Trainor on Fallujah, etc.

Retired 3-star Marine General Bernard Trainor is sort of an intellectual’s military leader. Well, they like to fawn all over him at Harvard University’s prestigious “Kenndy School of Government”, where he helps run a security-studies program. Here’s his take on whether the US military has in mind any “exit strategy” from Iraq:

I don’t think they have an exit strategy in mind at this particular point. I think the concept is to maintain our forces in there. Do we need more forces? Yes, we [do], but that’s a double-edged sword. If we start to put more American forces in, all that does is agitate the people who feel that this is an American occupation. But we do need the forces.

Are you feeling more secure yet? Are you reassured that the Prez sho’ looks as though he knows what he’s fixin’ to do in Iraq?
… Well, neither do I.
The above quote comes in the latest of the periodic little “interviews” conducted with Trainor by Bernie Gwertzman, a retired national-security correspondent for AP who now works at the Council on Foreign Relations, Inc. He puts them out in a handy little column that the CFR produces and distributes jointly with the NYT.
(Have we mentioned enough “prestigious”– equals East Coast, old money– US institutions yet? I’m sure you get the drift.)
Trainor was generally laudatory about what the US fighting men had achieved in Fallujah. Speaking about the Fallujah operation in a notable past tense (!) he said:

They all did very well… I think the performance of the army and the Marines is probably indistinguishable. The First Marine Expeditionary Force is the lead in the operation. [The operation] was very, very well planned, and I think they caught the insurgents by surprise because they feinted as if they were going to come from the south and, in fact, came from the north. When the Marines went in there shooting with lots of support, the issue was never in doubt. I think it went very quickly, and I think it worked with surprisingly low casualties.

Also, this:

BG: The battle for Falluja seems to be just about over… Now that the battle has finally happened, do you think it will have much impact?
BT: I think it has a considerable impact. You have to look at it in two aspects. One is the political aspect. Falluja has become, particularly after the withdrawal [of U.S. forces] in April, the Alamo to the Iraqis–a symbol of resistance to the Americans. That was an inspiration to the nationalists, the Baathists, the Sunnis, and even to the general population of Iraq. Nobody likes to be occupied, and this was sticking a finger in the eye of the Americans. Of course, in the Arab world, everybody was elated by the fact that the Marines backed off, and it was viewed as a great victory for Iraq, the Arab world, and Islam.
In dealing with that, if [Iraqi Prime Minister Ayad] Allawi was going to have a government that was respected and that was viewed as legitimate from a political standpoint, they couldn’t allow this autonomous element to continue to exist–something had to be done about that, and to show that the Iraqi government was able to enforce its will. The downside, of course, [looking at] Falluja from a political point of view, is that we get a lot of criticism for destroying a city, killing innocent women and children–the sort of thing Al-Jazeera will focus on–and perhaps increasing recruiting for the resistance.
Now that’s the common wisdom. But there’s kind of a silver lining in all of this. You will note that there wasn’t a widespread outcry in the Arab world. The Arab street was rather muted about this, including Iraqis themselves. The Shiites didn’t come up and support the effort, and everybody points out the problems that are taking place in Mosul and Ramadi and other places, but that’s restricted to the same gang that caused the problems in Falluja. The general population in Iraq has remained quite quiescent, so I think that’s a silver lining here, that the Allawi and American strategy may be working on the political side. It is too early to tell.
Now, on the military side, this place was a viper’s nest for the terrorists and the suicide bombers and so forth. From a military standpoint, it had to be taken–not only for its value in the military sense, but also to send a message to the other insurgents and terrorists that we have the strength, if necessary, to go in and take you apart.

And if the “message” of intimidation through raw power should not work?

BG: Should the United States keep the pressure on by striking hard at insurgents in Mosul and other cities?
BT: I think they have to continue to do this to maintain the momentum, because if they back off, the situation is going to get worse.

Regarding the lack of an exit strategy, and the conundrum mentioned by Trainor about how you need more troops, but sending them only risks further inflaming Iraqi resistance passions, he not surprisingly said the way to resolve that is by using additional “Iraqi” troops. But he did admit that,

Some of the information that I received was that they haven’t done very well at all except for a couple of special units.

Then, this exchange:

BG: So you’re talking about more troops. Where can the United States get more troops?
BT: We could send more troops out there, but I think the game plan is to hold the line on the numbers that we have and perhaps increase the numbers on the ground by extending the tours of the soldiers that are there and speeding up the deployment of the troops scheduled to go. [This would allow us to] maintain a fair number of forces out there without sending reinforcing units. There’s no question that we need more troops out there, but preferably they should be Iraqi troops and not Americans.

At the end, Trainor talks a bit about the differences that surfaced during the whole run-up to the Iraq war between the uniformed military and the civilians in the Pentagon. He more or less backed the estimate that former chief of staff Eric Shinseki had made about the size of the invasion force that would be needed.
Gwertzman asked,

Were the Pentagon and its internal war planners cognizant of the possibility of an insurgency or chaos after the U.S. major thrust was over, or was that a complete surprise?
BT: They were made aware of it in various studies. People can point to certain studies and paragraphs which alluded to it, but it really wasn’t emphasized by the intelligence community, and even if it was, I don’t think it would have registered with the administration at the time. They had a vision of what reality was going to be, that vision is what guided them, and that did not anticipate any sort of insurgency. One of the strong things in their thinking was “we’re not going to be doing any nation-building–we’ll get in there, do the job, turn it back over to the Iraqis themselves, and get out.” That was pretty naive and that was looking at the situation through rose-colored glasses, which any realistic military or civilian planner would say was a fantasy.

Well, Joan of Arc was probably the last successful war-time leader who was guided in her strategy by “visions”, and look where she ended up…
Myself, I prefer to stay in the “reality-based community”. It seems safer to me. And the most “realistic” strategy of all, when dealing with political differences, is surely to use every alternative to warfare that one can possibly think of rather than heading for the increasingly bloody, inhumane, and quagmire-like tragedy the Bushites’ militarism has gotten us all into in Iraq.
It strikes me that pacifism– that is, a commitment to resolving even serious differences through respectful dialogue and the use only of non-coercive means of persuasion– has never made more sense than it does today. “Fallujah” seems to me to represent–for both the sides involved in that hellish maelstrom–the ultimate idiocy of using the violent approach.