Beware the Surge Narrative Posted by Michael Cohen

Over at the New York Times, Thom Shanker buys the COIN narrative about the surge in Iraq, hook, line and sinker:

Under General Petraeus’s leadership at Fort Leavenworth, the military released a counterinsurgency field manual credited with helping turn around the war in Iraq and ending the armed services’ focus on heavily armored conventional warfare.

With that manual’s release, the American military was forced to embrace the messy irregular warfare that had been the core competency solely of a small specialty branch in the armed services — the Army Special Forces, known as Green Berets.

Well I suppose it's true that FM 3-24 is "credited" with turning around the Iraq war, it's also not accurate - or at the very least fails to reflect the complex number of reasons why Iraq has become more stable.  Credit must also go to the Shiite and Sunni death squads in Baghdad that helped turn that city from one that was once 65 percent Sunni to one that became 75 percent Shiite. Also the Medhi Army cease fire and the support for the Sunni Awakening in wiping out Al Qaeda in Iraq. It's not that the surge didn't have an impact, it's that it didn't have the level of impact the Shanker is ascribing to it.

But the more important problem here is one that I raised yesterday. The Times argues that the American military was forced to embrace "messy irregular war" and move away from "heavily armored conventional warfare."  Well it's not like they eschewed messy regular, conventional war in the process. From IraqBodyCount.org:

While the USA has used a variety of means in its surge strategy, military force has remained central, with the predictable outcome of new civilian lives lost. Airstrikes — the most frequent mode of US military attack involving civilian victims — have continued with regularity throughout the surge, killing 252 civilians in 2006 then — in the surge years — 943 in 2007 and 365 in 2008 (by end November).

COIN kills. In fact, all wars kill people. A new army manual that recommends "building relationships with wavering village elders and trust among distrustful village residents" is not going to change that basic fact.

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