Heritage expert answers your Iraq questions
September 15, 2007| By Nathaniel Ward
On Tuesday, I asked members to submit questions about the surge strategy to Heritage expert Kirk Johnson, who recently returned from a year-long stint at the U.S. embassy in Baghdad.
Here are his answers to the most popular member questions:
Is MoveOn.org correct that Gen. Petraeus’s surge strategy has failed and that violence and civilian deaths have actually increased?
Certainly not. When I was Amb. Ryan Crocker’s statistician at the United States Embassy in Baghdad until last month, we looked at many angles when it came to civilian casualties and violence rates. Gen. David Petraeus showed some of those statistics during his testimony this week. In general, we saw that by nearly every major measure and source (including Iraqi data) violence decreased.
How does foreign interference, by Iran in particular, impact the effectiveness of the surge strategy?
Iran is doing whatever it can to cause trouble so that we will leave. They are therefore providing mortars, rockets, and the especially deadly explosively formed projectiles (EFPs, also known as shaped charges) to harm our forces and test our resolve. They are also training insurgents in Iraq as their proxies against us.
Political reconciliation among Iraq’s various tribal and religious factions has been frustratingly slow to develop. Will continuing Gen. Petraeus’ strategy allow this reconciliation to occur?
There is a lot of hope that such will happen. The “tribal awakening” in Anbar province and elsewhere has a lot of us hoping that other tribal leaders will have the fortitude to work towards political accommodation and, eventually, reconciliation. Look for progress in Diyala and Ninewa provinces in the coming weeks and months.
Why has it cost so much time and so many lives to defeat what is on paper an insurgent force that lags behind American forces in weapons, supplies, training, mobility and so forth?
This is what is called asymmetric warfare. They cannot win in a conventional manner, but they can cause havoc and violence through indirect attacks and bombings. There is also not a traditional military “front,” so we almost have to be everywhere all at once in order to confront the enemy.
Has the surge strategy changed Iraqi perceptions of American troops and the United States in general?
This is hard to say. There is resentment among a free people to have an occupying force in their country, even if it is to provide security. Certainly Americans would not like it if a foreign force was present on our streets.
Nathaniel Ward is the Editor of MyHeritage.org—a website for members and supporters of The Heritage Foundation.
