Winning in Iraq

One of the eternal questions is, how will we know if we've achieved victory in Iraq? Jason at Countercolumn calls attention to a NY Times piece:

Some salient points: Note that one of the most effective recruiting mechanisms Al Qaeda has is money. Al Qaeda simply has more money than the other groups, and apparently can outspend the Ba'athists, despite Hussein's looted millions.

Next, it was interesting to see accounts of the tribes dispensing rough justice on their own. The sheikhs could have handed the fighters over to the U.S., or to the government. They didn't. They conducted their own arrest, then their own interrogation, then their own trial and execution. This reflects the power and influence that Iraqi sheikhs have over the population - a power that far exceeds anything an American could associate with a city councilman or mayor. This is why the "Strategic Corporal" concept is vital. The war in Iraq is not won or lost in Baghdad conference rooms. The war in Iraq will be won or lost by grassroots contacts between American platoon leaders, company commanders, and battalion commanders out in the provinces, where Al Qaeda is based. This is also why a broad liberal education is vital for our officer corps-and why the exclusion of ROTC programs at several elite universities harms our National Interest. It is not enough for today's junior officer corps to be made up of C students from State, with Phys Ed degrees and Varsity letters who can smoke their platoons on a road march. Every junior officer who leaves the gate must now be a mini Laurence of Arabia - a tactical innovator, a flexible thinker with genuine appreciation for culture, facility with language, and a keen understanding not just of his commanders mission and the mission of the unit two echelons above, but all the way up to CENTCOM.

A thought: Maybe the US needs to start up a system of schools, designed to produce Laurence of Arabia soldiers. The purpose should be to ensure a large pool of junior officers so there's no need to worry about a shortage. Ideally, only a small fraction would need to actually serve in the armed forces, and the rest could take their education into private industry, which can always use more highly-skilled people. Admission to these schools would be free, or very low cost, and have a very low minimum qualification. The barriers would not be to entry, but to further progress – you don't pass year N, you transfer to another school. The survivors would be very highly educated.

Universities are working to keep any taint of the military off their campuses. Maybe, if you can't join them, beat them. Compete against them in the marketplace. (Consider also Jerry Pournelle's book, Higher Education.

In a politically correct world where the school system fails to educate for fear of lawsuits, illiterate, ignorant students face a bleak future of unemployment. When Rick Luban is expelled for a minor prank, he joins Vanguard Mining and finds asteroid mining training to be more rigorous and demanding than school.

A company finds the schools can't (won't) teach the skills they need in their workforce, so they start a school to ensure they have an educated pool to draw from.

A school system like this would be the same kind of thing the US created in building the Interstate Highway system for defense purposes. Only a tiny fraction of the usage of these highways goes to the direct support of the military; the rest goes to support industry and personal travel.

Anyway, back to Jason. He notes that Al Qaeda and its allies are suffering from their rejection of Western education. They're having to re-invent stuff our military learned in officer training. And it's not working very well.

what we're only finding out now, Zarqawi was able to sense back in the first months of 2004, when he wrote to Bin Ladin expressing frustration at his lack of traction in Iraq, saying "By God, this is suffocation!" Yes, Zarqawi. It is. And you shall soon be reaping its fruits. The Ba'athist insurgency - as opposed to Iraqi nationalist fighters - has been, on the whole, defeated. Al Qaeda can be and will be defeated. As the article points out, the fact that a tribe stood up to them, took down their houses, tried and killed their assassins, AND HAS GOTTEN AWAY WITH IT cannot be a long-held secret. Other tribes, jealous of Al Qaeda challenges to their authority, and outraged at their atrocities, will follow suit. Al Qaeda has already been muscled over during the elections. Their fighters bleed red blood through their black track suits. They can be killed. When Iraqis figure that out - and they are - then the manufacture of martyrdom will accelerate. I wrote in the early days of this blog, in November 2003, that Al Qaeda will not be defeated by miliary force alone, but that victory would only come when its radical, murderous, nihilist ideology is thoroughly discredited on its own turf. We are watching that happen.