Henry's Web Log

General Petraeus succinctly captured the progress and challenges of the US military surge in Iraq, and afterwards, in his remarks published in the December 2008 edition of ARMY magazine (I get the news a little late here!). I found particular relevance in his observation:

"Security is necessary, but [it is] not sufficient. Certainly it is the bedrock, it's the foundation for everything else," he said. "When there are 55 dead bodies every 24 hours in Baghdad, you're not going to get legislation. You're not going to see markets open. You're not going to see kids going to school. Everything stops except for survival."
"You have to achieve that security, but . . . then it must be capitalized on," he added. "As you achieve a little bit more security, you begin a spiral upward instead of a spiral downward, where all of a sudden now you can ... get a market open, and then the people might provide you a little bit better intelligence, which means more effective raids and targeted operations, which means more bad guys off the streets, which means more local support, which means now you can get some Iraqi forces back on the streets. And you keep spiraling upward in a series of reinforcing activities, each of which capitalizes on the other."

Certainly it’s a good thing that we didn’t suddenly pull out of Iraq in the midst of gaining momentum, the upward spiral! And we do have some hard deadlines we’re meeting in accordance with the Iraqi legislation and at the request of our Iraqi partners, including a requirement to have combat troops out of the cities by the end of June.

The amazing part to me, though, is that the US Military, trained in the management of violence, is making a real difference in the economic stability of this country. In 2003, the objection was that “we’re not really trained to be economic development agents, we’re trained to kill” but the answer really is, “Who else is capable of pulling this off?”

You need a huge force to squash the violence, but do so in partnership with the host nation, and phase your own withdrawal so that more and more, it is the host nation that is taking care of itself.

“But we’re Americans! We want a quick fix! Isn’t there a pill we can take? Can’t we just get out of there?”

Well, no. We can’t. We’re Americans, and we’re trained to do the right thing.