# National Strategy for Victory in Iraq



## Infanteer (30 Nov 2005)

http://www.whitehouse.gov/infocus/iraq/iraq_strategy_nov2005.html

Hot off the presses from the U.S. Executive.  I must admit I'm a little leery about the opening heading:

_Helping the Iraqi People Defeat the Terrorists and Build an Inclusive Democratic State_

Terrorists?  Isn't the Insurgency the problem?



> Combating terrorism and insurgency requires different strategic responses....states must handle insurgencies differently, because they represent both a political and a military challenge.
> 
> LtCol Michael Morris, USMC, Al Qaeda as Insurgency; pg 6



As for Inclusive Democratic State, is that really going to be the solution to their problems?  Can we export democracy on the end of a bayonet?



> This is a civil war of sorts, and one which the West is poorly positioned to referee and ill-suited to encourage or end.  The contest is not the venue of an information operation writ large.  Rather it is the age old and fundamental debate on religion's role in governance. Each people must make its own choice; Madison Avenue marketing techniques and western-style politics are neither necessary nor sufficient to sway the result.  Instead a sophisticated form of political warfare must support and encourage moderate governments that champion tolerant forms of the Islamic faith, while opposing religious fascism.
> 
> LtCol Michael Morris, USMC, Al Qaeda as Insurgency; pg 12



Although I take issue with the rhetoric of "religious fascism", I think the good Colonel is on the right track.


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## 48Highlander (30 Nov 2005)

> This is a civil war of sorts, and one which the West is poorly positioned to referee and ill-suited to encourage or end.  The contest is not the venue of an information operation writ large.  Rather it is the age old and fundamental debate on religion's role in governance. Each people must make its own choice;



The religious aspect of it is immaterial, it's the political system that's important.  A democratic state with an official state religion is not neccesarily a bad thing - the Israelis certainly pulled it off pretty well.


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## Infanteer (30 Nov 2005)

48Highlander said:
			
		

> The religious aspect of it is immaterial, it's the political system that's important.



Try telling that to a Muslim in the Middle East....


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## R0B (30 Nov 2005)

Israel is a western franchise state.
At best, Iraq's democracy will be weak as political parties will be forced into coalitions. I'd be surprised to see them turn out better than Italy, politically.


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## xFusilier (30 Nov 2005)

Gee, didn't know it was possible to write a policy document composed almost completely in point form.  Needless to say the objectives outlined in required in this document are going to mean, a large porition of the American military commited to Iraq for a very, very long time.  I don't believe it is feasible, simply because democratization is an evolutionary process, and that it's absolutely irrelevant how you define sucess in Iraq, if the majority of Iraqi's don't care for your vision, it aint gonna happen.  Also the only sucessful democracies are secular democracies, in that duties of citizenship are defined by a criterion exclusive of religion.


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## Infanteer (1 Dec 2005)

2332Piper said:
			
		

> Explain.



Do you really need it explained to you?  It isn't exactly a South American junta.


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## Infanteer (2 Dec 2005)

Interesting site I found; I have to look into it more to figure out where they are coming from.

http://www.jihadunspun.com/home.php

Anyways, links to what the bad guys are saying is always fun to read, if anything to see how nutty they are - here is the Insurgency's response to the US Strategy for Victory:

http://www.jihadunspun.com/intheatre_internal.php?article=105250&list=/home.php&



> Al-Qaeda Takes Control Of Ramadi; Declares "Lions Expedition" A Victory
> Dec 02, 2005
> By Ubaidah Al-Saif; Translation © Jihad Unspun 2005
> 
> ...



Here is the US take on things (one I'm a bit more inclined to accept):

http://edition.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/meast/12/01/iraq.main/index.html


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## a_majoor (2 Dec 2005)

There is the home front as well. VDH has laid it out very well here:



> *A Moral War*
> The project in Iraq can succeed, and leave its critics scrambling.
> 
> Almost everything that is now written about Iraq rings not quite right: It was a "blunder"; there should have been far more troops there; the country must be trisected; we must abide by a timetable and leave regardless of events on the ground; Iraq will soon devolve into either an Islamic republic or another dictatorship; the U.S. military is enervated and nearly ruined; and so on.
> ...


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## Infanteer (3 Dec 2005)

It is a little disheartening that after reading LtGen Sattler's recounting of the Battle of Fallujah last year and how it "broke the back of the Insurgency" to see 21 casualties (10 KIA) in an attack in Fallujah (read it here).  And this attack wasn't a part of the ongoing counterinsurgency operations in Fallujah and Ramadi.

I'm not going to get optimistic yet.

RIP Marines.


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## tomahawk6 (4 Dec 2005)

Complacency kills.


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## Britney Spears (26 Dec 2005)

VDH is, as usual, nothing more than a Bushvik parrot. Since no one in academia takes his works on the ancient Greeks seriously, I suppose he's got to eat somehow.



> We took no oil â â€ the price in fact skyrocketed after we invaded Iraq.



Yes, and as anyone who works in the oil industry is keenly aware of, oil company profits have also skyrocketed with oil prices. What did Bush use to do again? Were we expecting him to just ship the Iraqi Oil to the US ans give it away for free?



> We did not do Israel's bidding; in fact, it left Gaza after we went into Iraq and elections followed on the West Bank.



Um, yes you did, you INVADED IRAQ, A SWORN ENEMY OF ISRAEL. what happens in Gaza and the West bank have zero relevence to the topic at hand.



> We did not want perpetual hegemony â â€ in fact, we got out of Saudi Arabia,



Isn't that what Bin Laden wanted? So is that the new strategy? Just cave in to their demands? 



> And we did not expropriate Arab resources, but, in fact, poured billions of dollars into Iraq to jumpstart its new consensual government in the greatest foreign aid infusion of the age.



Yeah, Halliburton sure has been doing some brisk business.




> and will leave Iraq anytime its consensual government so decrees.



Not only is this of very dubious credibility, since the US will define what "consensual" means, why is this even a good thing? If an Iranian backed Shi'te theocracy comes to power with the consent of the Shi'ites, should the US just pull out and be done with it? Mission Accomplished indeed.



> Zarqawi and the radical Islamicists are slowly being squeezed as only a war at their doorstep could accomplish. Critics of Iraq should ask if we were not fighting Zarqawi in Iraq, where exactly would we be fighting Islamic fascists â â€ or would the war against terror be declared over, won, lost, dormant, or ongoing, with the U.S. simply playing defense?



Oh fer fsck sakes..... that war on terror BS is really starting to get old. Same question I asked ages before and never got an answer to: How on earth has invading Iraq made the US any safer from terrorists? AL QAEDA IN IRAQ WAS A CREATION OF THE US INVASION. 



> Europe is quiet now. Madrid, London, Paris, and Amsterdam have taught Europeans that it is not George Bush but Islamic fascism that threatens their very existence.



For someone who apparently makes a living studying European history, that's a pretty wacky thing to say. Has he ever actually been to Europe? How did I miss all the Western European countries who have realized the error of their ways and jumped into the Coalition of the Willing?

Whatever, this is too easy. 

Rest of the relay, remaining fish in VDH's barrel to your front, on your own time, go on. 



> Strangely, I doubt whether very many would agree with much of anything stated above â â€ at least for now.



Guess why? Maybe he should try publishing his garbage in a real publication instead of a right wing wank rag?


Oh, and of course I still support the continued occupation of Iraq.


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## a_majoor (23 Jan 2006)

Some good news. So long as the Americans have the political will to go on, they can fight the Jihadis in Iraq indefinitely, since they have more than ample resources to do so. Reading between the lines, should they mobilize to engage Iran, Syria, Saudi Arabia or all three (or North Korea, for that matter), they have ample resources to do so:

http://www.nationalreview.com/nrof_buzzcharts/buzzcharts200601230854.asp



> Critics of the war in Iraq often complain about the “escalating cost of the war.” Listening to them, you’d never know that the war is one of the least expensive in American history.
> 
> Robert Whaples, professor of economics at Wake Forest University, has measured the cost of each major American war up through the first Gulf War. We took these costs and compared them to the cost of the Iraq war and found that the Iraq experience has consumed a smaller percentage of GDP (just 2 percent of one year’s wealth creation) than every other American war except the first Gulf War (which measured just 1 percent of GDP).
> 
> ...


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## 54/102 CEF (9 Mar 2006)

That's a great find - I believe its essentially absent from Cdn discussions though which is to our disadvantage. We can have all the daring do but no awareness back at home front says something about our Strategic Views. 

Here's a paper I found that presents the conditions to establish an insurgency which arises when natural economic expansion encounters traditional societies 

http://www.cia.gov/nic/PDF_GIF_2020_Support/2004_05_25_papers/violence.doc

background - an extract

Understanding that the current era's Global War on Terrorism is nothing more than the continuation of a long historical arc associated with the expansion of the functioning core of the global economy (traditionally defined by the market economy, free expression, and the opportunities they entail) is crucial to determining both the length of the strategic struggle ahead, as well as its likely pathways.  

So far, we have seen the anti-capitalist forces in the world progressively retreat across history:

Having failed to hijack Germany with a Communist insurrection during and just after the first World War, Lenin and the Bolsheviks initially retreated to a pre-capitalist environment in order to successfully break off a nation (Russia) from the capitalist world system (though 10 years later they began to build an industrial system).

Other Communist successes followed historically, other than those generated by the Soviet Union's military successes in World War II (i.e., the conquering and subjugation of Eastern Europe), and were based on even further retreats back into the past—namely, Mao's peasant-based revolutions (and all the variants that followed in various Third World locales, with varying levels of success),

The peak of this retreat, as far as the Communists were concerned, was seen in the Soviet Union's shift to support of  “Countries of Socialist Orientation” following the Cuban missile crisis.  In effect, the Communists experimented with the notion that future successes were to be had in breaking societies off from the capitalist world system and would involve the world's poorest and most economically backward states.  This experiment failed miserably, and with it, the grand historical retreat of the Communists’ influence began in the early 1980s, abetted by the rise of internal reformist leaderships in both the Soviet Union and China.

With the end of the Cold War, strategic thinkers in the West tended to assume that no coherent resistance to the then-rapidly enlarging market world order would emerge again—or the notion voiced by Francis Fukuyama of an "end of history."  In retrospect, this was a fundamental misreading of history.  History was simply resuming after the Communist planned-economy interlude, with the locus of violent resistance to the global economy's spread shifting to the traditional cultures of the Middle East.

To the extent the United States and its allies succeed in connecting the Middle East to the global economy beyond the slim bond currently offered by the energy trade (which results in wealth for elites but no broad economic development), those elements committed to violent resistance against the spread of the "corrupt," Western-derived global economy (the threat of "Westoxification") may yet again retreat into the past by targeting ever-more pre-globalized societies as their next venues for revolution/jihad.  In other words, as we succeed in the Middle East, we may be setting ourselves up for the next historical round in sub-Saharan Africa.  

I'd check out where runways are being lengthened in Africa............ 

PS: I saw a note in the paper today or yesterday that said Al Quaida is mixed up in Nigerian Oil disruptions.


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## a_majoor (9 Mar 2006)

54/102, much of what you say is also recounted in "The Pentagon's New Map", by Thomas P.M. Barnett. Essentially his thesis is the Western task for the next century is to integrate the "Non Integrating Gap" people and nations into the "Functional Core" community.

Interestingly, Barnett uses almost the same language as you did when discussing how the Bolsheviks and later Osama Bin Laden's followers are attempting to "break off" areas and nations from the Core and isolate them (which is essentially his definition of the Gap). An interesting read, if you havn't done so already.


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## Wizard of OZ (9 Mar 2006)

Pretty tough to have a National Victory strategy for Iraq when the goals that were set for the initial victory can never be obtained.  The odds of the Iraqis electing a stable government are slim to non in the near future anyway.  They can't even get parliment to work right now, to elect a PM for the nation.

You don't trust the army you are training to relieve you.  They don't trust the Iraqi commanders and will not give the Iraqi troops heavy equipment for fear of them using it against the Americans or British.

I don't see a viable solution to remedy this problem in the near future anyway.  Iran and Syria are fully exploting this situation and I have my suspicons that China has a hand at the table as well.  Iran in front of the camera and Syria behind the scenes. The way I see it is that if they keep America preoccupied here they figure they will have a free hand to do what they want.

You have two choices here you either to this the long haul way prob 10 - 20 yrs to rebuild and secure the nation or you pull pole and let them sort it for themselves.

Is it a Victory strategy or a survival strategy.

MOO


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## a_majoor (6 Apr 2006)

Declining casualty figures for the Coalition, Iraqi army and police. Given this sort fo news is not being reported, I have to wonder what else isn't being reported either?

http://www.myelectionanalysis.com/?p=875



> Numbers
> 
> 81, 76, 50, 49, 43, 25
> 
> ...


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## a_majoor (20 Apr 2006)

From Chaos Manor; are we building an appropriate government structure for Iraq?

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/view/view409.html



> *On what we are doing in Iraq*
> 
> I wrote this in response to a private letter from a serving officer. On reflection it belongs as a public statement:
> 
> ...



Of course, there are many people who would argue that Canada should be going to that system as well......


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## Centurian1985 (20 Apr 2006)

Wizard has hit the nail on the head; you cant achieve mission objectives if the objectives arent realistic.  First they base the entire concept on it being the 'war against AQ' which was not a problem until six months AFTER the invasion.  Then they presume that they are winning the war agaisnt insurgents when in fact the insurgency keeps building (Ive lot count of the numbers of times Ive heard spokespersons say they've brone the resistance). For every man you kill, two relatives take up arms in revenge, basic tribal warfare foundations.  

In countries with conditions that facilitate the foundation and maintenance of resistance and insurgency, it is impossible to completely eliminate insurgent groups; look at Greece and Turkey, both 'civilized' countries of NATO, yet both have significant anarchist/terrorist/insurgent problems. If your plan is to 100% eliminate insurgency you are fighting a losing war.  

Ref Britney, yeah oil is nice, but the profits in Iraq are not based on oil, they have yet to start producing enough to make a profit.  It is based on the lawless atmosphere and need for technology of all types, thats where the money is!


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