Decisionmaking In Operation IRAQI FREEDOM: The Strategic Shift of 2007
Authored by Dr. Steven Metz.
May 2010
96 Pages
Brief Synopsis
In this second volume of the series, Dr. Metz looks carefully at the 2007 decision to surge forces into Iraq, a choice which is generally considered to have been effective in turning the tide of the war from potential disaster to possible—perhaps probable—strategic success. Although numerous strategic decisions remain to be made as the U.S. military executes its “responsible withdrawal” from Iraq, Dr. Metz has encapsulated much of the entire war in these two monographs, describing both the start and what may eventually be seen as the beginning of the end of the war. In this volume, he provides readers with an explanation of how a decision process that was fundamentally unchanged—with essentially the same people shaping and making the decision—could produce such a different result in 2007. As the current administration tries to replicate the surge in Afghanistan, this monograph is especially timely and shows the perils of attempting to achieve success in one strategic situation by copying actions successfully taken in another, but where different conditions applied.
INTRODUCTION
When the Bush administration elected to invade Iraq in 2003 to remove Saddam Hussein from power, no senior policymaker anticipated that there would be extensive and protracted armed resistance after the dictator was gone. The administration assumed that the Iraqi bureaucracy and security forces—both military and police—would return to work once they had new leadership untainted by association with Hussein. But American policymakers did not understand how fragile and precarious Iraq was after decades of pathological rule. As Iraqi security forces disappeared, the nation collapsed into a spasm of looting and street crime. All administration and public order collapsed. It was “Lord of the Flies” on a monumental scale. Anarchy sparked public anger which gathered energy with each passing week. Personal and sectarian hostility, which had been suppressed by Hussein, raged unfettered. Revenge haunted the streets—and it was armed. For a brief interlude, little violence was directed against Americans. But that did not last long. Trouble first exploded in the restive city of Fallujah, 35 miles west of Baghdad. The U.S. military had bypassed the city in its assault on Baghdad, but elements of the 82d Airborne Division arrived in late April. Fallujah did not take kindly to occupation, and the 82d did not take kindly to occupation duty. Within a few days, a rally celebrating Saddam Hussein’s birthday led to angry denunciations of the U.S. presence and heated demands for withdrawal. Shooting broke out, leaving at least 13 Iraqis dead. Two more died the next day in a second round of clashes. Attackers then tossed grenades into a U.S. Army compound.
In early May, two American Soldiers were killed in Baghdad. A few weeks later, two more died during a nighttime attack on an Army checkpoint near Fallujah. Violence spread to Baghdad and the region west and north of the capital known as the “Sunni triangle.” The initial attacks were unsophisticated, but this soon changed as veteran soldiers unemployed by the disbanding of the Iraqi army joined in. Armed bands began to focus on isolated checkpoints and slowmoving convoys. They made greater use of rockets and mortars, allowing them to retreat and fight again rather than die en masse as the Saddam Fedayeen irregulars had in the March and April battles. Iraqis who worked for the Americans or were part of the new government and administrative structure became targets. Translators were among the favorites. Insurgents sabotaged the electrical grid, water system, and oil pipelines. Like their forebears in earlier insurgencies, Iraqi fighters seemed to understand that a country’s rulers—the Americans in this case—were blamed for the lack of water, electricity, and fuel even when the insurgents themselves were responsible. The greater public anger and frustration, the insurgents knew, the better for them.
Over the summer, a group of Hussein loyalists calling itself al-Awda (“the return”) made open overtures to Islamic militants linked to al Qaeda. There were reports of former regime officials recruiting foreign fighters. U.S. forces soon encountered Syrians, Saudis, Yemenis, Algerians, Lebanese, and Chechens, indicating that the international jihadist network, born in Afghanistan in the 1980s, was refocusing on Iraq. Insurgent leaders began paying unemployed Iraqi men with military and police training and criminals released from prison earlier in the year to kill American troops.
As early as June, some strategic analysts warned that the fighting constituted an organized guerrilla war. But U.S. officials rejected this idea. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld attributed the violence to “the remnants of the Ba’ath regime and Fedayeen death squads” and “foreign terrorists” who were “being dealt with in an orderly and forceful fashion by coalition forces.” As summer wore on, though, it was increasingly difficult to sustain that position. Finally, on July 16, General John Abizaid, commander of the U.S. Central Command, admitted that the United States faced “a classical guerrilla type campaign.” “It’s low-intensity conflict in our doctrinal terms,” he said, “but it’s war, however you describe it.” The optimism of a month earlier, the hope of a quick and relatively painless transition to a post-Hussein Iraq, was shattered.
Initially the United States did not develop a comprehensive strategy for counterinsurgency support in Iraq, or a national strategy which explained the rationale for U.S. involvement and the ultimate political objectives. These only took shape during 2004 and 2005 as the insurgency grew. The strategy stressed increasing the size and effectiveness of the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and turning over responsibility to them as quickly as possible. This reflected a long-standing truth of counterinsurgency support: outsiders can influence the outcome, but only locals can determine it. Ultimately the Iraqis themselves had to defeat the insurgents. In fact, some U.S. military and civilian leaders were convinced that American military forces provoked hostility among the Iraqi people, and thus sought to minimize the U.S. role, keeping American troops off the streets as much as possible and limiting their contact with the population.
This did not work. Creating a new ISF proved harder than expected. With few effective Iraqi security forces and not enough Americans to secure all of the country around the clock, the insurgency spread and mutated. Attacks became better coordinated and more sophisticated, particularly those using improvised explosive devices (IEDs) and vehicle borne improvised explosive devices (VBIED). Foreign extremists linked to al Qaeda, and under the leadership of the Jordanian Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, began targeting Iraqi Shiites. Nineteenth century Russian revolutionaries used to assert “the worse, the better,” meaning that anything that eroded public order and trust in the government helped their cause. The Iraq insurgents put this into practice. Eventually Shiite militias began striking back. “By the summer of 2006,” journalist Linda Robinson wrote, “Baghdad was on fire. Sectarian violence was spilling into all-out civil war, and it swept up hundreds of thousands of Iraqis.” The ISF, while improving, were overwhelmed and remained weak in key areas. Some units were simply dysfunctional. Others joined the sectarian violence, serving the government by day and sectarian militias by night. By the end of 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) grimly noted that, “Attack levels—both overall and in all specific measurable categories—were the highest on record during this reporting period. . . .”
Then things began to turn. In January 2007, President George W. Bush announced a new approach in Iraq which increased the number of U.S. military forces, refocused them on population security, and redoubled reconstruction assistance and support to political reform. While the strategic shift experienced a rocky start—American casualties increased during the first half of 2007—Iraq eventually began to stabilize. By March 2009, the DoD reported that, “violence has dropped dramatically in the last 2 years, and normal life continues to return to the country.” Today attacks continue, but there is precarious stability. The U.S. military is no longer involved in combat operations and soon will have only a training and advisory force in Iraq. That country’s future certainly remains unclear— renewed sectarian violence or a revived insurgency are possible. However, Iraq at least has an opportunity.
The popular perception is that the strategic shift of 2007, which is often simply called “the surge,” snatched victory from imminent defeat. According to this thinking, the United States was implementing a flawed strategy but then had a burst of insight. As a result of the surge, “America won and al Qaeda, the Ba’athists, and the Iranians lost.” Reality is more complex. The strategy which had taken shape by 2005 was appropriate for that time, given both conditions in Iraq and the wider strategic context. During 2006, though, the essential nature of the conflict changed, thus requiring a strategic shift to allow the United States and the Iraqi government to recapture the initiative. The strategic shift of 2007 succeeded through a combination of good thinking, good luck, and good timing. This monograph will explore the decisionmaking process that led to the strategic shift, drawing implications and recommendations for military involvement in strategy formulation.
Access Full Report [PDF]: Decisionmaking In Operation IRAQI FREEDOM: The Strategic Shift of 2007
|
NEWSLETTER
|
| Join the GlobalSecurity.org mailing list |
|
|
|
