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| Iraq |
| The Gamble: How Sean MacFarland's tactics turned Iraq's tide of violence |
| 2009-02-21 |
| This is a long and pretty good (i.e., free) excerpt in the Times (of London) from Ricks' new book. Not being your natural man at arms, I will leave the comments to those 'burgers who know which end of the gun the thingy comes out of. In February 2007, General Petraeus, newly arrived in Iraq, would come to see him and ask some questions about his methods and metrics. "Sean had obviously done something extraordinarily important," Petraeus said later. "What you had there was the first really significant example of the concept of reconcilables and irreconcilables." Petraeus already knew that he wanted his troops to go out and protect the population. In Ramadi, he learned that "a key way of implementing that is not just living with them, it is also ... literally separating them, protecting the population from the irreconcilables. "That means you have to know who the reconcilables are and who the bad guys are, and then of course try to achieve some separation and protect the one from the other." Chiarelli, the number two US commander in Iraq in 2006, said that MacFarland's operation marked the first time in the Iraq war that a counterinsurgency campaign had been conducted and then had been sustained by the succeeding unit. "Sean was the first guy who did it and it stuck for the guy who followed," he said. Upon arriving in Iraq, Odierno would seek to build on what MacFarland had started. "He's the guy who put this together" that is, how to operate differently and more effectively in Iraq, Odierno said later. "Once they cleared Ramadi, and they stayed in Ramadi with a significant amount of force, that was the tipping point. |
| Posted by:Matt |
| #1 The "Anbar Experiment" was conducted in context of the all-party negotiations in Jordan. Al-Qaeda in Mesopotamia - which had major support in Sunni, Iraq - lost most when their presence became a liability as Shiites began winning battles with them. The fact that many were foreigners, didn't help either. It was the Sunni need to halt further erosion of their power that led them to accept the occupiers as power brokers. Sunnis had boycotted the first elections. Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting since 636 AD, and any peace arrangement has to be seen as transitory. MacFarland is a great tactition, but strategic aspects of post-2006 events, were out of his scope. |
| Posted by: Alistaire Greash5374 2009-02-21 10:51 |