AMERICANS HAVE DEBATED a lot about Iraq: whether the war was justified, whether the administration lied about Iraq’s weapons programs, whether sufficient postwar planning was done, and whether the coalition, the United Nations or the Iraqis themselves should be put in charge of reconstruction. In short, we have debated virtually every topic possible–with scant attention to the one most relevant to what is happening daily on the ground there: Does the United States have the right military strategy in place to defeat what its own generals admit is an increasingly sophisticated insurgency? It’s an urgent question, because American servicemen and women–along with cooperating Iraqis–are coming under attack virtually every day. The number killed and wounded is rising. Yet the debate has focused on whether we have enough troops, rather than whether we have the right forces, in the right places, using the right stratagems to defeat the amalgam of hard-core Baathists, Iraqi opportunists and radical Islamists from outside the country who continue to wage unconventional war against the U.S.-led occupation. Although the Bush administration can rightly point to successes in reconstructing Iraq since Saddam Hussein’s regime was toppled, the fact remains that unless the security situation in Iraq is brought under control and the insurgency there decisively defeated, those successes can never be made permanent and the president’s larger hopes for a stable, democratic Iraq will never be fulfilled.
Developing and executing a successful counterinsurgency strategy for Iraq is a challenge, to be sure, but far from an insurmountable one.
