MAX BOOT REPORTS FROM IRAQ:
Every U.S. officer I talked to said that the 150,000 soldiers we have in Iraq now are sufficient. What’s required is not more troops, they said, but better policing methods. Both the 101st Airborne and the Marines are disdainful of some of the heavy-handed tactics, such as large-scale “cordon and search” operations, employed by Army units in Baghdad and the surrounding areas. They argue that the focus should be on getting better intelligence and training Iraqi security forces to police their own country. That process is now underway, but it will take time to create a new army and police force.
The biggest problem I saw in Iraq was not with the U.S. military but with the civilian arm of the occupation — the Coalition Provisional Authority run by L. Paul Bremer III. One well-intentioned CPA project, to hire agricultural laborers to clear canals, caused a riot in the southern city of Diwaniyah when the ditch diggers weren’t paid for three weeks. More often, the CPA is guilty of sins of omission. Its television station, the Iraqi Media Network, is not received in the north, thus ceding the information war to anti-American satellite channels like Al Jazeera.
The problem is that the CPA lacks both personnel and money. In the north, the 101st Airborne deploys 21,000 soldiers; the CPA has no more than a couple dozen employees there. And what few people the CPA has don’t last long. Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police chief, arrived in Iraq at the beginning of the summer to run the Justice Ministry, and already he’s going home.
Instead of sending more troops, the administration needs to beef up the CPA and decentralize its operations. Congress needs to provide more funding because, as Maj. Gen. David Petraeus, commander of the 101st Airborne, told me, “Money is ammunition.” But neither the CPA’s woes nor the well-publicized terror attacks should distract us from the substantial progress that’s been made in the four months since the war ended. As long as we keep our nerve, we will prevail.
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