Roll Them Up

From IBD:
Posted 6/9/2006

Military Strategy: It's time for American forces in Iraq to focus on destroying the insurgency, not to get sidetracked into Baghdad police work.

The killing of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was an undeniable moral victory, but is it a model for winning a war? That's a fair question, and armchair generals have not been shy about answering it.

Several of these might be called the security-firsters, for their insistence that the U.S. military make it a top priority to make the Iraqi people feel safe.

The Wall Street Journal editorial page says the next order of business should be to secure Baghdad; thus it implies that chasing down terrorists is a costly distraction.

Kenneth Pollack of the Brookings Institution and Frederick Kagan of the American Enterprise Institute sound the same general theme, though they differ on what should be secured and how.

Kagan wants to see "clearing and holding" offensives in Sunni towns north and west of Baghdad. Pollack wants mostly defensive operations, with less focus on the Sunni triangle and more on central and southern Iraq.

As for real generals, they're barred from making their opinions public. But it seems from their actions that they're not quite on the same page with the security-firsters.

If they had thought it right to blanket Baghdad with U.S. troops to restore order to that violent city, they probably would have done so by now. If they had put a top priority on creating safe havens, they might not have tried so hard to track down and kill Zarqawi.

So who's right?

As armchair officers ourselves, we don't believe in deferring automatically to military men. They can be too close to the action to see the larger political context. But the generals in the Iraq war zone have knowledge not available to most of the U.S. punditocracy. They know terrorism and how it works. And as was shown on Thursday, they're starting to track down terrorist leaders.

The death of Zarqawi was not just a triumph for Iraq and the U.S. and a setback for al-Qaida. It also was an argument for the classic principle of taking the war to the enemy. Wars are ultimately won not by securing cities but by destroying the enemy's ability to fight — in this case, by killing leaders and disrupting their networks.

Rolling up all the terrorists will be no simple task. But if the U.S. backs away from this mission — on the principle that it's more important to police the streets of the capital — the enemy will just survive, regroup and wait for the Americans to leave.

It will pounce in full force against an Iraqi government that may still be just finding its legs. The danger in making Iraq's largest and most closely watched city appear safe while giving terrorists the run of the hinterlands is that the American people may see the war as won, when it is only had a change of venue.