The ‘Seven Soldiers’ wisdom on Iraq

This book-writing business really is pretty intense. But I just wanted to dash over here to the blog to note a couple of important things that have been going on:
1. War critique by seven smart serving soldiers.
This great article came out in last Sunday’s NYT. I know Scott Delicious-ed it. But it needs much more attention. It is a very smart and well-informed criticism of the whole current war effort, signed by seven serving members of the fairly elite, special-ops-y 82d Airborne.
Taking on the hard-spun optimism expressed recently by Washington desk-jockeys Micael O’Hanlon and Ken Pollack, these serving grunts write this:

VIEWED from Iraq at the tail end of a 15-month deployment, the political debate in Washington is indeed surreal. Counterinsurgency is, by definition, a competition between insurgents and counterinsurgents for the control and support of a population. To believe that Americans, with an occupying force that long ago outlived its reluctant welcome, can win over a recalcitrant local population and win this counterinsurgency is far-fetched. As responsible infantrymen and noncommissioned officers with the 82nd Airborne Division soon heading back home, we are skeptical of recent press coverage portraying the conflict as increasingly manageable and feel it has neglected the mounting civil, political and social unrest we see every day. (Obviously, these are our personal views and should not be seen as official within our chain of command.)
… it is important not to assess security from an American-centered perspective. The ability of, say, American observers to safely walk down the streets of formerly violent towns is not a resounding indicator of security. What matters is the experience of the local citizenry and the future of our counterinsurgency. When we take this view, we see that a vast majority of Iraqis feel increasingly insecure and view us as an occupation force that has failed to produce normalcy after four years and is increasingly unlikely to do so as we continue to arm each warring side.
Coupling our military strategy to an insistence that the Iraqis meet political benchmarks for reconciliation is also unhelpful….
Political reconciliation in Iraq will occur, but not at our insistence or in ways that meet our benchmarks. It will happen on Iraqi terms when the reality on the battlefield is congruent with that in the political sphere. There will be no magnanimous solutions that please every party the way we expect, and there will be winners and losers. The choice we have left is to decide which side we will take. Trying to please every party in the conflict — as we do now — will only ensure we are hated by all in the long run.
At the same time, the most important front in the counterinsurgency, improving basic social and economic conditions, is the one on which we have failed most miserably…
We need to recognize that our presence may have released Iraqis from the grip of a tyrant, but that it has also robbed them of their self-respect. They will soon realize that the best way to regain dignity is to call us what we are — an army of occupation — and force our withdrawal.
Until that happens, it would be prudent for us to increasingly let Iraqis take center stage in all matters, to come up with a nuanced policy in which we assist them from the margins but let them resolve their differences as they see fit. This suggestion is not meant to be defeatist, but rather to highlight our pursuit of incompatible policies to absurd ends without recognizing the incongruities.
We need not talk about our morale. As committed soldiers, we will see this mission through.

There has been some curiosity regarding the identity of these soldiers. Here’s what I noticed: Four are described as sergeants, two as staff sergeants, and one, Buddhika Jayamaha, as an “Army specialist.” But it is Jayamaha who has his name listed first. Clearly, this must have been by the agreement of the other six– but he is the lowest-ranking one of them all. Clearly, he must have played a leadership role in drafting the text and bringing the other six to agreement around it.
So who is Buddhika Jayamaha?
Was Sourcewatch onto something when they tagged this? It’s the contents page for a hefty, v. expensive two-volume work that was published in March, on “Civil Wars of the World”… and the chapter on Sri Lanka was co-authored by a Buddhika Jayamaha.
So maybe BJ really is quite a bit of a specialist on civil wars and insurgencies. Quite possibly of Sri Lankan origin himself? And then for whatever reason he went and enlisted in the 82nd Airborne where he (1) went to Iraq, (2) survived the tell the tale, (3) developed his own, very well-informed understanding of what was going on there, and (4) was able to persuade six sergeants in the 82nd to sign an article that featured– we might presume– mainly his own analysis?
Anyway, I would like to note that the “Seven soldiers” description of the situation seems to me to have a lot more ground-truth to it than the O’Hanlon-Pollack piece published in the NYT exactly three weeks earlier, under the title “A war we just might win”
Btw, regarding O’Hanlon and Pollack, George Packer blogged this a couple of days after their piece appeared:

I talked to Pollack yesterday. In answer to some of the questions I raised: he spoke with very few Iraqis and could independently confirm very little of what he heard from American officials. In eight days he travelled to half a dozen cities—that’s not much time in each. The evidence that four or five Iraqi Army divisions, with most of their bad commanders weeded out, are now capable of holding, for example, Mosul and Tal Afar, came from American military sources. Pollack found that U.S. officers sounded much more realistic than on his previous trip, in late 2005. He gauged their reliability in answers they gave to questions that he asked “offline,” after a briefing—there was a minimum of happy talk, but also a minimum of dire gloom. The improvements in security, he said, are “relative,” which is a heavy qualification, given the extreme violence of 2006 and early 2007. And it’s far from clear that progress anywhere is sustainable. Everywhere he went, the line Pollack heard was that the central government in Baghdad is broken and the only solutions that can work are local ones.
It was a step back from the almost definitive tone of “A War We Just Might Win” (a bad headline, and not the authors’). That tone was misplaced, and it is already being used by an Administration that has always thought tactically and will grasp any shred of support, regardless of the facts, to win the short-term argument…

And the second thing I was going to blog about? I’m afraid y’all are going to have to wait… Back to the book factory for me.