The United States is expected to increase its military
presence in the Sunni areas of Iraq.
U.S. analysts said this will probably mean the redeployment of American
troops from the Kurdish-populated areas in the north and the Shi'ite areas
in the south. The troops will be placed in the so-called Sunni Triangle
around Baghdad.
"The American presence in particular areas in the Sunni triangle will
actually grow, not lessen," Gary Schmitt said. "So there will be an even
increased American face in terms of the occupation. I'm not saying that's an
easy thing for people to swallow, but in fact that's the way
counterinsurgencies work."
The United States has 132,000 troops in Iraq, the largest force in the
country. Washington, which seeks to reduce its force to 105,000, plans to
train and equip about 140,000 Iraqi military and security forces by early
2004.
This will include the appointment of 1,000 officers who served under the
regime of Saddam Hussein. The training of up to 32,000 Iraqi police cadets
began on Monday in a facility near Amman.
On Sunday, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Mark Kimmitt, deputy director of
operations, Combined Joint Task Force 7, told a news conference in Baghdad
that Sunni insurgents have turned to so-called soft and civilian targets.
Kimmitt said this has led to more aggressive military operations by United
States and coalition forces, including the capture of 72 anti-coalition
suspects over the previous 24 hours. Another 46 Saddam loyalists were also
killed in weekend operations.
"In terms of tactics, we have said for the last couple of weeks that we
see the enemy starting to attack soft targets, Iraqi targets, rather than
military targets," Kimmitt said. "We think this is a change on part of the
enemy. He [the enemy] realizes that attacking a military target will
probably lead to his death or capture."
In an address to the Washington-based American Enterprise Institute on
Oct. 22, Schmitt, executive director of the Project for the New American
Century, said the U.S. military has been uncomfortable with the
counter-insurgency mission in Iraq. He said the military has sought to
exchange firepower for manpower. In contrast, he said, the
counter-insurgency mission in Iraq must be labor-intensive.
The analysts said the U.S. counter-insurgency strategy in Iraq has
been similar to that in El Salvador in the 1980s and Vietnam in the early
1960s. This consisted of a well-trained U.S. military that attempted to
quell an
insurgency through conventional tactics.
"The current strategy really plays to our strength, which sort of
depends on our fire power and our precision strike capability and sort of
having the right intelligence to act quickly and decisively," Reuel Gerecht,
a researcher at the American Enterprise Institute and former U.S.
intelligence analyst, said. "The question is whether that's the right
approach to this problem. It's a high-tech approach to a low-tech problem,
and I have my doubts that it'll work."
Danielle Pletka, of the American Enterprise Institute, said the U.S.
presence is virtually nil outside of Baghdad, which has resulted in the
resumption of power by former Saddam loyalists. Ms. Pletka also said the
U.S. military does not employ such counter-insurgency tools as a central
data base on Saddam loyalists, insurgents and Al Qaida cells.
"We have subcontracted political power to the local military
authorities," Ms. Pletka said. "And guess what? They don't know a lot about
Iraq, and they're making a lot of bad decisions about who to put in power,
particularly in a variety of different provinces and especially the place
where I think is the most important, in what's called the Sunni Triangle,
where in three different governates we put in power people who are, in
essence, ex-Ba'athists or people who are known to have been associated with
Saddam."
In his briefing, Kimmitt said military analysts have still not found
evidence of a nationally-organized Iraqi resistance to the U.S.-led
coalition. But the general said military intelligence continues to search
for links between insurgency elements in the north and central regions of
Iraq.
"The analysts who are working on this question day and night still don't
believe they are seeing any central direction for these activities, that
most of them are small cellular type," Kimmitt said. "Are there linkages
between families? Are there linkages between organizations? Are there
linkages between former regime elements? That's what were trying to find
out."
