(2008-02-26) Rosen Iraq Surge

Nir Rosen on "The Myth of the Surge" (War On Iraq). Now, in the midst of the surge, the Bush administration has done an about-face. Having lost the Civil War, many Sunnis were suddenly desperate to switch sides - and Gen. David Petraeus was eager to oblige. The U.S. has not only added 30,000 more troops in Iraq it has essentially bribed the opposition, arming the very Sunni militants who only months ago were waging deadly assaults on American forces. To engineer a fragile peace, the U.S. military has created and backed dozens of new Sunni militias, which now operate beyond the control of Iraq's central government... "We are essentially supporting a quasi-feudal devolution of authority to armed enclaves, which exist at the expense of central government authority," says Chas Freeman, who served as ambassador to Saudi Arabia under the first President Bush. "Those we are arming and training are arming and training themselves not to facilitate our objectives but to pursue their own objectives vis-a-vis other Iraqis. It means that the sectarian and ethnic conflicts that are now suppressed are likely to burst out with even greater ferocity in the future."

John Robb interprets - The improvised theory that led the US military to fund the insurgency (the "Awakening") has transformed the US Counter-Insurgency doctrine (COIN) - a document was so carefully prepared and announced with such fanfare - into a mere pile of paper. Why? Because we have abandoned the doctrine's binding assumption: that everything we do in counter-insurgency should increase the legitimacy of the host government. Essentially, the abandonment of our doctrine means that the US military is now completely adrift in Iraq without a counter-insurgency Road Map. So, what happens next? If you analyze this development through the perspective of Boyd's OODA loop, we can conclude that the US military has lost one of its primary sources of orientation.