Fighting for Hearts, Minds, and Souls
The unseen impact of Petraeus’s strategy.
By Clifford D. May
The first concept to grasp is that the global conflict now underway involves both a clash of arms and a clash of ideas. To succeed in this war will require effective combat on both fronts.
The second concept is this: The clash of arms and the clash of ideas influence one other, often in peculiar and even counterintuitive ways.
One example: Al Qaeda in Iraq could not challenge American troops directly. Their solution has been to target innocent Iraqis instead, to slaughter innocent Muslim men, women, and children by the hundreds.
Why wouldn’t this cause outrage around the world? It did — but al Qaeda calculated that in much of the West, the outrage would be directed less at them than at Americans for “stirring up a hornet’s nest.” And, as they also expected, images of death and destruction, coupled with reports of soldiers killed by roadside bombs, soon would erode the will of many Americans to continue the fight.
Now, however, a new phase in the clash of arms may be having an unanticipated impact on a different audience. A shift in strategy initiated by the new U.S. commander in Iraq, Gen. David Petraeus, is changing ideas about both al Qaeda and the U.S. in Muslim societies — and on the theological plane.
I learned this from Hassan Mneimneh, a scholar and director of the Iraq Memory Foundation, a research institution with offices in Baghdad and Washington. Mneimneh also served, as I did, as an advisor to the Baker/Hamilton commission on Iraq. And we were recently on a panel exploring U.S. interests in Iraq at the United States Institute for Peace.
This time last year, even most military people concluded that Anbar Province was irretrievably lost to al Qaeda. But General Petreaus was not ready to give up: A few short months ago, he told Anbar’s traditional leaders, the tribal sheiks, that if they’d ally with the U.S., their people and their lands would be liberated from al Qaeda’s “occupation.”
They agreed. Since then al Qaeda terrorists by the score have been killed, captured, and driven out of Anbar. Mneimneh wondered: How would the sheiks and religious scholars justify this alliance to themselves and their people? To put it bluntly, how would they explain partnering with infidels against fellow Muslims?
He found the answer in numerous sermons and publications — everything from books to blogs and websites. The truth, he discovered is that most Iraqis, unlike so many Westerners, do blame al Qaeda for the carnage al Qaeda has carried out. And most Iraqis have not embraced al Qaeda’s brand of Islam, with its barbarism — e.g. the murder of children to teach their parents obedience — and ultra-fundamentalism.
What’s more, Iraqis were deeply offended by al Qaeda leaders — almost all of them foreigners — saying their interpretation of Islam is flawed and inadequate, as has been that of their families and clans for generations. Mneimneh reports that Iraqi clerics have responded by calling al Qaeda’s version of Islam “excessive and unfair.”
To express such views while al Qaeda militants were walking the streets would have brought severe reprisals. But over the past few months, as the surge has been making progress, and as more Iraqis have felt more secure, they have been articulating these views loudly and clearly. Mneimneh believes they are being heard beyond Anbar, beyond Iraq and even beyond the Middle East. “This is coming out,” he emphasized.
At the same time, because Petraeus has moved his troops from cloistered bases into Iraqi communities, more Iraqis are coming into contact with Americans and learning that — frightening though they may look with their body armor and big guns — they aren’t quite as satanic as advertised. They don’t ask for bribes. They like kids. They show respect. And they have been providing security while training Iraqis to protect themselves. They are willing to stay and assist but they would prefer to go home as soon as conditions permit — not quite the dictionary definition of a foreign occupier.
“Note that the troops taking part in the surge have not been attacked by the Iraqis who live in the neighborhoods where they are now posted,” Mneinmeh said. “On the contrary, those Iraqis have been bringing the troops the intelligence they need to succeed.” Accepting a tactical alliance with such people does not violate Islamic doctrine, Iraqi religious scholars are daring to assert.
“The longer this persists,” Mneinmeh said, “the more Iraqis’ views will be changed. As these new views are expressed, disseminated and reinforced, it becomes less likely that they will be abandoned later.”
In other words, every day the surge continues, every day American soldiers continue to wage the clash of arms in Iraq, they also are fighting — and perhaps winning — a consequential clash of ideas.
— Clifford D. May, a former New York Times foreign correspondent, is president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, a policy institute focusing on terrorism.
i believe something very profound is happening in the Middle East. it's not happening overnight and it's in the subtleties of what the media presents but i do believe it's happening.
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
i believe something very profound is happening in the Middle East. it's not happening overnight and it's in the subtleties of what the media presents but i do believe it's happening.
Let's continue to be frank. This SURGE! was nothing more than a smokescreen. A complete delay tactic created by Fred Kagan of AEI and installed by this Administration who've continually failed to pull their collective heads out of their asses throughout this entire debacle. The whole ing point of the SURGE! was NOT to instill peace throughout the land IN OF ITSELF. You yourself agreed in a prior thread that such troop levels cannot be sustained for obvious reasons. And the Army today admits the patently obvious:
quote:
Army Secretary Pete Geren on Thursday ruled out extending troop deployments beyond the current 15 months, saying that longer tours in Iraq put stress on soldiers and their families, and have contributed to an increase in suicides.
So by April, whatever "peace" we are seeing with such tremendous "progress" created by the SURGE! will inevitably be quelled by our troop withdrawal to which we will have no choice but to do.
So then what? We are right back to where we started before.
In the meantime, the whole entire point of the SURGE! idea was to clear the road for a political solution to take place. Yet your National Review author Clifford May and the rest of your Conservative mouthpieces continually AND WILLINGLY ignore that idea completely. And why? Because THE ING POLITICAL PROCESS IS MOVING BACKWARDS, NOT FORWARDS. Christ, half the ing government has already walked out on al Maliki, while the rest are on vacation because, well, it's too hot right now (funny how we can't have our soldiers take a vacation for the weather).
So the entire point of the SURGE! is being completely undermined by the backwards movement of the political process taking place. Ain't that ing swell, Q? So you can clear the streets and decrease the bloody violence to live long day, but in the end the means meet absolutely no ends, and we have to ing leave eventually anyway. Nice, ain't it?
And let's talk about that decrease in violence thingy. As you're fully aware by now, the latest NIE called "Prospects for Iraq's Stability" is out. And what's our government analysts attribute to the decrease in violence?
Uhhh, sectarian cleansing:
quote:
The polarization of communities is most evident in Baghdad, where the Shia are a clear majority in more than half of all neighborhoods and Sunni areas have become surrounded by predominately Shia districts. Where population displacements have led to significant sectarian separation, conflict levels have diminished to some extent because warring communities find it more difficult to penetrate communal enclaves
Now where was that ever written in the whole rationale for the SURGE!? For some reason, I just don't think our Administration had that in mind when sending in more troops, did you?
Nevertheless, violence will still be quite up over the next 6-12 months (long past our SURGE! troop levels drop):
quote:
[L]evels of insurgent and sectarian violence will remain high [over next six to 12 months] and the Iraqi Government will continue to struggle to achieve national-level political reconciliation and improved governance.
Oh, and that whole sectarian cleansing thingy really doesn't help out much with the growing refugee crisis either:
quote:
Population displacement resulting from sectarian violence continues, imposing burdens on provincial governments and some neighboring states and increasing the danger of destabilizing influences spreading across Iraq’s borders over the next six to 12 months.
And you'll also note in the report how the Iraqi military STILL cannot sustain themselves at all. But then again, we steadily decreased the focus on their training ever since the SURGE! started, so what can we truly expect out of that anyway?
But hey, I think like our dear Clifford that we should all just keep clapping, only LOUDER this time. And for those who don't clap, well they need to shut their pieholes and be kicked out of our God-fearin' country! Not that any of Clifford's or any other neocon's predictions about this war have EVER come to fruition so far, mind you, and that we should continue on all fronts to trust these Very Serious neocon warmongering analysts when they make such dire future predictions.
Oh, incidentally, last I remember, any Democratic plan for a PHASED redeployment plan always entailed keeping task forces in Iraq to battle al Qaeda, did it not?
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
Oh, incidentally, last I remember, any Democratic plan for a PHASED redeployment plan always entailed keeping task forces in Iraq to battle al Qaeda, did it not?
maybe one Democratic Senator's or Congressman's plan or group did at some time but it's kinda moot your party has been so fractured on that subject all year.
why do you ask? is it part of some "new" Democrat strategy?
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
maybe one Democratic Senator's or Congressman's plan or group did at some time but it's kinda moot your party has been so fractured on that subject all year.
You needn't remind me of their sheer incompetence. It's definitely frustrating as hell, but that's attributed in large part to the dumb Blue Dogs and Serious beltway consultants who've done nothing but hurt and lose elections for the Dem. party.
quote:
why do you ask? is it part of some "new" Democrat strategy?
Uhh, no. Nearly all plans I have come across by the Dems. in the past are fairly aligned with the recommendations of the Bush appointed Iraqi Survey Group, which called for a phased withdrawal of most troops with the exception of a task force to remain and fight al Qaeda.
MisterOpus1
While we're on a thread from an editorial, this one has a nice ring to it:
quote:
Bush correctly recognizes that the price of failure in Iraq will be high. And yet, at the same time, he has been categorically unwilling to do what is necessary to actually win. A supposed "surge" of 30,000 more troops cannot quell the unrest: perhaps a quarter million could provide the necessary stability and security. But to do that, he would have had to engage in either international diplomacy or an intranational military draft, and neither of those two steps, even though they would have helped win what the president sees as the defining world struggle of our times, were considered politically palatable.
The White House chose to staff the Baghdad-based government with hundreds of inexperienced die-hard conservatives with no actual knowledge of the country or infrastructures they were governing, even though it presumably knew a rapid and competent rebuilding of the Iraqi nation was absolutely vital for any chance of stability. But instead the White House chose years of cronyism and partisan loyalty over nonpartisan expertise and experience, because critical efforts to win the defining world struggle of our times were considered less important than promoting those partisan ideological economic experiments and fiefdoms.
The White House chose at the beginning of the war to move troops from Afghanistan into Iraq, launching a second supposed front to their anti-terrorism efforts while the bin Laden trail was still fresh. Bush is insistent that the only way to lose a war is to leave, and yet he managed to apply exactly that strategy to the actual war on terrorists themselves: attack with vigor, maintain the ongoing effort with insufficient forces, then leave. The special forces actively hunting bin Laden were needed elsewhere because a war with Iraq could not wait even another six meager months: winning Bush's defining world struggle of our times was indeed more important than winning the war with the people who attacked our nation. Abstract ideological goals took center stage -- and the lion's share of presidential attention and of troops on the ground -- over the more concrete military and security needs of the actual fight against actual terrorists.
In short, Bush correctly recognizes the price of failure, but that has not stopped him from, at every turn, playing politics with his own chosen war. The military has done what the military was tasked to do -- remove Hussein from power, and remove Iraq's military capabilities. Everything else has been on the administration to do, and that "everything else" has turned out to be a partisan fiasco wrapped in a ideological quagmire and sculpted into an incompetent clusterf*ck. There is apparently not one major neoconservative within the wide span of Bush's ideological wings, not one within an entire movement dedicated to the premise that they know how the world works and how nations should be run that can accomplish, on the real world stage, one damn thing of note.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
You needn't remind me of their sheer incompetence.
incompetence, realism, whatever floats yours. Reid has been pretty quiet lately.
quote:
Uhh, no. Nearly all plans I have come across by the Dems. in the past are fairly aligned with the recommendations of the Bush appointed Iraqi Survey Group, which called for a phased withdrawal of most troops with the exception of a task force to remain and fight al Qaeda.
the Pentagon has supported a phased withdrawal since Mar 2003.
it's those conditions conducive to a phased withdrawal that they sweat. this is nothing new.
MisterOpus1
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
incompetence, realism, whatever floats yours. Reid has been pretty quiet lately.
Vacation does that to a man.
And yes, I've got plenty to gripe about with Reid's party, but I'll save that for another day.
quote:
the Pentagon has supported a phased withdrawal since Mar 2003.
it's those conditions conducive to a phased withdrawal that they sweat. this is nothing new.
I agree this is a major point of contention, but my point was more of a focus on the fact that no one is saying we shouldn't continue to fight al Qaeda in Iraq even when there is a phased withdrawal under any given circumstances. Yet this is what Cliff May is indirectly implying (and often times what Conservative pundits incorrectly and directly imply), that anyone who wants out of Iraq are also advocating to divert attention away from al Qaeda in Iraq. That is simply not the case.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by MisterOpus1
I agree this is a major point of contention, but my point was more of a focus on the fact that no one is saying we shouldn't continue to fight al Qaeda in Iraq even when there is a phased withdrawal under any given circumstances. Yet this is what Cliff May is indirectly implying (and often times what Conservative pundits incorrectly and directly imply), that anyone who wants out of Iraq are also advocating to divert attention away from al Qaeda in Iraq. That is simply not the case.
i don't know, maybe it's just you. to me he doesn't imply any such thing.
i get it he's a Conservative but to me his article is illustrating the fact that our own troops are exposing the utter fraudulence <--spelling? and duplicity that is at the core of the fundamentalism and sectarianism struggle in , not just Iraq, but a ripple effect across the Middle East.
Al Queera created a hell of a thing to pit Muslim against Muslim. pure hell, but a very flawed strategy.
once you get to a point looking and listening about innocent women and children being literally slaughtered by other Muslims, any Muslim or Arab can instantly see how fraudulent and duplicitous these murderers, all of them including Saddam, are. it brings a sort of clarity to the idea that maybe America isn't the enemy. maybe the enemy is within. if America is going to stay here and fight it, maybe we should lend a hand so we not lose more innocent. surely the politcs would follow the lead on the street.
to understand his suggestion one doesn't need to be a conservative or a liberal.
Krypton
This war's foundation is based on already proved lies and therefore the entire structure will come falling down. No country has the right to destory another country's sovereignty unless provoked by attack. Bush wants to compare Iraq to 1970's Indochina and what would happen if we pulled out of Iraq....
My honest opinion is that if the US did pull out, yea, really bad things are going to happen, like the Khmer Rouge or the scary socialist arabs, but that is the fault of the Bush Administration who went into Iraq again based on falsehoods. The Iraqis will sort it out just like the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Loations did. 32 years after the Vietnam War ended, Vietnam is now one of the fastest growing economies in the world, and has joined the international diplomacy/economy. Occupation is only going to delay the inevitable.
Al-Qaida will still not win against the Iraqi people who are wholesale turning against Al-Qaida. The US needs to withdraw, and let them fight for their own sovereignty. The US can't do it for them. Iraq is not Japan, SOuth Korea, or Germany. Iraq is Iraq, and the situation is much more volatile than simple us against them.
No wonder the paranoid Iranian elite are so eager to have nuclear weapons. They're surrounded by their ideological enemy.
Q5echo
quote:
Originally posted by Krypton
This war's foundation is based on already proved lies and therefore the entire structure will come falling down. No country has the right to destory another country's sovereignty unless provoked by attack.
what lies?
the Iraqis will prove you wrong. they are doing it as we speak.
quote:
My honest opinion is that if the US did pull out, yea, really bad things are going to happen, like the Khmer Rouge or the scary socialist arabs, but that is the fault of the Bush Administration who went into Iraq again based on falsehoods. The Iraqis will sort it out just like the Vietnamese, Cambodians, and Loations did.
jeez how astonishingly insensitive to actually endorse genocide for the mere satifaction of holding someone accountable for something you can't even begin to prove. wtf is wrong with you dude?
you sit here and aggrandize about one nation's soveriegnty, indignant that this once proud nation was somehow violated by another for duplicitous reasons yet you haven't the slightest problem casting them off as lambs to a slaughter so you can be proven right at some point down the road.
you are paleo-con. i'm convinced now.
quote:
No wonder the paranoid Iranian elite are so eager to have nuclear weapons. They're surrounded by their ideological enemy.
if you'd do a little research you'd find out Iran wanted nukes a long time ago.
hardcore trancer
quote:
Originally posted by Krypton
No wonder the paranoid Iranian elite are so eager to have nuclear weapons. They're surrounded by their ideological enemy.
:eyes: :eyes:
Am I hearing this right?you are actually begining to see why a country like Iran would ever want to have nuclear weapons?
I ve noticed that your opinion has changed alot toward this administration for a while,but what I want to know is that lets say things were going well in Iraq right now,would still have been against the occupation?or are you against it now because things arent going the way that Bush wanted to?
hardcore trancer
quote:
Originally posted by Q5echo
the Iraqis will prove you wrong. they are doing it as we speak.
what in the next 200 years maybe?:stongue:
what would it take for a guy like you to admit that this whole thing is a mess and this admin is to blame.I know you dont give rats ass about Iraqis well maybe their oil but thats about it.
