Arms and influence

An Iraqi cast of millions!

I hate the vast majority of movies about the Vietnam War, since they largely overlook the Vietnamese. Regardless of the movie's point of view--from the virulent anti-communism of The Green Berets, to the "My God we were screwed up" message of Platoon--the camera is always focused on Americans. Americans, as played by John Wayne and Willem Dafoe, fought the war. Americans argued over the right way to fight the war, or even to fight it at all. And, of course, whether we're talking about hapless hippies or sadistic sergeants, Americans screwed up the war.

Obviously, the Vietnamese themselves are missing from this picture. Therefore, we shouldn't be surprised at how little the average American knows about the anti-colonial movement that started before WWII, the Japanese occupation of Indochina during WWII, the First Indochina War, or what happened in the war between North and South Vietnam after the US withdrew its last combat forces. As far as American popular culture is concerned, the Vietnam War started with the first battles in the Ia Drang valley, and ended with a helicopter escaping the roof of the US embassy in Saigon.

And, even while the US was vigorously fighting the Vietnam War, the real story was America Agonistes. No Vietnamese are needed to tell that story, just the right cast of American characters.

So, my fellow Americans, let's not make this mistake all over again. As Edward Luttwak pointed out, war is not an engineering problem, in which the only thing that matters is the skill of the operators, and the amount of resources at their disposal. Not only is there an enemy (or enemies), but also, in counterinsurgency especially, a lot of people who are not fighting for any side, who nonetheless play a critical role in the story.

Treat with skepticism every book you read about Iraq that does not give the Iraqis a prominent part. Get irritated at journalists who tell us only about what the Americans are doing in Iraq. Demand from our newly-elected officials a definition of victory in terms that describe both Americans and Iraqis. We've hogged the camera long enough--let's share it with the Iraqis. And not just one stock character, who may happen to be a refugee, shopkeeper, sheik, or insurgent, who's somehow supposed to stand in for the mortifying complexity of an entire nation.

A new Iraq narrative?

Now that the election is behind us, how will the discussion of Iraq change? Here's my guess:

• Without Bush and his advisers running the show, many people will be ready to hear more about what's happening in Iraq, not in Washington. To put it less politely, without a President who still seems to think that you win a counterinsurgency war by killing every insurgent, until none of them are left, many Americans will be less worried about how the man in the Oval Office is screwing up the prosecution of the war.
• For those who have lost track of what's happening in Iraq, the current reality may come as a bit of a surprise. Things have changed. The Iraqi military and police now have functioning units. Running battles like the siege of Fallujah are no longer the norm. Violence is still a daily fact of life, but it has mutated into a different form. Whether or not the status quo constitutes victory, or is pointing in the direction of victory, is beyond the scope of this small post.
• The Iraq drama will feature a new cast. The new reality of Iraq begs an important question: which Americans have been most important in contributing to these changes? The answer largely lies below the level of people who give White House or Pentagon briefings. Instead, the center of Iraq strategy has shifted to the middle levels of military and civilian organizations, more along the lines that Bing West describes in The Strongest Tribe, or many contributors to the Small Wars Journal or Parameters have described.
• Reflexive mockery will become less prevalent. I'm not sure if many bloggers are quite ready for this cultural shift. What will it be like to write about America's wars, without the immediate assumption that the people in charge are incompetent?
• Attention to Iraq may be hard to sustain. The new Iraq narrative is likely to be filled with strategy and policy details. Are the current measures of success at counterinsurgency accurate? How much leverage does the United States still have over Iraqi factions? Will the final shape of Iraqi politics be more of a balance of power among sectarian and tribal forces, or will stronger, independent state institutions emerge from the turbulent waters of factional struggle? Not everyone has the patience or interest in these details. Unfortunately, you can't say much about the Iraq war without diving into the details.

To the extent that everyone, regardless of their political affiliation or opinion of the war, can move to a more pragmatic discussion of the Iraq war, which is the real theme of this new narrative, I say, Hallelujah!

So what's the big secret? Part II

As covered in the previous post, there's definitely something afoot in Iraq that's reducing the number of attacks on US forces. (Less so on Iraqis.) So what could it be?

Red herrings
If Woodward's comments are any clue, it's a technological innovation. Woodward compared it to the invention of the tank and other military technologies, which means it's probably not merely a change in technique. While US military and civilian personnel have been operating in a more joint fashion, following the example of the Provincial Reconstruction Teams in Afghanistan. However, this joint approach is nothing new: in US military experience, it's at least as old as the CORDS program in Vietnam. And again, if Woodward's hints are any guide, we're on the trail of something that has some kind of technological angle.

We might increase our chances of finding the mystery innovation if we re-think what makes it secret. Rather than limiting the search to things we don't know exist, we might also include things we know exist, but don't know exactly how effective they are.  The secret, therefore, may be the effectiveness of some new technology, or how it's used.

To extend the tank example, the big innovation of WWII wasn't the tank, since armored fighting vehicles first appeared on the battlefields of WWI. Instead, what changed by WWII is how national militaries used the tank. Rather than treating them as an infantry support weapon, tanks became their own type of unit. Rather than infantry being the "arm of decision," tanks became the most important instrument of maneuver warfare. Rather than tying down tanks to infantry units, armies created special divisional and regimental organizations centered around the tank.

The secret new counterinsurgency weapon, therefore, might be something right in the open, but perhaps not receiving much attention in the US press. That makes me wonder if the Big Secret is the biometric database.

The information weapon
The US and Iraqi militaries have been building on top of the national registries of Iraqis started under the Ba'athis regime, updating it and adding further information such as biometric data (fingerprints, retinal scans, etc.). Iraqi and American forces use it to identify criminals and insurgents at checkpoints, during sweeps, and other occasions.

It's clear how this biometric database might be very effective at identifying the people who have been killing Americans. With more resources and technical skill than their Iraqi counterparts, US military personnel might have enjoyed more success at finding the people attacking them than those attacking Iraqi security forces.

Woodward indicated that the secret program, whatever it is, has been critical in helping US forces "to locate, target and kill leaders of al-Qaeda in Iraq, insurgent leaders, renegade militia leaders." That implies the innovation is some sort of information gathering technology--or, perhaps, an information analysis tool, or something that makes information more readily available, like the biometric database.

Improving the biometric database might also fit the "Manhattan Project" comparison Woodward makes. Over time, Iraq and American officials have needed to add data, and also to improve the data mining tecniques used to identify potential targets. While similar efforts, such as the ridiculous Total Information Awareness project, might have failed, Americans in Iraq might have had the resources, incentives, and sense of realism needed to make this data warehouse project succeed.

Uncomfortable questions
If my guess is correct, it's also clear why the US government would want to keep the success of this program under wraps. Iraqis with access to the database might abuse it. Even if religious or clan affiliation were not recorded, it might be possible for Iraqi officials to infer it from the data that is available.

And the potential problems don't stop there. US officials outside of Iraq can use the same information to track Iraqis abroad, including in the United States. And why stop at Iraqis? Why not use the same resource to track suspected Iranian agents who move in and out of Iraq, and plenty of other places, too.

The biggest problem with the biometric database, of course, is the risk that it may not only legitimize monitoring inside the United States, but also expand it. If it works in Iraq, why not use the same sort of biometric database to track suspected domestic or internaional terrorists in the United States?

Therefore, if the biometric database is Woodward's secret program, US military officials have plenty of reasons to avoid talking about it.

So what's the big secret? Part I

As Bob Woodward makes the rounds promoting his new book, The War Within, his interviewers keep asking the same question to which he keeps giving the same answer: What's the new program, technique, or technology that's supposedly responsible for the drop in Iraqi insurgent attacks? In the absence of knowledge, we're left to speculate--and speculate I will!

Violence decreases--but where?
First, we have to deal with the question of the numbers themselves. How substantial was the drop, and when did it happen? Global Security maintains three charts that help answer this question: (1) the overall level of violence; (2) the distribution of attacks, by province; and (3) the distribution of attacks, by target. Since a detailed look into the data's reliability is another big discussion altogether, we'll accept the numbers as presented as accurate, or at least in the right zip code of accuracy.

The first statistic is important--but so are the other two. Since the middle of 2007, the frequency of attacks has dropped dramatically. Geographically, the major drops occurred in Baghdad and Anbar province. Target-wise, the big decrease is in the number of attacks on coalition forces. The number of attacks on Iraqis, both in uniform (security forces) and out (civilians) dropped far more gradually, and far less proportionately.

Coalition forces become harder targets
Are there any conclusions we can draw? Since the numbers reflect insurgent attacks only, omitting violence from other sources, we're seeing only part of the story about fighting among Iraqi groups. Other indicators of internecine violence, such as the recent UCLA study of Badhdad by night, are necessary to depict what people mean by the phrase "civil war."

On the other hand, we can say that either (1) Coalition forces have figured out some way to reduce the number of times insurgents try to shoot them and blow them up, or (2) something else is happening that has the side effect of reducing the attacks on US and British forces. Therefore, it's entirely credible that US officials have crafted some secret something that's responsible for the drop in attacks on Americans.

The imperfect shield
The numbers do cast some doubt on the efficacy of the surge. The focused escalation of effort in Baghdad and Anbar is responsible for some drop in violence. However, this escalation has not created as strong a protective shield around Iraqi civilians as many people assume. Insurgents can still harm, and therefore intimidate, Iraqis within the enclaves that US and Iraqi forces have struggled to create.

Case in point is this weekend's suicide bombing of Shiite mosques in Baghdad. While no protective shield will be perfect, the aggregate statistics echo the anecdotal evidence, such as this weekend's attacks.  Particular insurgent groups, such as Al Qaeda In Iraq, may be weakened, but some Iraqi insurgents retain the power to terrorize.

[Given the scope of this topic, I'm continuing the discussion in a later post.]

Time tunnel

Since I'm going to be back to blogging this weekend, I'll obviously have a few words to say about the new "time horizon" for the American occupation of Iraq. Before I get into the specifics, let me just make a couple of observations that hearken back to the first postings on this blog, early in the Iraq war.

As Fred Ikle nicely summarized in the title of his great little book, Every War Must End. How it ends, of course, is less certain. Wars almost never end in the way the original parties, including the victors, intended. The Iraq war has been an extreme example of that maxim.

Therefore, we're far from being done talking about the beginnings of the Iraq war. All the lessons of this war will be shaped--perhaps warped--by the wide gulf between US war plans and the outcome. In fact, this gulf may make these lessons harder to discern. The murk at the grand strategic and theater levels will obscure many of the successes and failures at the tactical and operational levels.

We are also well on our way to re-creating the emotional and doctrinal chasm that separated Americans after the Vietnam War, to the point where people with differing views often could not have a civil conversation about the subject. Rancor, in large part the deliberate creation of one faction in American politics, is one of the great costs of the Iraq war, because it will make it hard to learn from it. As the Iraq war itself has shown, even learning the lessons of the last war is no obstacle to ignoring or misapplying those lessons. In other words, rancor makes grave risks even greater.

Vietnam on the brain

Disagreements over the Iraq war--something that's likely to become more visible, as we approach the presidential campaign debates--are inescapably discussions about the lessons of the Vietnam War. Both candidates worry that the United States will repeat the mistakes of that conflict. Obviously, they are focused on different mistakes.

The "lost victory" of the Vietnam War
John McCain worries that, after flailing for a few years, US officials have finally hit on a winning strategy for Iraq. The situation in his mind is comparable to the phase of the Vietnam War that started in 1967 and 1968, after Creighton Abrams replaced William Westmoreland as the commander of the Military Assistance Command Vietnam (MACV), and Ellsworth Bunker became the US ambassador to South Vietnam. The two men worked well together, which substantially improved the use of force as a political instrument. Among other changes, the counterinsurgency war took a dramatically more positive turn, thanks to both important doctrinal and organizational reforms that dovetailed with the Tet Offensive, which was a military catastrophe for the National Liberation Front.

Unfortunately, the American electorate was in no mood for nuanced discussions about counterinsurgency warfare. Even if the counterinsurgency side of the Vietnam War had visibly improved, Americans wanted to withdraw from South Vietnam. While the Tet Offensive might have crippled the NLF, the North Vietnamese Army (NVA) continued attacks into the South. While the government of President Thieu seemed far more stable than its immediate predecessors, Americans remained skeptical about the political reliability of any Saigon government.

Most significantly, an increasing number of American voters did not feel that the Vietnam War was important enough to win. If dominoes were to topple, the damage to American interests seemed far worse than the blood and treasure lost in continuing to fight the war.

Predictable mistakes
Obviously, the differences between Vietnam and Iraq are considerable. However, the political dynamic of fighting a counterinsurgency war does appear the same. Whatever McCain's beliefs about the "winnability" of the Iraq war, he seems to have ignored how these dynamics. In fact, he bears a great deal of responsibility for fueling them.

We can bemoan how much better prepared the US government should have been to fight a counterinsurgency war. (And yes, I'm one of the chief bemoaners.) However, it seems that every counterinsurgency war seems fated to start with a lot of flailing around. Regimes under siege repeat familiar mistakes, such as rushing green troops into dangerous situations that require greater skill and discipline, or using terror in a counterproductive quest to crush the guerrillas' political organization.

Great power patrons make their own set of familiar mistakes. Here are a couple:

• Promising the war will be easy and short, when we know it will be long and difficult.
• Ignoring the political and cultural details of the conflict, preferring instead to overemphasize the military dimension.
• Treating the conflict as sui generis, without any useful precedents.

To his credit, McCain is not to blame for the latter two mistakes. He criticized the US Army for pursuing a "search and destroy" strategy that focused on killing insurgents over securing the safety and support of the population. He has cited precedents, not only from the Vietnam War, but from other conflicts that offered "lessons learned."

Repeating one of the biggest mistakes
His participation in the selling of the Vietnam War is where he bears the greatest responsibility for repeating the mistakes of the past. However dumbed down his current speeches may be, McCain is certainly not ignorant of this risk. After release from his North Vietnamese captors, McCain dedicated time to reading both histories of the two Indochina wars and the classic works about counterinsurgency. He is both smart and knowledgeable enough to realize what happens when a government promises to deliver a quick, decisive victory in the sort of conflict that is inevitably longer than expected, and rarely offers any chance for total victory over the adversary.

Later, McCain tried to rectify his mistake. His now-infamous "100 years" comment was, no doubt, a belated attempt to provide some amount of "straight talk" about counterinsurgency. Unfortunately, the message came far too late, when Americans in 2007 were as impatient with the Iraq war as they were in 1969 with the Vietnam War. McCain had joined the chorus in 2003 that predicted a short, easy war in Iraq. He therefore set the stage for the classic political backlash that ends counterinsurgency wars, from the American Revolution to the Vietnam War. If he's frustrated with how unwilling Americans seem to be in recognizing any gains made in the Iraq War, he has only himself to blame.

Precedented

I haven't had a chance to look at the just-released Army study of the Iraq War (just finished meeting some demanding deadlines at work, and the PDF for the study is STILL downloading). However, I'll pass along one preliminary observation.

Yesterday, I heard Donald Wright, one of the authors of the report, on The News Hour. I was listening to it on the car radio, which can be hazardous to your health if you hear someone say something so stupid that you almost lose control of the vehicle in anger and disbelief. When asked to explain the avalanche of bad decisions in 2003 to 2005 that made the Iraq war the nightmare that it has been, Wright said that the Army was unprepared for an "unprecedented" kind of war.

Unprecedented. Mull that word over for a moment. Unprecedented. Happily, you're not driving this blog post while reading this post (but if you are, you're already endangering yourself and other drivers.)

Unprecedented.

Sure, he used contemporary Army jargon about "full spectrum operations." In Iraq terms, that means simultaneously handling offensive operations, defensive operations, population security, civic action projects, and a bunch of other stuff. Wow, that's tough. Never faced anything like that before, Wright said.

Unprecedented, only if you overlook the Vietnam War.

Tone deaf

For the last several years, George W. Bush has been telling us that Presidential leadership is about having good intentions, not producing desirable consequences; making demands of American allies and enemies, instead of understanding what might be necessary to get their agreement or acquiescence; reaching the right conclusion, not having the expertise needed to arrive at a conclusion; making decisions, not seeing them through. Anyone with this worldview will confuse tone with content, words with results.

Therefore, in a recent interview with the Times of London, Bush said that a major problem with his Iraq strategy was his own tone:

In an exclusive interview, he expressed regret at the bitter divisions over the war and said that he was troubled about how his country had been misunderstood. “I think that in retrospect I could have used a different tone, a different rhetoric.”

Phrases such as “bring them on” or “dead or alive”, he said, “indicated to people that I was, you know, not a man of peace”. He said that he found it very painful “to put youngsters in harm’s way”. He added: “I try to meet with as many of the families as I can. And I have an obligation to comfort and console as best as I possibly can. I also have an obligation to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain.”

You might think that Bush is just being disingenuous, trying to argue from history's docket for a less severe verdict. Maybe so, but he's also being entirely consistent. Bush has asserted that dissent during wartime sends the wrong signal to whomever we're fighting in Iraq (something that's not entirely clear to him). He also said recently that continuing to play golf as a "wartime president" sent the wrong signal, though miniature golf seems to be exempted. Any public diplomacy with countries like Syria, Cuba, or Iran will also, in the Bush Weltanschauung, send the wrong signal. Setting any deadlines or defining any measures of success in Iraq would send the wrong signal to the troops.

And so on. Bush worries frequently and loudly about signals. Since, as a businessman and politician, he almost never had to suffer any personal hardships resulting from his own mistakes, he can reduce leadership to a series of signals.

Tone to Bush matters more than it might to other people. Therefore, to be fair to Bush, let's remember a few other "media is the message" aspects of his Iraq policy:

• With regards to the Ba'athist governments alleged unconventional weapons programs, Bush never made his accusations through Hank Williams-style yodeling.
• During his infamous "Mission Accomplished" speech, he did not wink at the cameras.
• When, in 2003, reporters asked him about the expected difficulty of the Iraqi occupation, he did not answer in a Joe Isuzu-like voice.
• While trying to "comfort and console" the families of American soldiers killed in Iraq, he did not show them his dust-covered golf clubs to demonstrate his own personal sacrifices.

Monty in Baghdad

Reading Max Hastings' Armageddon, which covers the closing years of WWII in Europe, I realized that I was in the thick of yet another account of Operation MARKET GARDEN, the fabled (and failed) "bridge too far" campaign. I've read so many accounts of this particular battle, I can't accurately count them. So why read yet another one?

I'll skip quickly past the usual reasons: no one book adequately covers all the details; military historians get into interesting and important debates; even reading the same book twice may give you a slightly different understanding the second time around. My reason for mentioning the uncountable accounts of MARKET GARDEN is a bit different: you never know when you'll bump into an insight about current events, rounding a corner in an historically familiar neighborhood.

Monty's gamble
Here's the short version of Operation MARKET GARDEN: Between September 1944, the Americans and British had chased the Wehrmacht from the Normandy beaches to the banks of the Rhine. Overstrained supply lines, the ingenuity of the Germans on defense, and other factors brought the Allied offensive to a halt. After the seizure of Antwerp, the bulk of British forces faced the Germans in the Netherlands. The top British commander, Field Marshal Bernard Montgomery, looked across the Dutch landscape and saw an opportunity.

In his sector, Montgomery argued to Eisenhower, the Allies could make a surprise thrust through Holland, cross the line where German defenses were weaker, and then drive into Germany proper. The main problem was the landscape of Holland, which limited any offensive to a single highway, crossing several major rivers. If, in the first days of the battle, the Allies failed to seize all the major bridges around the Dutch cities of Nijmegen, Eindhoven, and Arnhem--and, just as importantly, prevent the Germans from demolishing them--the operation would fail.

The resulting plan, Operation MARKET GARDEN, depended on British and American paratroopers and glider-borne troops to surprise the Germans, secure the bridges, and wait for the British XXX Armored Corps to assault down the highway connecting the three critical cities. Unless the airborne troops moved quickly, the Germans would destroy the bridges. Unless the XXX Corps moved quickly, the Allied troops behind enemy lines would be the lightning rods for devastating German counterattacks.

Operation MARKET GARDEN suffered many problems, all of which contributed to a costly debacle. The Germans delayed the airborne troops from seizing their objectives as quickly as planned (especially difficult, since the parachute and glider drops took more than a single day to put all the troops into the battlezone). The tanks of the XXX Corps could not leave the highway to drive overland, given the risk of bogging down in the soft Dutch terrain. The armored advance, therefore, remained only a few tanks wide across its entire length, making it relatively easy for the Germans to bring it to a halt at any point. This geographic limitation, combined with a strange lack of urgency at key points in the battle, made it impossible for the XXX Corps to link up with the British 1st Airborne division in Arnhem, where the "Red Devils" fought a courageous but doomed defense. Aside from massive casualties, the Western Allies also suffered months of delay in finally defeating Nazi Germany.

The biggest problem with MARKET GARDEN, however, lay in the plan itself, not its execution. Montgomery's plan--unusually risky, for a general famous for his caution--depended on every element succeeding. If the Allies seized the bridges around Eindhoven, and if they seized Nijmegen, and if they seized Arnhem, and if the British armored column reached all three cities in time, MARKET GARDEN would be a success. If any link in this chain of events failed, the entire campaign would fall apart.

Bush's blunder
MARKET GARDEN, therefore, is a cautionary tale to which the practitioners of war should regularly return. Whenever someone feels tempted to take this sort of risk, they can sober up quickly just by remembering the American paratroopers crossing a river in small boats, in broad daylight, into German machine gun fire, because it was the only chance to seize the next link in the chain. Or, you might remember the slow death of the 1st Paras in Arhhem, fighting a delaying action from house to house, with inadequate weapons to combat the German tanks blasting their hiding places into rubble.

Of course, there's nothing stopping people who are ignorant of history from violating its lessons. There's also no firm barrier between ambition and sense. Just as Montgomery imagined he saw a chance for the British to claim the great prize, the killing blow to Hitler's Reich, George W. Bush and members of his Administration thought they found the moment to deal, once and for all, with the Ba'athist regime in Iraq.

As anyone could and should have seen at the time, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM depended on too many military and political "ifs" going exactly according to plan. If Iraq forces collapsed quickly, as the proponents of "shock and awe" had hoped...If a roaring success in Iraq could silence any domestic and international critics...If Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld's promises that the American forces committed to both the invasion and occupation proved to be correct...If the Iraqi populace felt more gratitude for the occupation than resentment...If the Iraqi exiles, or their counterparts who remained in Iraq, could quickly assemble a functional government...Then, of course, Operation IRAQI FREEDOM would be a success.

Again, you might fault many aspects of this military operation's execution. Had the US officials been more concerned about the shadowy insurgency than capturing Saddam Hussein, the critical first few months of the occupation might have muted the violence to come. Had the same officials thought more carefully about how the motley insurgent groups might react to American actions, instead of treating them as if they were target dummies waiting to be shot and then collected, the Americans and Iraqis might have avoided wasting the first few years of fighting a counterinsurgency war.

These questions of execution can mislead us into believing that there was just a tactical adjustment here, a few extra resources there, that might have led to a happier outcome. The problem with Operation IRAQI FREEDOM was just the same as with MARKET GARDEN: too many elements had to succeed for the overall plan to be anything but a failure.

Refusing to take the sucker's bet
The major difference, of course, was who bore the responsibility for stopping the needlessly risky enterprise (or radically re-designed it to the point where it was a different campaign entirely).
In 1944, Eisenhower should have said no to his nominal subordinate, Montgomery, even if this refusal put greater strain on the American-British alliance. In 2003, the Congress--the President's Constitutional peer--plus the American press, and ultimately the American public, should have recognized a bad plan for what it was. Even if few of them were experts on Iraq, they could have asked the obvious question: "What's the fallback plan if any part of this strategy should go awry?"

For anyone who doesn't see the point of revisiting the failures of 2003, military history poses an obvious question. If, in 2003, Americans were willing to ignore the bloody, awful lessons of 1944, what are the chances that we've really learned the lessons of 2003 yet?

Prison statistics

A whole generation of instant experts on counterinsurgency and counterterrorism have spent the last several years proclaiming how these struggles are real wars, not police matters. Being people with more volume than knowledge, they've missed the point. Of course, counterinsurgency and counterterrorism are forms of warfare. However, victory depends on turning these wars into something that looks like police matters.

At the end of a counterinsurgency war like the one in Iraq, political and military measures will have reduced the insurgents from revolutionaries to criminals, from a movement to a gang. Robbed of political legitimacy, the ability to intimidate or persuade, larger numbers of active members and supporters, and a free range of action, the insurgents dwindle to something that should be treated as a police matter.

Long before the war has reached this point, what happens to suspected insurgents while in custody matters greatly. Unspeakable acts that fall under the polite term "human rights abuses" are the persistent mistake that governments under siege make. Form a combination of impatience, arrogance, and fear, regimes see torture, murder, indefinite detention, and other forms of "abuse" (another polite term) as the short, urgent road to defeating the insurgents. The political backlash is rarely worth the limited, unreliable information gained, or the number of potential insurgents jailed.

People with successful track records at counterinsurgency counsel a much different approach. (For an example, see Stuart Herrington's recent op-ed piece.) Therefore, stories about the treatment of Iraqi prisoners are central to the counterinsurgency story. If war outlasts the bad memories of Abu Ghraib, jails will still be an important stage on which Iraqi drama plays out. Prison statistics may be far more important than casualty numbers.