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Frontline featured an excellent program on the Iraqi insurgency tonight, which is due to be rebroadcast on the web Friday at 9PM and on TV at various times. The footage and perspectives - including realistic, mixed assessments from competent and optimistic yet cautious US military personnel - were very good; highly recommended.

The web site features expanded interviews with individuals that appeared in the report. Col. H.R. McMaster's interview is particularly interesting, as he describes the security see-saw in the city of Tal Afar (I've bolded some passages that reinforce some of the ideas that I've been pushing over the last few weeks):

What was the experience then for the people of this city during this year?

The life was literally choked out of the city. The terrorists had everyone living in abject fear. I mean, people didn't want to come out on the streets; they were afraid for their children to go to schools; the marketplaces closed. What the terrorists did that was very effective for them in terms of giving them the freedom of action they wanted in this city is they [incited] violence … between the Turkmen Sunni, who are the majority population here, and the Turkmen Shi'a.

We've had tremendous success. People come to us spontaneously, thank us for the operation, our continued security efforts. But we also recognize the situation here generally is very fragile.

They attacked the Shi'a, and it was based on this attack … ideology that anyone who does not believe in their narrow definition of Islam is a rejectionist, and it's their duty to wage jihad against them. There were kidnappings and murders and beheadings. These armed camps developed, and the communities fell in on themselves and defended themselves behind what were essentially tribal militias, and one of the tribal militias here in Tal Afar was the police force.
...
And how do you effectively roll that back?

Well, we had to take a very deliberate approach to this problem. One of the things that the enemy did was they tried to cast our intentions here as actions against the Iraqi people and against the Turkmen Sunni population in particular. They've cast our intentions as [those] of crusaders and occupiers who wanted to exploit the Iraqi people rather than help the Iraqi people get their feet under them so this country could succeed and prosper and have security such as they deserve so much. So we had to defeat that disinformation campaign, and it took some time to do that, because you just don't tell people, "Hey, you know that my intentions are pure." You have to prove to them your intentions through your deeds and through building relationships, and we were able to do that over a period of a few months.

It was also important for us … to separate these terrorists and insurgents from the population. It was important for us to address some of their local grievances, and it was important for us as well to show them that we were a force to be reckoned with, … that we had the capability and the determination to defeat these terrorists, because they wouldn't throw their lot in with us … if we didn't demonstrate that commitment to win the fight.

We had some initial actions against the enemy which were devastating to the enemy. [We] were killing 30, 40, 50 of the enemy at a time. I think that helped us; people thanked us for that. Intelligence came in at a much higher level after those very sharp engagements with the enemy within the city. … With the intelligence we were receiving, we could conduct very precise offensive operations to capture them. We had people who were willing to come forward and tell us exactly what these people did and to testify against them in court, because people were really desperate to return to normalcy and to bring security to the city and to their children.

The enemy then tried to deny us that access by attacking the people in an indiscriminate manner, and a very determined and brutal manner. … It became very clear to us that based on the nature of this enemy, based on the strength of the enemy here, that we would have to conduct an offensive operation to defeat the enemy's operation and then immediately transition into getting Iraqi army and police into position throughout the city to prevent the enemy from returning.
...
We're at the stage now where we have established permanent security in the city, so we're accelerating the development of a reconstituted police force.
...
The enemy preyed on this community to such a degree, it became increasingly clear to the people that the source of all of their problems and all of their grievances were the terrorists themselves, whether it was the lack of basic services, the employment situation. But we couldn't do reconstruction here because the contractors would be shot at; the new water pipe would be blown up; the new power line would be destroyed. And so a precondition for progress along any line in any area was the removal of this terrorist organization within the city.

Read the rest, and try to catch one of the rebroadcasts on TV or the web.

And answer me: given the words about the importance of building relationships and gaining Iraqi trust from a US Army counterinsurgency expert risking life and limb in the field, do obnoxiously bigoted attitudes like this (see update) ...

Who gives a shit what Hugh Hewitt, Dean Esmay, Bill Ardolino, and their 1.2 billion Muslim friends think.

... support or undermine the actual methodology behind the war effort? As Reynolds recently opined about Ann Coulter's recent "raghead" remark, people that express such universally hostile sentiments about Muslims are "objectively pro-terrorist."

Posted by Bill at February 21, 2006 09:55 PM | TrackBack (3)

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