Word: anbar
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...from some military commanders who fear the withdrawal may be too hasty to maintain the country's recent security gains. But the President ought to be reassured by the assessment of Marine Major General John Kelly, who just completed a 13-month tour as the top U.S. commander in Anbar province...
...Late in the summer of 2006, the top Marine intelligence officer in Iraq cabled his superiors at the Pentagon that the war was essentially lost in Anbar; his dire assessment soon surfaced on the front page of the Washington Post. "The prospects for securing that country's western Anbar province are dim," the newspaper said, summarizing the report. "There is almost nothing the U.S. military can do to improve the political and social situation there." One anonymous official who read the report flatly told the paper "the United States has lost in Anbar." (See pictures of the Anbar Awakening movement...
...turnaround in Anbar, said Kelly, wasn't the 30,000-strong U.S. surge, which sent relatively few reinforcements to Anbar. Instead, the local population - mostly Sunnis who had largely supported the insurgents - grew so fed up with the brutality of the al-Qaeda element that it rose up against the insurgency. Tribal sheiks who had once fought against U.S. forces began to work with the Marines in a tacit "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" alliance. "If the objective is zero violence in the nation of Iraq, it's impossible," Kelly said. "But if the objective...
...Kelly supports cutting levels of combat troops. He notes that the number of American soldiers in Anbar fell from 38,000 to 23,000 during his tour, and he could have cut even more. And those that remained changed their way of operating, encouraging Iraqis to take the lead while promising that a dedicated U.S. military unit would be standing by if the Iraqis ran into trouble and needed U.S. help. "We've never been called as a quick-reaction force since we started doing this," Kelly said. But Kelly's Baghdad commanders were leery. "I had conversations with...
...Army Generals David Petraeus, Ray Odierno and Lloyd Austin. In typical Army fashion, they were conservative in their assessment of the battlefield, and always wanted more troops to keep potential trouble at bay. Kelly, a Marine on his third Iraq tour, said he sensed what was possible in Anbar while his Army bosses in Baghdad didn't. "Maybe because of my experience - and certainly because the Marines were doing so well - I had a sense that things were doable," Kelly said, "perhaps before other people had a sense that they were doable." As Obama unveils the specifics of his pullout...