The Geek Loves To Say He Told You So!

Normally the Geek is a shy and retiring sort of guy. A modest, desert wall-flower. Not this time. Not now!

In various posts, including one of recent vintage, the Geek, using a small set of open source intelligence indicators, concluded that the US was ahead of the opposition in establishing greater security in Iraq.

Now even Der Speigel, a German publication given to anti-American rants, has admitted that genuine security has returned to significant areas of Iraq as a result of the much maligned escalation (surge is the politically correct term) in US ground forces. Not only has the noise level greatly decreased in Anbar province, a former playground for the violent, the vast majority of the al-Qaeda in Iraq leadership cadre has been either captured or killed.

Even though the suicide truck bombs with a body count of five hundred or more have dominated the news, the fundamental reality has not changed. Once the US put enough maneuver battalion boots on the ground and took the war to the hidden enemy, more and more black hats were killed, captured, or simply gave up the game and went home.

(The Geek's view is contrary to that of the Los Angeles Times among others whose coverage included gratuitous and unjustified editorial opinion that the atrocity proved the US "surge" had failed. And, the journalists wonder why the mainstream media are not trusted by better educated Americans?)

Counterinsurgency is, as the Geek has written so often over many years, a manpower heavy type of war. Technological capacities, whether in intelligence acquisition capabilities or weaponry, is a force multiplier. But all the eyes-in-the-skies and super-killer munitions cannot take the place of men on the ground, showing force to the uncommitted, and taking the war to the enemy.

While the early indicators are positive, it is way too early to declare victory and start ramping down our force strength. The Iraqi government is a long, long way from being such in more than mere name. The Iraqi security forces have developed nicely, but they are still too few, too untrained, and potentially still too unattached to the Baghdad government for the heavy lifting in the war to be turned over to them. American troops have a lot of humping, fighting, and dying yet to do. There is no way around that unless we want to write off as "expended w/o effect" the 3,700 who have already died in the sands and streets of Iraq.

Beyond these almost self-evident considerations, there are a couple of other, seemingly intractable difficulties.

The first is Iran. To believe as some in academia, journalism, and politics seem to that Tehran is not backing at least some of the insurgents must be off their meds. Iranian support and assistance must be countered or blocked without widening the war.

The second difficulty is the foreign fighters who constitute by all accounts the majority of the suicide bombers and many of the most motivated fighters. Many, if not most, of the non-Iraqis come from our "ally" Saudi Arabia. That's right. Saudi Arabia, the country to which the US is proposing to sell billions of dollars of advanced weaponry and the platforms to use it.

What? No linkage?

The aging Saudi king is not unaware of what is going on. He has moved to curtail the power of the reactionary Wahhibist clergy in higher education as he recognizes that the oil boom is over and Saudi needs business and technological competence if it is going to survive in the coming decades. He is very well aware that seventy percent of the Saudi population is under thirty and that thirty percent of the fifteen to twenty-five year old men are unemployed. (Who knows what percent is under-employed or employed in jobs the individual considers unrewarding, meaningless and without a future.)

That pool is the one which provides the fighters and bombers in Iraq. What is the king and his government doing to either dry the pool or stop the flow of wannabe jihadists? How can that be effectively linked to arms sales or other features of the bilateral relationship between the US and Saudi Arabia?

Those are a couple of very tough issues to settle. Along with the political mess called the Iraqi Government, they are sufficient to render nugatory all the security successes bought by American efforts and lives.

The Bush administration deserves credit for sticking it out through a political storm when the easy thing to do would have been to bring the troops home and write off the lives lost as a bad investment. The current administration deserves no credit for what it appears (not) to be doing regarding the non-military problems both in Iraq and the larger Mideast.