DISQUS

ajm8127 · 1 year ago

"Kilcullen added that negotiations are a two-way street in counterinsurgency." That a brilliant statement. I think he may be on the something.
--
" Arriving in Baghdad in early 2007, Kilcullen advised Petraeus on applying counterinsurgency strategy to a chaotic situation in Iraq."
Didn't the surge also start around this time? So is it possible that the change in Petraeus' strategy, from the advice of Kilcullen, and not the surge, helped quell the violence in Iraq? More to the point, is it possible that John McCain is full of it, and that intuitive thinking and not brute force are making pulling out if Iraq a coming reality?

emjay · 1 year ago

I don't think that's the case, ajm. Petraeus understood COIN principles before Kilcullen got to Baghdad in 2007. He mentored people like LtCol John Nagl who wrote about and practiced those principles, which comprised securing the populace, which sometimes required lethality, and ensuring an inhospitable environment for insurgency through non-lethal means. That was central idea behind the surge, to which all of Petraeus' braintrust, including Kilcullen, contributed.

The fact that Kilcullen now decides the invasion itself was "stupid" doesn't discount McCain's, and most everyone else's, analysis that the surge has largely succeeded.

My concern is that Kilcullen has allowed attacks against him to turn his public profile against the war with the statement "it was f*cking stupid". Whether it was stupid or not, many young soldiers followed Kilcullen's work religiously and made his precepts work in the field. I doubt they would have done so as effectively had they known Kilcullen thought the Iraq mission was "f*cking stupid". Like some others, Kilcullen now has to protest he was against it all along, to defend himself against attacks like Hayden's. Unfortunately, this is a dispiriting shock to young people who took risks and made enormous sacrifices to make the Petraeus/Kilcullen/surge strategy succeed, and believed in the worthiness of the mission. When it comes to a post-military, or post-Iraq career, some will find it necessary "switch sides" so to speak, and ingratiate themselves with those who oppose the war and the administration.

A how-to for policy makers as a general framework is great, but it's unfortunate that Kilcullen felt the need to ingratiate himself with today's "in" crowd with that comment. There are young soldiers out there, still laboring and giving their all, that do not believe it was "f*cking stupid" and are bewildered to hear this from Kilcullen.

emjay · 1 year ago

I don't think that's the case, ajm. Petraeus understood COIN principles before Kilcullen got to Baghdad in 2007. He mentored people like LtCol John Nagl who wrote about and practiced those principles, which comprised securing the populace, which sometimes required lethality, and ensuring an inhospitable environment for insurgency through non-lethal means. That was central idea behind the surge, to which all of Petraeus' braintrust, including Kilcullen, contributed.

The fact that Kilcullen now decides the invasion itself was "stupid" doesn't discount McCain's, and most everyone else's, analysis that the surge has largely succeeded.

My concern is that Kilcullen has allowed attacks against him to turn his public profile against the war with the statement "it was f*cking stupid". Whether it was stupid or not, many young soldiers followed Kilcullen's work religiously and made his precepts work in the field. I doubt they would have done so as effectively had they known Kilcullen thought the Iraq mission was "f*cking stupid". Like some others, Kilcullen now has to protest he was against it all along, to defend himself against attacks like Hayden's. Unfortunately, this is a dispiriting shock to young people who took risks and made enormous sacrifices to make the Petraeus/Kilcullen/surge strategy succeed, and believed in the worthiness of the mission. When it comes to a post-military, or post-Iraq career, some will find it necessary "switch sides" so to speak, and ingratiate themselves with those who oppose the war and the administration.

A how-to for policy makers as a general framework is great, but it's unfortunate that Kilcullen felt the need to ingratiate himself with today's "in" crowd with that comment. There are young soldiers out there, still laboring and giving their all, that do not believe it was "f*cking stupid" and are bewildered to hear this from Kilcullen.

soldiernolongeriniraq · 1 year ago

Two points:



"Unlike the 2006 Army/Marine Corps counterinsurgency field manual. written principally by Petraeus and Marine Gen. James Mattis, this new handbook is not intended to be a guide for counterinsurgency practitioners"



Conrad Crane, LTC Nagl, et al, might have something to add to this. While it's quite true that the FM carries the imprint of Petraeus and Mattis, the scut work was done by others in much lower grades, just like in most other FMs. It wasn't "written principally" by either the generals, and they would be the first to tell you that.



Second, in light of Kilcullen's pointed response to your interview with him on SWJ, as a journalist in training you might need to learn the art of "off the record." It appears as if Kilcullen believed his remark to you was off the record, and you've likely burned him as a future source.



While truth is always more important than access, readers aren't served by you losing access, are they?

spencer_ackerman · 1 year ago

@Soldiernolongeriniraq, Dave did not and does not believe that remark was off the record. I admitted to an error of judgment in including the remark in my piece, but I did not violate any ground rules, which I take to be sacred. I hope this clears that up.

soldiernolongeriniraq · 1 year ago

Fair enough, Spencer. The obvious rejoinder would be that K's use of profanity might have been tacitly assumed to be off the record because no mass market media outlet would've printed it.



He's not press stupid, perhaps just unaware about the more tolerant language diktat of the Washington Independent.



Recently, a picture of the poor man getting smooched by two women (one of whom I recognized) appeared on a blog using, uhhhh, curiously Tiger Beat language. While I'm not sure if anyone asked him, he probably wished that had never surfaced, too.



As a public figure, he certainly loses some expectation of privacy. But as a journalist, don't you have an obligation to protect your sources from ridicule, too?

DE Teodoru · 9 months ago

LBJ sent US troops to South Vietnam because Le Duan decided to change the guerrilla war into a regular units war of maneuvre using the North Vietnames Army (NVA). So our forces went into South Vietnam to fight North Vietnam's forces, not to fight a war against South Vietnamese guerrillas. By 1967, according to Hanoi Commanders, Westmoreland had won the attrition struggle, causing the desperate Tet 168 Offensive by Hanoi, setting off, not to win militarily, but to make points at the Paris negotiations. As Le Duc Tho told a Viet Communist Party Historical Review in 1984, the Viet Cong was a minor annoyance to Saigon and it had no power in the cities. As South Vietnam went from 85% rural to 75% urban, the peasant sea left the gurrilla high and dry, going "bourgeois" as urbanites, per Hanoi Radio. So, we lost politically but honorably. By contrast, it is no wonder that Kilcullen called Iraq "that stupid f--en war." WE CREATED THE IRAQ INSURGENCY because we went into Iraq intelligence blind, language deaf and culture dumb. To keep down our losses we humiliated the Iraqis and destroyed any feeling that we were liberators by behaving as occupiers, no, colonizers. The generals knew we were too few so they sought to terrorize Iraqis with out night time raids, mass arrests and massacre from the air with drones. We created 80% unemployment and removed the Saddam Welfare State, replacing it with "free-crooked-enterprise" for Bush's corporate friends, leaving Iraqis to starve. Bangladeshis were imported to do the job of serving our occupation because they were cheap and would not expose their crooked Halliburton employers to the press. Besides, no one trusted Iraqis in their own country . We offered them mysery and humiliation whil our "allies" the the Saudi/Kuwaiti bankers offered them cash to blow us up. Seeing the Sunni uprising and US Army's helplessness (except to massively massacre, a la Fallujah, as trained to do by the Israelis), the Iranians broke their deal with Bush and began supporting a Shia counterinsurgency. America's response was war crimes because the Pentagon followed Israel's advice: "the only good Arab is a dead Arab." The surge is a myth and Kilkullen is a mere propagandists who knows that Americans suffer from the "ain't my kid going to Iraq" disconnect syndrome and will accept any reasonable sounding excuse to cover the real reason for their support of the war: TO FILL 'ER UP CHEAP OUR SUVS. That the surge is a myth was obvious from the start in that it payed cash and guns to insurgents to support the US presence without caring a fig if the "elected" Baghdad Government was against it. Petreaus calls it "victory" because US casualties were temporarily decreased. But he calls it "fragile" because he knows that our killer squads did not destroy the hate of US occupation so if we stop paying them, the Sunnis will shoot us in the back as we leave. The surge pushed all the Shias into Iran's camp, including Prime Minister Maliki. For this Americans and ten times as many Iraqis payed with their lives? It is up to the autor of DERELICTION OF DUTY to call the genrals " star whores" for the way they were parrots of Rumsfeld's shoulders and then covered up the no-strategy phony "victory" Bush needed for long enough that the failure of Petraeus's COIN " fragile victory" collapses and will by then be called "Obama's War." NO one can claim to be a loyal American unless he/she considers all our troops as "my" kids and not allow to be done to them what he/she would not allow to be done with his/her biologic kids. Our generals are like our citizens: self-centered and short-sighted... that spells the end for the American version of the Roman Empire.