Error Theory

Why did the Iraqis turn against al Qaeda and Iran? Because al Qaeda and Iran were murdering them en masse. And why were al Qaeda and Iran murdering Iraqis en masse? Because Defense Secretary Rumfeld’s small-footprint force-protection strategy meant that they couldn’t attack American troops without getting immediately annihilated.

In order to get the “continuing violence” that their allies in the Western media could use to create American defeat on the home front, the Saudi and Iranian proxy warriors in Iraq had no choice but to wage war on the Iraqi people.

They understood the risks: that playing for a media victory would cost them the war on the ground. This is clear in the letter that al Qaeda #2, Ayman al-Zawahiri, wrote to al Qaeda in Iraq leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi in the Fall of 2005:

The policy followed by the brothers in Baghdad is a media oriented policy without a clear comprehensive plan to capture an area or an enemy center. Other word, the significance of the strategy of their work is to show in the media that the American and the government do not control the situation and there is resistance against them. This policy dragged us to the type of operations that are attracted to the media, and we go to the streets from time to time for more possible noisy operations which follow the same direction.

This direction has large positive effects; however, being preoccupied with it alone delays more important operations such as taking control of some areas, … That is why every year is worse than the previous year as far as the Mujahidin’s control and influence over Baghdad. [From the CENTCOM translation of Zawahiri's letter, May 2006, not identified as coming from Zawahiri, but containing much language in common with the captured Zawahiri letter that was released to the public in October 2005]

Sunni Al Qaeda’s attacks on civilians were initially aimed at their religious rivals, the Shiites. Zawahiri recognized that this was turning the Iraqi population against al Qaeda, and urged Zarqawi to stop:

… why were there attacks on ordinary Shia? Won't this lead to reinforcing false ideas in their minds, even as it is incumbent on us to preach the call of Islam to them and explain and communicate to guide them to the truth? [Section 4E, Weekly standard translation.]

As someone watching from afar, Zawahiri found the grisly videotaped beheadings of hostages particularly grating:

Among the things which the feelings of the Muslim populace who love and support you will never find palatable - also- are the scenes of slaughtering the hostages. [Section 5]

All of this terrorizing of the Iraqi population should only be used as a last resort, Zawahir urged:

Therefore the mujahed movement must avoid any action that the masses do not understand or approve, if there is no contravention of Sharia in such avoidance, and as long as there are other options to resort to, meaning we must not throw the masses-scant in knowledge-into the sea before we teach them to swim… [section A4.]

There were no other options to resort to

The problem for al Qaeda was that they had no viable options. Allying with the Western media was it. Military victory on the ground was simply impossible:

… however far our capabilities reach, they will never be equal to one thousandth of the capabilities of the kingdom of Satan that is waging war on us. [Section 5]

On the other hand, the media strategy still offered a real chance for victory, given that the West’s anti-war media had succeeded in creating American defeat in the past:

Things may develop faster than we imagine. The aftermath of the collapse of American power in Vietnam-and how they ran and left their agents-is noteworthy. [Second section A.]

Al Qaeda’s only real choices were to either bypass Iraq, or to pursue a media strategy in alliance with the West’s anti-war, anti-Bush media. Here Zawahiri and Zarcawi were of one mind that that Iraq was the central battle for the heart of the Islamic world. Their religious convictions would not let them abandon Iraq:

I want to be the first to congratulate you for what God has blessed you with in terms of fighting battle in the heart of the Islamic world, which was formerly the field for major battles in Islam's history, and what is now the place for the greatest battle of Islam in this era, and what will happen, according to what appeared in the Hadiths of the Messenger of God about the epic battles between Islam and atheism. [First section A]

And so it was settled. Al Qaeda’s would attack Iraqis, creating media events that the Western media could use to try to lose the war at home. It was understood that this strategy would turn the Iraqis against al Qaeda, losing the war on the ground, but maybe not before the Democrats and their media allies managed to lose the war in America. It would be a race: could the Democrat/ al Qaeda alliance create defeat in America before the American military would win the war in Iraq?

Not just a democracy, but a republic

Rumsfeld had to have been perfectly aware that al Qaeda’s strategy was to sacrifice their position on the ground in an attempt to win the war in the media. Not only had al Qaeda spelled it out for him, but from the beginning he was always watching both sides of the Jihadist population equation, trying to squeeze their birthrate as well as their death rate. In October 2003 he was asking:

Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?

When al Qaeda answered his force protection strategy by attacking the Iraqi population, Rumsfeld obviously knew that this would turn the Iraqi people against al Qaeda, turning that population equation drastically in our favor. There was no reason at that point to upset this advantageous applecart by changing strategy. Just let it work, and not just because al Qaeda’s attacks on the Iraqi population promised to win the war on the ground for us. Equally important, it also handed us the one victory that we never could have won by military means alone: the battle to create in Iraq, not just a democracy, but a republic in the American sense (a system of liberty under law).

The great danger going into Iraq was not that we would lose the war, which was never a realistic possibility (so long as the Democrats did not actually succeed in losing the war at home). The real danger was losing the peace: that the Iraqi people, devoid of any post-Saddam identity beyond religion, would elect a Khomeinist government, handing the country democratically to the Islamofascists. In Iran, it took fifteen years for the population to turn en masse against the Islamofascists. We couldn't wait 15 years in Iraq. The democracy would already be usurped.

If the theocrats took democratic control of the government even once, Iraq would be lucky to ever have democratic elections again. Elect people who believe that democracy is an “evil principle,” (Zarqawi’s description) and they are not likely to adhere to it. But Rumsfeld’s force-protection strategy, and al Qaeda’s response to it, matured the Iraqi contempt for theocracy in a short couple of very long years.

The vast majority of Iraqis now hate the religious vision of the Islamofascists. They hate the contempt for democracy and they hate the religious intolerance. Iraqis are rising now as a united people, promising brotherhood with Iraqis of other faiths. Just as Sunnis are standing up to al Qaeda , so too are Shiites standing up to Iran and the Sadr army.

There is still religious persecution, but it is coming from outsiders. The one exception is in Mosul Basra, where the British left too soon. If we abandon Iraq, the dirtbags are still strong enough to intimidate, but they have already lost the battle for hearts and minds. Their thuggery will just make them more hated, until the democratic government is strong enough to purge these interlopers from Iraqi society.

As President Bush believed would happen, the Iraqis are forging their own brand of Islam, an Islam of democracy and religious liberty. It will transform the Islamic world, and it was all enabled by the Democrats’ declared intent to turn Iraq into “another Vietnam.” How could Al Qaeda say 'no,' with the Democrats offering full assistance? In the words of New York Senator Chuck Schumer:

There will be resolution after resolution, amendment after amendment . . . just like in the days of Vietnam. The pressure will mount, the president will find he has no strategy, he will have to change his strategy and the vast majority of our troops will be taken out of harm's way and come home.

As Blackfive points out with some ire, Democrat leaders must think the American people are pretty stupid, as if we don't know that wars are either won or lost and that you can't just "bring the troops home" without losing.

Such tissues of denial have never fooled al Qaeda, which has always been perfectly clear on their de facto alliance with anti-war Westerners. Having the media on their side was obviously a big lure for al Qaeda, but what really made the alliance work , and what made it irresistable to al Qaeda, was the particular media strategy that the Democrats decided to employ.

The Democrats find a force multiplier for their media strategy: the Iraq war is a “civil war”

While Zawahiri was opining about how to fine tune al Qaeda’s media strategy on the ground, the Democrats were working on how best to lose the war at home. In October 2005, the same month as Zawahiri’s letter, Democratic Senator Dianne Feinstein articulated what would become the centerpiece of Democratic efforts to abandon Iraq. She characterized the Iraq war as a civil war, insinuating the supposed Vietnam war lesson that it is always a mistake to interfere in a civil war:

We are in the middle of two factions, Shiite and Sunni, attempting to settle their differences by mostly violent means. …

I believe this is a matter for Sunnis, Shiites and Kurds to address through political negotiation. This battle cannot be won militarily.

America needs to change course, reassess its mission in light of this escalating insurgency, place more responsibility on Iraq for a negotiated settlement, and begin a structured drawdown of American forces.

These talking points--“the battle cannot be won militarily” so “its time to start pulling out”—were at the center of the Democrats’ push the next month for a “timetable for withdrawal.” This is where the Democrats began actually trying to pull the plug on our war effort and hand Iraq over to al Qaeda and Iran.

The “civil war” characterization of the war was a force multiplier for the al Qaeda/Democrat media war alliance. “Continuing violence” by itself did not by itself have a very powerful anti-war effect because it had tendencies not just to depress America’s fight spirit, but also to energize it. If the violence showed al Qaeda waging war on the Iraqi people, that would show the American people and the Iraqi people on the same side, which would make Americans want to protect Iraqis, while hinting at the reality on the ground: that more and more Iraqis were turning against al Qaeda.

For al Qaeda’s violence to really be effective in creating American disaffection for the war, the Democrats needed to frame the violence in a way that would not have these positive effects on America’s fighting spirit. This is what the “civil war” trope accomplished. No longer was the “continuing violence” seen as al Qaeda and Iran murdering Iraqis. Now it was spun as Iraqis murdering Iraqis, with no side that we could help without antagonizing the other.

Hence the “timetable for withdrawal.” If all we could do is make enemies, until we ourselves became nothing but a source of conflict, then we should get out. By taking on the mass murderers, we had supposedly made ourselves the problem. As Pennsylvania representative John Murtha put it:

Our troops have become the primary target of the insurgency. They are united against U.S. forces and we have become a catalyst for violence.

The turning point for the war on the ground: al Qaeda and Iran play to the Democrats’ “civil war” trope

Where al Qaeda in late 2005 had been unsure whether killing Iraqi's was a good idea, the Democrat's "civil war" strategy tipped the balance. If the Democrats and their media allies were going to increase the effectiveness of mass murder by depicting it as the eruption of civil war, then by Allah, mass murder is what al Qaeda was going to deliver.

In February 2006, al Qaeda and Iran joined forces to trump up the biggest, fattest, phoniest civil war they could muster. Sunni al Qaeda blew up the Shiite Golden Dome mosque, and Iranian backed Shiite militias “retaliated” by launching dozens of attacks on Sunni civilians, with Iran actually funding both sides of this elaborate theater.

If these Saudi, Syrian and Iranian proxy warriors had been able to start a real civil war, it would indeed have made things difficult, but the Iraqis were having none of it. The Golden Dome attack was the birthday of the Anbar Revenge Brigades, announced to the world a scant two weeks later. Instead of retaliating against Iraqi Shiites, as al Qaeda and Iran had hoped, Iraqi Sunnis retaliated against al Qaeda.

Victory on the ground became at that point a certainty. The Iraqi Sunni hold-outs who had been fighting us began switching sides, and the harder al Qaeda fought it, the more thoroughly they would become hated in the new Iraq. But it wasn’t just the pace of coalition victory on the ground that was greatly accelerated by the “civil war” media strategy. Equally dramatic was the effect on the negative fighting spirit of the American people.

A March 2006 poll by the Washington Post and ABC News found that a full 80% of Americans saw Iraq falling into civil war, and they were responding just as the defeatists wanted:

In the face of continuing violence, half -- 52 percent -- of those surveyed said the United States should begin withdrawing forces.

Al Qaeda and Iran poured it on through all of 2006, blowing up Iraqis like crazy, until they had the Iraqi people almost 100% against them. But the Western media did not have any trouble spinning this violence as civil war. Even when it was perfectly clear that they were being played, the media just turned a blind eye.

Mudville nails The New York Times

One particularly glaring sequence was documented by milblogger Greyhawk at the Mudville Gazette. The New York Times’ front page headline for March 27, 2006 read: “30 Beheaded Bodies Found; Iraqi Death Squads Blamed”:

BAGHDAD, Iraq, March 26 — The bodies of 30 beheaded men were found on a main highway near Baquba this evening, providing more evidence that the death squads in Iraq are becoming out of control.

Two days later, Major General Thurman in Iraq exposed the story as a hoax. The Times buried its retracted headline in a paragraph seventeen, where it was joined with fresh claims of sectarian massacre:

The police in western Baghdad discovered 14 bodies on Tuesday, all killed execution-style with gunshots to the head, apparently the latest victims of sectarian bloodletting. On Monday, Iraqi forces found 18 bodies near Baquba with similar wounds. Earlier reports of 30 beheaded bodies found in that area were wrong, the Interior Ministry official said.

“Apparently the victims of sectarian bloodletting,” but not actually the victims of sectarian bloodletting. On April 2nd Stars and Stripes reported that the 18 victims near Baquba had been murdered by al Qaeda terrorists dressed up to look like Iraqi military. Al Qaeda was trying to make it look like the country, and the Iraqi military, were descending into “sectarian bloodletting”

When the Times learned how it was being used by al Qaeda, it should have issued a front page apology and promised not to be duped again. Instead, the Times just kept on reporting each al Qaeda ploy with the same fresh gullibility. It was a game of footsie between them, striving on both sides for American defeat.

Another TET Offensive

By the end of 2006, 86% of Americans had swallowed the “civil war” hoax hook line and sinker. In the media sphere, the Democrat/ al Qaeda alliance had proved a total success. How total? It won them the 2006 mid-term elections, with control of both houses of Congress. That’s the brass ring. They gained the control over government necessary to effect the unilateral surrender they had been promising. The only thing left was to actually surrender.

Total destruction for al Qaeda on the ground was successfully turned into a media victory for al Qaeda. It was a carbon copy of the 1968 TET Offensive in Vietnam, as Arnaud de Borchgrave had been warning about since 2004. The Communists in South Vietnam threw everything they had at the U.S. and South Vietnamese militaries, and been utterly destroyed, never again to threaten as a fighting force. But Walter Cronkite reported the ferocity of the attack as a measure of Communist strength and declared the war unwinnable. LBJ surrendered to Walter Cronkite, announcing a couple of weeks later that he would not seek re-election, and the Democrats succeeded in losing the war at home, even after it was already won on the ground. (Cronkite is even bidding to play the same role again today.)

But surrender efforts take time, just as victory on the ground does. It turned out that, while the Democratic Party leadership has been united on a policy of surrender to al Qaeda, not all Democrats are on board. A handful of holdouts have allowed time for al Qaeda’s defeat on the ground to become a fait accompli, which is making more Democrats reluctant to surrender to al Qaeda. Thus the time of greatest danger should be past, even though the Democrat surrender efforts continue unabated. There have been plenty of attempts (forty so far this year), and Harry Reid is still spewing the “un-winnable civil war” mantra:

“The surge hasn’t accomplished its goals,” Reid said. “… We’re involved, still, in an intractable civil war.”

(Al Qaeda, in the meantime, informs us that all but 200 of their fighters in Iraq are dead.)

The media has also continued to pretend that the al Qaeda and Iranian proxy war is a civil war. In July of this year, the captured leader of al Qaeda in Iraq admitted that the organization went to great lengths to pretend that it was an Iraqi organization, even pretending to follow a fictitious figurehead with an Iraqi name:

In his words, the Islamic State of Iraq is a front organization that masks the foreign influence and leadership within al Qaeda in Iraq in an attempt to put an Iraqi face on the leadership of al Qaeda in Iraq.

Reuters headline? “Senior Qaeda figure in Iraq a myth: U.S. military.” Or in the words of Don Surber: Bass-ack-wards. Reuters tried to make it look to the casual reader that al Qaeda was the myth, when the actual myth was that the violence in Iraq is home grown.

This has been par for the course for four years. The media knows as well as al Qaeda that this is a race, and it looks now that the race has been won by our military, thanks to the switch to a more aggressive finishing strategy orchestrated by General Petraeus. What has allowed the “surge” strategy to succeed so spectacularly is the Iraqi people’s almost unanimous hatred for al Qaeda, created by the Democrat/ al Qaeda media strategy of blowing up Iraqis. This turn against al Qaeda was fully formed during Rumsfeld’s tenure. To make use of that hatred, all Petraeus had to do was switch from force protection to population protection. Protected from retaliation, Iraqis expressed their hatred of al Qaeda by pointing to the bad guys.

Should we have used the Petraeus strategy from the outset?

That’s a little like seeing Ali come off the ropes in the 8th round to kayo Foreman and thinking: “hey, he should have done that in round one.” Petraeus’ “clear, hold and build” strategy might have worked earlier, but it also might have altered al Qaeda’s strategy. If our troops had been more exposed, al Qaeda might have concentrated more on military targets and less on the Iraqi population, which was the key decision that determined everything. Induce al Qaeda to make a different decision, and who knows how things might have turned out?

In the counterinsurgency manual that he co-authored, Petraeus describes the logic of the population protection strategy:

Sometimes, the More You Protect Your Force, the Less Secure You May Be

1-149. Ultimate success in COIN is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force. If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents. Aggressive saturation patrolling, ambushes, and listening post operations must be conducted, risk shared with the populace, and contact maintained. . . . These practices ensure access to the intelligence needed to drive operations. Following them reinforces the connections with the populace that help establish real legitimacy.
From “Counterinsurgency/FM 3-24/MCWP 3-33.5” [Quote selection Michael Yon.)

But this supposes that the population is intimidated by the counterinsurgency, instead of sympathetic to it. Colonel David Kilcullen, an Australian advisor to General Petraeus, explains the surge strategy this way:

When we speak of "clearing" an enemy safe haven, we are not talking about destroying the enemy in it; we are talking about rescuing the population in it from enemy intimidation.

The "terrain" we are clearing is human terrain, not physical terrain.

But winning the cooperation of an intimidated population and winning the cooperation of a hostile population are very different things, and at the start of the Iraq war, the Sunni minority was broadly hostile. Saddam Hussein had established them as a ruling class over the majority Shiites. We had kicked them out of that privileged position and were sticking them with minority status in system of government by majority rule. Anything they could do to keep us from succeeding, they were sympathetic to.

Going in, one might well have given the population protection strategy a better chance of working than the force protection strategy. (Ditto for McCain's consistent calls for more troops, favoring big footprint over small footprint, without specifying a preference for either force protection or population protection.)

But the way al Qaeda and Iran responded to our small-footprint/ force protection strategy--by blowing up Iraqi civilians to create a phony “civil war” for the Western media--made the force protection strategy a winner. It turned the Sunni population against al Qaeda, turning them from hostile to intimidated: just the conditions that Petraeus strategy was formulated to succeed in.

If we had a do over, it would be crazy to alter this sequence. It is purely speculative whether the Petraeus strategy could work on a hostile population. The Rumsfeld strategy DID work.

It was perfectly clear what was happening

Only in hindsight do we know that the force protection strategy would elicit such a reckless gamble from al Qaeda: getting them the bet their reputation throughout the entire Muslim world on the ability of their Democrat allies to lose the war at home. What does not require hindsight—what was perfectly obvious at the time—was that al Qaeda’s decision to attack the Iraqi population was going to lose them the war on the ground.

I certainly saw it, writing a trio of blog posts in late 2005 about the emergence of the civil war trope (Evil bit©h watch), and a couple more posts on how Democrat efforts to lose the war at home were luring al Qaeda into attacking the Iraqi population (Baiting the flytrap with the sickly sweet stink of defeatism, and Dems duped into duping al Qaeda.)

A sample:

By attacking the Iraqi people they [the terrorists] are winning for the United States the one battle we could not otherwise win by force of arms: the battle for the direction that the Iraqi and Afghan democracies will take. We cannot force the electorates of these countries to favor religious liberty, yet the terrorists are doing more than we could ever hope to give intolerance a very very bad name. This is how Al Qaeda chooses to spend its limited pool of Jihadists? They are dying by the tens and hundreds to serve OUR purposes in Iraq and Afghanistan?

[Judy Woodruff's] optimism offers an explanation. She is a little frustrated because Katrina is hampering the ability of her and her colleagues to attack the war effort, but it doesn't keep down her pluck:

...we were just sitting here saying, if it hadn't been for Katrina, the numbers on--the deaths in Iraq would have been all in the headlines the last week.

This when al Qaeda by its own admission was being systematically destroyed by the U.S. military. Go Judy!

Bin Laden's September 7th 2007 video from the cave expressed his bitter disappointment in the failure of the Democrats to follow through on defeat:

People of America: ... after several years of the tragedies of this war, the vast majority of you want it stopped. Thus, you elected the Democratic Party for this purpose but the Democrats haven't made a move worth mentioning.

Like a good ally, he makes excuses for the Democrats' failure, straight from the American left's own talking points:

... since the democratic system permits major corporations to back candidates, be they presidential or congressional, there shouldn't be any cause for astonishment, and there isn't any, in the Democrats' failure to stop the war.

The consequences of this failed Democrat/ al-Qaeda alliance is a much more positive outcome than we could otherwise have hoped for. If al Qaeda had just recognized our military superiority and chosen not to commit its resources in Iraq, they a) would still be alive to fight elsewhere, and b) would still be able to proclaim themselves as defenders of Islam. Instead they gambled everything on their media strategy, committing atrocities that the Democrats could use to win surrender for them. Now their name is dirt, and their bodies are dirt.

Equal rights in the Islamic world?

The result is the prospect of a religiously tolerant Iraq, truly something new under the sun in the Islamic world. Iraq now has a chance to become a modern republic, protecting equal liberty under law. Its constitution asserts both human rights and Islamic identity. The great question was which would give when there was a conflict between traditional Islamic suppression of religious minorities and equal rights.

Thanks to the al Qaeda/Democrat media strategy, the Iraqi people now hate the religious intolerance of al Qaeda and Iran with a white hot passion, giving them the best possible chance to become the first modern Republic in the Islamic world (a republic that chooses to reject theocracy, unlike Turkey, which has its theocratic tendencies denied by un-democratic means). Figure ten years before they start to completely outstrip the rest of the Islamic world economically, making them a model for other Muslim countries to follow.

Credit Donald Rumsfelds’ wartime leadership, the Democrat/ al Qaeda alliance that fell into his lap, President Bush’s backbone, and most of all, the blood sweat and tears of our military families who actually pulled it all off.