Expert fears U.S. will win Iraq battles but lose war [View All]

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http://weblogs.chicagotribune.com/news/politics/blog/2007/06/expert_asks_are_we_seeing_more.html

by Frank James

U.S. policymakers and the military may be launching a new round of Iraq whack-a-mole, only on a larger scale.

That’s the take of Anthony Cordesman, the national security expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies who has been oft-cited in this blog because of the respect he gets from many in the nation’s capital as one of the best thinkers on security issues.

Cordesman has been observing the latest state of play in Iraq, including the current Operation Ripper launched by U.S. and Iraqi forces to take out insurgents and al Qaeda outside Baghdad.

While he’s impressed with how much the U.S. military has transformed itself to fight a counterinsurgency, he’s concerned still by some of what he hears from top U.S. military officers.

It is too early to judge what is happening in Baquba, and the use of far more intense combat tactics coupled to broader efforts to seal and secure urban areas after tactical victories may have a more lasting effect. There is, however, an obvious risk that the US will simply end up playing “Whack a mole” on a steadily rising scale.

So far, the claims of success to date have been tenuous to meaningless. As of June 23rd, MNF-I claimed that, “at least 55 al-Qa’ida operatives have been killed, 23 have been detained, 16 weapons caches have been discovered, 28 improvised explosive devices have been destroyed and 12 booby-trapped structures have been destroyed.” These figures are far too low to matter.

It also really doesn’t matter if insurgent casualties are much higher than our own unless such casualties include substantial cadres of leaders and experts that cannot be easily and rapidly replaced. The insurgents can simply disperse, stand down, and regroup. The domestic political realities in the US also make it clear that unless the US is successfully taking out cadres and insurgent infrastructure, the US is now so sensitive to American casualties that tactical victories can result in the same kind of political and strategic defeat that occurred in Vietnam.