Reports of Progress In Iraq Challenged

Critics Cite Administration's Past Rhetoric
By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, March 10, 2007; A14

President Bush on Tuesday cited "encouraging signs" of military and political progress in Iraq as his new strategy gets underway. On Wednesday, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice noted that "things are going reasonably well." And on Thursday, Rice's special coordinator for Iraq, David M. Satterfield, described a "dramatic decrease" in sectarian attacks in Baghdad since Bush's plan was announced in January.

But a number of analysts and critics said this week that some of those signs indicate less progress than the administration has suggested. Sectarian attacks in Baghdad are down at the moment, but the deaths of Iraqi civilians and U.S. troops have increased outside the capital. Though Iraqi leaders have agreed on a new framework law for oil resources, the details of how the oil revenue will be divided among competing Iraqi groups remain unresolved.

"If I were the president, I'd probably seize on every encouraging sign," said Anthony H. Cordesman, an Iraq expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. "As an analyst, that isn't what we do."

Bush prefaced his report, given in a speech to the American Legion, by saying that it is too early to judge success. Others have added similar caveats. "I think people have been badly burned by letting hopes outride analysis" in the past, said one senior administration official, "and there is going to be a genuinely careful look at everything before saying it." Though there are positive indicators, he said, "right now there is no trend."

The administration is under public and congressional pressure to justify the troops and the money it says the new Iraq strategy requires, and Bush is anxious to show that events are vindicating his strategy. The deployment of 21,500 additional troops has already begun, even as Congress debates proposals to withdraw U.S. forces and begins considering the president's request for $100 billion in supplemental funds for the Iraq and Afghanistan wars this spring. The administration also plans to seek $145 billion more in October -- over and above its defense budget request of nearly half a trillion dollars for fiscal 2008.

Some of the president's assertions were spot-on, according to analysts and U.S. military officials. U.S. and Iraqi forces have, as Bush said, reported recent seizures of caches of conventional weapons and bombs.

At times, however, Bush's assessment appeared less than fully accurate. "The Iraqi government," the president said, "has completed the deployment of three additional Iraqi Army brigades to the capital. They said they were going to employ three brigades, and they did." But a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad said this week that two Iraqi brigades and one battalion of a third have arrived in Baghdad. Two of the five new U.S. brigades committed under the new strategy have also arrived.

Bush's report that "Iraqi and U.S. forces have rounded up more than 700 people affiliated with Shia extremists" appears to have little to do with the new strategy. The number is "based on captures . . . since July 2006," the military official said. Bush first reported the same roundup -- citing 600 captures -- last fall.

The administration's past rhetoric on Iraq -- from "Mission Accomplished" in spring 2003 to the "Strategy for Victory in Iraq" in the fall of 2005 and last summer's "Plan Baghdad" -- has left it open to questions.

"I think people would be more sympathetic . . . if he hadn't spent the last four years in a variety of ways exaggerating, hyping and not being clear about the facts," said a senior Democratic congressional staffer who was not authorized to speak on the record. "Now he's saying the sky isn't falling, and people don't believe it."

If violence is down in Baghdad, analysts said, it is likely because the Shiite militias operating there are waiting out the buildup in U.S. troops, nearly all of whom are being deployed in the capital. At the same time, Sunni insurgents have escalated their operations elsewhere.

As Bush spoke on Tuesday, at least 118 Shiite pilgrims were killed in attacks across central Iraq on the eve of one of Shiite Islam's most sacred holidays. The attacks came the day after nine U.S. troops were killed by roadside bombs outside the capital. On Wednesday, at least 75 more Iraqi civilians and two U.S. soldiers were killed in bomb attacks.

On the political front, Bush hailed the Council of Ministers' agreement on a framework law recognizing that Iraq's oil resources belong to all Iraqis -- Shiites, Sunnis and Kurds. But three key measures for dividing the oil revenue among the provinces, reorganizing the state oil company and regulating contracts with foreign companies have yet to be drafted, said Timothy Carney, the administration's economic coordinator for Iraq, in a Baghdad news conference yesterday. These measures must be approved by the government and the parliament, which is "going to take a few months," Carney said.

The administration has touted its new leadership team in Iraq, but only half of it is in place. In the absence of the new ambassador, Ryan C. Crocker, who is due in Baghdad at the end of this month, Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, held his first news conference there on Thursday.

Petraeus cited the captured weapons and the decreased violence hailed in Washington. "At the same time, tragically, there have been violent, sensational attacks," Petraeus said. "I have now served in Iraq for nearly 2 1/2 years. There have been plenty of ups and downs during that time -- periods of optimism and periods of frustration."

Don't Send A Lion To Catch A Mouse

By Shankar Vedantam
Washington Post
March 5, 2007

Two centuries ago, Napoleon Bonaparte sent his armies into Spain to overthrow a monarch who had once been a French ally. Napoleon, who believed he was touched by the hand of destiny, predicted his troops would be welcomed as liberators by ordinary Spaniards. He was wrong. The resulting Peninsular War from 1808 to 1814 seriously undermined French prestige, handed Napoleon a stinging defeat and produced a raft of unanticipated consequences that included the outbreak of deadly civil wars.

Historians would have a field day exploring parallels between Napoleon's Peninsular War and President Bush's war in Iraq, but that is not where we are going today. The Peninsular War interests us because it is one of the earliest examples of an asymmetrical war -- Spanish insurgents faced down the powerful French army by using stealth, deception and the support of civilians. It is the war that gave us the term "guerrilla."

Two political scientists recently examined 250 asymmetrical conflicts, starting with the Peninsular War. Although great powers are vastly more powerful today than in the 19th century, the analysis showed they have become far less likely to win asymmetrical wars. More surprising, the analysis showed that the odds of a powerful nation winning an asymmetrical war decrease as that nation becomes more powerful.

The analysis by Jason Lyall at Princeton University and Lt. Col. Isaiah Wilson III at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point shows that the likelihood of a great power winning an asymmetrical war went from 85 percent during 1800-1850 to 21 percent during 1950-2003.

The same trend was evident when the researchers studied only asymmetrical conflicts involving the United States. The more industrialized a powerful country becomes, the more its military becomes technologically powerful, the less effective it seems to be in an asymmetrical war.

Essentially, what Lyall and Wilson are saying is that if you want to catch a mouse, you need a cat. If you hire a lion to do the job because it is bigger and stronger, the very strength and size of the lion can get in the way of getting the job done.

"A lion is built for different prey," Lyall said. "A lion is built to take down an antelope, and a cat is designed to take down a mouse. Now [in Iraq] we are a lion trying to take down a mouse.

"Mechanized armies are very poor at acquiring the kind of information you need to win against an insurgency. Mechanized armies need long supply trails. Soldiers go into their barracks and play Xbox. They patrol in armored vehicles. In the 19th century, armies lived off the land."

Lyall and Wilson are scheduled to present their findings at a West Point conference in a few weeks. The Pentagon is arranging for them to share the results with senior officials. A preliminary version of the analysis was presented last August at a meeting of the American Political Science Association in Philadelphia.

Wilson worked in Iraq in 2003-04 with Gen. David H. Petraeus, recently appointed commander of U.S. forces in Iraq. The political scientist's research speaks directly to recent changes in U.S. strategy in Iraq -- American troops have begun fanning out from protected enclaves into more exposed positions in the hope that "cop on the beat" patrols will give them a better handle on the insurgency.

Wilson said he saw the advantages of being mobile and lightly armored when he served with the 101st Division in Iraq. "If you are looking through armor at the people you are trying to serve, what does that sound like to the people?"

While the findings are of immediate interest because of the situation in Iraq, the social scientists are really trying to address a systemic issue: America has gotten stuck in the Hollywood notion that a military with ever more powerful armaments is a more effective military.

Reversing that view will be difficult because it calls into question the utility of giant defense projects, Lyall said. Also, the findings lend credence to the politically unpopular notion that successfully prosecuting an asymmetrical war, such as the one in Iraq, requires a large fighting force and, possibly, high casualties as troops asked to blend in with local populations become vulnerable targets for insurgents.

Lyall and Wilson are testing other theories that might explain their empirical finding -- unlike the hammer-is-too-large-for-the-nail theory, the most prominent of these alternate explanations will not give Washington policymakers much to work with: Many of the 250 asymmetrical wars that the scientists studied involved colonial powers trying to subjugate various peoples -- imperial Europe fighting distant wars in Africa, Latin America and Asia. The rise of nationalism over the past two centuries and the revulsion that colonialism now inspires might also explain the declining ability of major powers to subjugate weaker nations.

"One of the best rival explanations is nationalism," Lyall agreed. The French and the Russians, for example, won asymmetrical wars in Algeria and Chechnya in the 19th century, but lost asymmetrical wars in those same places in the 20th century. "In the 19th century, there was not a literacy for nationalism. You look at a lot of these colonial wars. The great powers could play off tribes against each other. By the 1960s, you cannot do that anymore."