Joseph L. Galloway
is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents,
with more than four decades as a reporter
and writer, he recently concluded an assignment
as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell
at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent
22 years as a foreign and war correspondent
and bureau chief for United Press International,
and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and
senior writer for U.S. News & World Report
magazine. His overseas postings include tours
in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore
and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow
in the former Soviet Union. During the course
of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served
four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam
and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War
and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert
Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division
(Mech) in the assault into Iraq. General H.
Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The
finest combat correspondent of our generation
-- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
WASHINGTON - A senior American commander made the mistake of telling reporters that the military offensive that eventually captured a largely depopulated and destroyed Fallujah had "broken the back of the insurgency" across Iraq.
It did not, of course. It could not.
What the take-down of Fallujah did accomplish was to correct, at great cost in American lives and American treasure, an American mistake made last spring when the Marines were halted as they moved to take both Fallujah and Ramadi after weeks of deadly fighting.
The insurgents and foreign fighters had been given free rein over Fallujah for more than six months, and they used it as central headquarters for bomb making of various sorts, a torture and execution chamber for foreign and Iraqi hostages, and a launch pad for attacks in Baghdad and elsewhere.
The American-led offensive was loudly announced in advance to empty Fallujah of its 200,000-plus civilian populace. Civilians weren't the only ones who left. Along with them went the top leadership of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's gang of foreign terrorists and many of his fighters and other local insurgents.
The American attack accounted for perhaps 1,200 of the estimated 3,000-plus armed enemies who had occupied the city.
The capture of a single strongpoint does not break the back of an insurgency as widely spread and deeply motivated as the one that has tormented Baghdad and the cities and towns of the Sunni triangle.
That insurgency will only be broken when the Sunni population, 20 percent of Iraq's 25 million people, is convinced that they have a viable future in the Iraq that is being rebuilt on a different model.
It can be fairly argued that we Americans created the insurgency that today bedevils us and takes the lives of four to six American soldiers every day. The Bush administration had planned to clean out the top few layers of Saddam Hussein's Sunni dominated Baath Party. But when the time came, former Ambassador Paul Bremer instead purged Iraq of every Baathist down to kindergarten teachers and then disbanded and dismissed without pay the hundreds of thousands of soldiers in Saddam's army.
No one has to date accepted responsibility for those glaring mistakes, or any of the other failures in planning for post-war security, stability and rebuilding.
Nor has anyone in authority yet stated a plausible exit strategy, an end if you will, for our costly and deadly involvement in Iraq.
An insurgency can only be beaten when, through information and incentives, the civilians among whom the insurgents hide are eventually convinced that they gain nothing, and risk everything, by shielding and supplying the guerrillas. The key words in that sentence are "through information and incentives," not through bombing and shelling and overwhelming and destroying in classic fashion.
We now face the plain fact that the insurgency is growing. A year ago the enemy was able to mount 15 to 20 attacks a day in Iraq. Recently that number has escalated to near 150 attacks per day - attacks that now include daily car bombings of our convoys and occasional mortar and rocket attacks in the heart of Baghdad.
American commanders on the ground are asking for more soldiers and Marines to boost strength above the 138,000 now fighting in Iraq so they can secure the rebuilding of Fallujah, keep the insurgents from coming back in, and chase them to the cities and towns elsewhere in the triangle where they have resumed their deadly business.
Why does my mind keep going back to the Weinberger/Powell doctrine, which the current civilian leadership in the Pentagon declared dead and gone while they were doing their victory laps and praising their own strategy of smaller, faster, deadlier in the field of military affairs?
That doctrine, dating to when Caspar Weinberger was defense secretary and Colin Powell was his military aid, said you only go to war when you have exhausted all other options; that you go to war with everything and everyone you need, not incrementally; that you clearly define your objectives; and that your military leaves after winning the war.
There's something in there for everyone -- a lot of good lessons learned the hard way in a place called Vietnam. Now if only we can persuade the civilians who command our military to vet their plans for the next war against that doctrine.
