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A Soldier's Story-"The Iraqis are in the fight," says Gen. David Patraeus. - OpinionJournal - Featured Article

A Soldier's Story-"The Iraqis are in the fight," says Gen. David Patraeus.


Gen. Petraeus seems a little less in his element in Washington. Perhaps he's nervous, or perhaps it's just the hyperalert air of a man who knows the fate of his work of the past 15 months will largely be determined over the next two--starting with today's referendum on the proposed Iraqi Constitution. That's because the Iraqi security forces he built will face their stiffest challenge yet in trying to protect the vote, and because their future will of course be dependent on who ultimately gets elected in December. "The most important coefficient," he emphasizes, "is the political environment."

As for the immediate challenge of today, Gen. Petraeus says he's not only optimistic, he thinks there's a good chance the process will actually have a galvanizing effect on morale. "The January elections were a defining moment for the Iraqi security forces," he says, by way of comparison. "They took a huge lift from those elections--their performance and the support they got from the Iraqi people following that, with several of their policemen martyring themselves to smother suicide-vest wearers. And since that time there's not a case of an Iraqi unit folding, going out the back of a police station."

He's alluding, of course, to the miserable performance of Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)--both army and police--during the simultaneous Sunni and Shiite (remember Moqtada al-Sadr and the Mahdi Army?) insurgencies in April 2004.

Gen. Petraeus is careful (too careful) not to blame this on the strange combination of inattention and control-freakery that characterized the security strategy of L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority. But when pressed, he concedes he was tasked to fundamentally reshape Iraqi security forces in June that year for a reason. "The original conception for the Iraqi military was a force that would be used to defend the territorial integrity of Iraq," he says. But the interim government that assumed control of the newly sovereign country "wisely and inescapably recognized that the biggest threat to Iraq was internal, not external, and those forces that were being trained and equipped and invested in, for whom infrastructure was being rebuilt, clearly needed to help Iraq fight the insurgency."

Thus was born the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq, or "min-sticky"--an awkward acronym even by military standards. One of Gen. Petraeus's frustrations is getting people to understand that things really have changed since then.

"Is Joe Biden convinced?" I ask, referring to the Delaware senator who spent the summer claiming that only a handful of Iraqi battalions were of any use. "You'll have to ask him," replies the general, launching into a survey of the state of play: "There are now nearly 120 army and police combat battalions [about 750 men each] that are 'in the fight.' And 'in the fight' by the transition readiness assessment means they are either Level One, Level Two or Level Three. Now certainly, roughly 80 of those are Level Three, which means 'fighting alongside.' In other words they're fighting literally side by side with our forces. They're not yet capable of independent operations on their own."

But "nearly 40 now are Level Two or better. . . . That's hugely significant because it's at Level Two, at the 'in the lead' category, that means they're doing independent operations. They're not fully independent though, and that's what Level One means. It means they need no Coalition assistance whatsoever."

He offers an example: "In one case, one of the units was reassessed from One to Two. It's doing the same mission, by the way, on Haifa Street in Baghdad. It's just a case of someone being asked, 'Are you sure they're really Level One?' and he said, 'Well maybe they do need a little help from the Coalition in logistics so I guess they properly should be Level Two.' The truth is they actually got a little bit better in that month or two since they were reassessed. . . . They own their own area of operations."

I can vouch for the general's assessment of the Haifa Street unit's performance, as well as that of the Iraqi forces now manning Baghdad's once-perilous airport road. I was there in June 2004, when one couldn't be sure if the few Iraqi forces visible were the real thing or impostors who might kidnap you and sell you to the highest bidder. Today smartly outfitted ISF are visible everywhere.

"People keep asking, 'When will Iraqi security forces take over from Coalition forces?' " says Gen. Petraeus. "Well, they've been doing it for months. . . . There was a ceremony a few months back when Coalition forces transferred security responsibilities to Iraqis in Najaf. The same thing happened just a few weeks ago in Karbala. Mostly recently, within the last week, four districts within Baghdad have been transitioned to Iraqi security force control and I think that's roughly 20% of Baghdad."

I ask the general if it was a mistake to disband Saddam's army in the first place. He responds that the decision was a much "tougher call" than most critics realize, given that there was "no infrastructure left" and it was such a "top-heavy force": "We're told there were 1,100 former brigadiers and above just in Ninevah province." Did we send too few troops of our own? He had enough when he was running Mosul, the general replies.

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