NYT: West Point Is Divided on a War Doctrine’s Fate

The New York Times reports that there’s a debate going on between the pointy-headed scholars at West Point over whether US counterinsurgency strategy has worked in Iraq and Afghanistan. They frame the debate with both sides of the discussion;

Broadly, the question is what the United States gained after a decade in two wars.

“Not much,” Col. Gian P. Gentile, the director of West Point’s military history program and the commander of a combat battalion in Baghdad in 2006, said flatly in an interview last week. “Certainly not worth the effort. In my view.”

Colonel Gentile, long a critic of counterinsurgency, represents one side of the divide at West Point. On the other is Col. Michael J. Meese, the head of the academy’s influential social sciences department and a top adviser to General Petraeus in Baghdad and Kabul when General Petraeus commanded the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

“Nobody should ever underestimate the costs and the risks involved with counterinsurgency, but neither should you take that off the table,” Colonel Meese said, also in an interview last week. Counterinsurgency, he said, “was broadly successful in being able to have the Iraqis govern themselves.”

But what they neglect to discuss is that counterinsurgency operations don’t happen in a vacuum. Since the beginning of cross-border military operations, we’ve known that counterinsurgency operations are difficult and should be avoided.

Since the Guantanamo trial, when the lawyers for the terrorists in that trial accused the judge of reading “The Black Banners” by Ali H. Soufan, I’ve been reading that book myself and it’s apparent to me that counter-insurgency operations in Iraq could have been avoided and the only reason we were forced into that strategy is due to the Clinton Administration’s demonstration to the world that we could be defeated when he withdrew from Somalia after the debacle in Mogadishu. In fact, it was a point that Osama bin Laden hammered at in the days leading up to the 9-11 attacks. Saddam Hussein passed out copies of the DVD “Black Hawk Down” to his commanders in the days before the attack on his regime.

Another way to avoid counterinsurgency operations would have been for President HW Bush to ignore the screeching harpies of the Democrat party in 1991 and continued military operations into Baghdad in the first Gulf War while Hussein’s military was decimated and scared witless – before there was a Black Hawk Down. COB6 and I spent more than a month outside the gates of Baghdad unopposed in April and May 1991.

Another thing we could have done to prevent a counterinsurgency operations scenario was to un-lobotomize the anti-war Left and prevented them from demonstrating to our enemies that an insurgency would be effective when the Left sent “human shields” to Iraq and those three congressmen stood on the roof of Hussein’s palace declaring that Hussein was more credible than our own president.

The Times inadvertently hints at this at the end of their piece;

To John Nagl, a retired Army lieutenant colonel who fought in Iraq, wrote a book about counterinsurgency and now teaches at the United States Naval Academy, American foreign policy should “ensure that we never have to do this again.”

Of course, Leftists will take that line to mean that we shouldn’t go to war, but I believe the good colonel was widely referring to our policies in the 90s which encouraged an insurgency in the first place. The Obama Administration’s current strategy of rushing for the exits without a clear vision of victory, only insures that in the near future, we’ll be involved in another similar war. And all of Big Army’s eggheads are afraid to say it out loud.

Category: Terror War