Say Anything Blog

Gen. Petraeus is urging caution, saying that we’re a long way from mission success, but there’s plenty to make one hopeful as well.

‘I WALKED down the streets of Ramadi a few days ago, in a soft cap eating an ice cream with the mayor on one side of me and the police chief on the other, having a conversation.” This simple act, Gen. David Petraeus told me, would have been “unthinkable” just a few months ago. “And nobody shot at us,” he added.

Petraeus, the new commander managing the “surge” of troops in Iraq, will be the first to caution realism. “Sure we see improvements - major improvements,” he said in our interview, “but we still have a long way to go.”

What tactics are working? “We got down at the people level and are staying,” he said flatly. “Once the people know we are going to be around, then all kinds of things start to happen.”

More intelligence, for example. Where once tactical units were “scraping” for intelligence information, they now have “information overload,” the general said. “After our guys are in the neighborhood for four or five days, the people realize they’re not going to just leave them like we did in the past. Then they begin to come in with so much information on the enemy that we can’t process it fast enough.”

In intelligence work - the key to fighting irregular wars - commanders love excess.

What is particularly interesting to me in this report is the fact that our troops are working more on the “people level” in Iraq, and staying there to reassure the Iraqis that we’re not going to abandon them.  These things are interesting because both of them fly in the face of conventional liberal attitudes on the war.

We are told by the left that the Iraqis resent our troops being there, yet the evidence from the article above suggests that the more we work with the Iraqis and help them understand that we are there to help them for the long run the more helpful they are with us.  Which leads me to believe that much of the “resent” liberals point to is resentment ginned up by the left’s opposition to the war and never-ending calls for withdrawal in the first place.  If we can convince the Iraqis that we’re not about to abandon them to the chaos that would result from our untimely departure they’re going to be more forthcoming with assistance, intelligence and cooperation.

We have to remember that these are a people who were oppressed, in the most brutal and terrible ways, for generations.  They have not lived in freedom.  They have not lived with free speech.  They have not lived in a society where they could trust the police or count on government services.  Most of them haven’t even lived in a system where you could vote the way you wanted to without having to fear being beaten, killed or (perhaps worse) watching the women in your family get abused and/or raped.  So it’s not surprising that the Iraqis are hesitant to trust our troops and trust the new Iraqi government that we have helped set up (flawed though it may be).

All this talk of withdrawal and giving up in Iraq has undermined our ability to help the Iraqis in a real and demonstrable way.  It’s sad that so many on the left don’t recognize that.  Which isn’t to say that they have to agree with the President’s foreign policy, but it does mean that they should perhaps take a step back and realize the consequences of their political rhetoric, both in voicing it and what would happen were their rhetoric to become reality.