US losing war of wills for democratic Iraq [View All]

WASHINGTON - Counter-insurgency experts are advising the Pentagon that recent positive policy shifts in Iraq may have come too late for the United States to avert defeat, or at least a protracted and unpopular military commitment. Although US forces are performing extremely well at a tactical level, the advisers - some recently returned from Iraq - say the wider war of winning 'hearts and minds' is slipping away. The Bush administration runs the risk of losing its broader goal of establishing a stable democratic Iraq. Those held responsible are the post-war military planners, who refused to heed warnings of a pending insurgency and commit enough resources, and the politicians, for failing to produce a coherent strategy.

President George W. Bush insists the US is winning the war in Iraq, a view also held by some senior officers on the ground. But the broad conclusion of a number of advisers is that the US will need to deploy large numbers of troops for several years to prevent a slide into civil war. They question whether the US public has the stomach for this.

Professor Ahmed Hashim of the Naval War College, Rhode Island, returned recently from Iraq where he was a counter-insurgency adviser to the US military. He came to the military's attention nearly a year ago with a paper delivered at the Middle East Institute in Washington, describing the complex nature of the nascent insurgency.

Fighting it would be 'like eating soup with a fork', he said, quoting T.E. Lawrence. Last week, he returned to the institute and wrote a paper for the Jamestown Foundation, a strategic studies think-tank. Again he quoted Lawrence of Arabia in Iraq in 1920: 'We are today not far from disaster.'

http://www.straitstimes.asia1.com.sg/world/story/0,4386,257834,00.html?