiting Baghdad. A month ago, AFP reported that attackers bombed homes of police officers, killing a child and injuring 10 others. These are not isolated incidents. Violence may be down in the aggregate, but attackers’ targeting has improved.
I quote a summer 2008 World Affairs piece by Lt. Col Gian P. Gentile, who served two combat tours in Iraq, in case my civilian interpretation is unconvincing:
Properly understood, the surge narrative is really not about Iraq at all. It is about the past and future of the U.S. Army. It resurrects dubious battlefield lessons from the past—Vietnam, principally—applies them to Iraq, and extrapolates from there into an unknown future. On all three counts—past, present, and future—the narrative suffers from numerous and irreparable defects. Its reading of the past, grounded in the cliché that General Creighton Abrams’s “hearts and minds” program “won” the war in Vietnam, is a self-serving fiction. Its version of the more recent past and even the present is contrived and largely fanciful, relying on a distorted version of both to tell a tale in which U.S. forces triumphed in Iraq in 2007 and did so despite the misguided efforts of their predecessors even a year before. More than anything else, the surge narrative stakes a claim on the future, instructing us that its methods of counterinsurgency will be uniquely suited to the next war and to the one after that.
Col. Sean McFarland’s tactical achievements in Ramadi should not be minimized, but neither should they be overblown. Iraq, post-surge, is still a fragile, impoverished, and violent place. The American public should know the full story of the “surge” before they allow our leaders to replicate it in Afghanistan.
Respectfully,
Brian Palmer
[BP1]