[The USA was doomed on this one from the start. But, I don’t think winning hearts and minds is always important. Some people you can’t win over and then the response should either be: total withdrawal, or total war and beat them into the ground. The USA is in a position to beat them into the ground, but American leaders, and even less so the American people have little stomach for this – which I think it a real recipe for later disaster. Jan]

Counter-insurgency experts are advising the Pentagon that recent positive policy shifts in Iraq may have come too late for the US to avert defeat, or at least a protracted and unpopular military commitment.

Although US forces are performing extremely well at 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 goals of establishing a stable democratic Iraq.

Those held responsible are the postwar 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 American public has the stomach for this.

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

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.”

He described an “Islamo-nationalist fusion”, a binding together of minority Sunnis now out of power and fearing their identity to be under threat. Their infrastructure is the mosques. Tribal elements play a role, as well as Islamist extremists from outside Iraq.

Insurgents are growing more proficient and their tactics and techniques more lethal. They lack military resources but they have one key element that the US does not: time. However, they also lack another critical ingredient: a comprehensive socio-economic programme. That is one reason a full-blown nationalist insurgency has not developed.

Iraq, Mr Hashim says, is going through an “incipient civil war”, low-level “ethnic cleansing” and communal struggle. Criminal gangs inv- olved in drug trafficking and prostitution add to the brew.

Andrew Krepinevich, a veteran military analyst and formerly of the Pentagon, says that the insurgency, being primarily urban, has a “lower probability of success” than rural campaigns, as in China, Vietnam and Laos. But their focus will be to defeat the will of the US, he told the FT.

“The centre of gravity is not the enemy forces, capital or industrial base; it is the people of Iraq and the United States. Frankly, right now, the trends of the past three months show the insurgents making substantial progress on winning over the population in Iraq.”

He described the erosion of popular US support for the war as remarkable, given the overwhelming strength of the US and the resources that could be applied.

Mr Krepinevich doubts that there will be sufficient security to allow a serious election campaign by the target of next January. “The US military has performed very well at the tactical level; the operational level has been a disaster.”

Source: Financial Times
URL: http://news.ft.com/servlet/ContentServer?page…/p>