http://www.alternet.org/story/147377/the_mythology_surrounding_petraeus%27_surge_in_iraq_will_keep_us_trapped_in_afghanistanAlterNet / By Joshua Holland
The Mythology Surrounding Petraeus' Surge in Iraq Will Keep Us Trapped in Afghanistan
The real story of Petraeus' job in Iraq is that he failed to accomplish one of the most crucial tasks of the occupation.
June 30, 2010
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That the Iraq surge was a success is almost a universally held belief, despite ample evidence to the contrary. That belief lends unearned weight to Petraeus’ counter-insurgency doctrine, known as COIN. The idea is not only to kill as many of the enemy as possible, but to create a functional, legitimate state that can police its own territory and win over the hearts and minds of the population. The efficacy of COIN has become an article of faith across the ideological spectrum, a belief held tightly by neocons and liberal interventionists alike. But it has no track record of success whatsoever, either in Iraq or elsewhere in the world. At best, it remains an unproven theory of warfare.
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Seven years, thousands of American and hundreds of thousands of Iraqi lives later, the conventional wisdom is that Iraq is well on the way to fulfilling its promise. This is how the New York Times’ Dexter Filkins and Alissa Rubin describe the country -- and Petraeus’ contribution to the war effort -- today:
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As I write this, a sampling of today’s headlines out of Iraq: “12 killed in Iraq attacks, including army general,” “14 Officials Killed in Blistering Violence Across Iraq,” “Turkish warplanes bomb northern Iraq” and “Iraq rivals meet to bring premiership row to head.” The country’s leadership has been deadlocked in an “election crisis” that has persisted since a vote marred by charges of violence and fraud on March 7. Middle East scholar Juan Cole describes Iraq today as “the scene of an ongoing civil war between Sunnis and Shiites that is killing roughly 300 civilians a month.”
The United States and its allies have sunk hundreds of billions of dollars into the country. But despite the investment, last week “security forces opened fire and killed two people” during a protest “against repeated power cuts that have reduced electricity supply there to less than two hours a day.” Reuters reported that farmers are “killing for water” in some rural areas. "Today, we don't have a fully functioning government as it is totally preoccupied by the security situation and political wrangling so we don't have a strong role to deter any possible widespread conflict" over resources, Karbala-based analyst Jaafar Moahmmed Ali told the wire service. "Besides, we have an acute shortage of water nationwide and a very bad economic situation that makes it very hard for farmers to do other work."
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Juan Cole noted that the violence also decreased as a result of communities that had been fully "cleansed" of one or another ethnic or sectarian group. “In some ways,” he wrote, U.S. forces “inadvertently hastened a Shiite victory” in a simmering civil conflict. Petraeus then paid off Sunni resistance groups -- the Sons of Iraq -- to put down their weapons and support the central government, a tactic that’s being replicated to a lesser degree in Afghanistan and that proved effective, but only in the short term.
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The bigger problem is that it’s largely impossible to implement such a grand strategy in a military with an entrenched warrior culture. When General Stanley McChrystal was axed last week after making inappropriate comments to Rolling Stone, it generated tons of press because of the political intrigue surrounding the move, but the most important part of the story was largely missed. Petraeus had mentored McChrystal, who became an equally ardent advocate of COIN. But the Rolling Stone article revealed a high command that has little interest in giving equal weight to the work of its civilian counterparts. It portrayed senior staffers as dismissive of other branches of government, and showed that even COIN’s strongest adherents weren’t buying into the strategy fully where it counts the most. As I wrote at the time, “McChrystal and his aides are protecting his legacy against history’s harsh judgment of what will prove an incoherent policy from its inception.”
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