Friday, July 06, 2007

Political Progress in Iraq   [Rich Lowry]

This Michael Gordon story from Diyala today highlights how there is political progress in Iraq, just not the sort of progress we insisted on with our benchmarks at the beginning of the year. This is bottom-up political progress as key Sunni players are beginning to swing our way (something we've been hoping for a long time). This passage goes to how drawing down our troops now would probably throw away this nascent progress and how the Sunni tribes siding with us are dependent on our combat power:

The militants’ hold on the region was facilitated, senior American officers now acknowledge, by American commanders’ decision to draw down forces in the province in 2005 in the hopes of shifting most of the responsibility for securing the region onto the Iraqis. That strategy backfired when the Iraqi authorities appointed overly sectarian Shiite army and police regional commanders, alienating the largely Sunni population, and otherwise showed themselves unable to safeguard the area.

“Up until Captain Richards went in and met the 1920s guys, we fought,” recalled Lt. Col. Mo Goins, the commander of the First Battalion, 12th Infantry Regiment, which held the line in Baquba until reinforcements began to arrive in March. “That is what we did. Small arms. Mortars. I.E.D’s.”

Captain Richards’s soldiers arrived in Buhritz in mid-March as part of a battalion-sized operation. Unlike many earlier operations, the Americans showed up in force and did not quickly withdraw. The residents saw an opportunity to challenge Al Qaeda, and for a week, the two sides battled it out in the streets.

Initially, the Americans stood on the sidelines, concerned that they might be witnessing a turf fight among insurgents and militias. “We were not sure what was going on,” Captain Richards recalled. “We were not sure we could trust the people not to turn on us afterwards.”

But after the militants gained the upper hand and more than 1,000 residents began to flee on foot, the Americans moved to prevent the militants from establishing their control throughout the neighborhood. The soldiers called in an airstrike, which demolished a local militant headquarters.

07/06 01:52 PMShare