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The fighting had stopped.  The war was won. With the unfolding mess in Syria, and the meddling of Iran, there was plenty of justification to maintain a presence. And, if we had, this whole ISIL thing could not have happened.  ISIL did not rise up internally, it came from outside of the Iraqi border, from areas where we hadn't done anything, through areas we could and should have been stationed. (The parallels to 1975 are not lost on me. It was not the VC that brought down Saigon.  Heck, at least Baghdad still stands, even though their whole government seems to have become a proxy for Iran now.)

Obama had decided, politically, to pull us out.  The SOFA negotiations became half-hearted jokes, with the incoming administration already making its intent clear.

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How exactly you 'win hearts and minds' against people with a theological determination to subjugate others is a much more difficult case to make.

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It's hard to get results with your hands tied behind your back.

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It's not the military, it's the politicians. Let our military off the leash, or have us in a fight that is for defense of the nation from an actual military aggressor; and watch our military lay waste to our enemies.

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That is narrative the Iraqis put out, but remember the Iraqis according to them have never lost a war.  Do you think they would admit that the US targeting the specific tribe that was doing most of the foreign fighter trafficking and killing a large portion of their male population to the point they gave us a former Army Col to work with to go after the other tribes in the area?

Now I understand where you're coming from, though I don't agree. The Sheikhs joined sides with Americans not because their people took such appalling losses from us, but because they were at war with AQI, had been for a little bit, and the Americans became unlikely bed mates. Nothing I've read (and I've read alot about it) shows any correlation between body counts and the Awakening movement. Quite the opposite really. Seems like there were quite a few volunteers in Anbar to join the IP and the CLC militias once that movement kicked in, enough to garrison major cities like Ramadi, Fallujah, and every other Sunni Triangle city. How did this happen if they were all dead?    

I've heard of the revisionist theory that we killed our way to peace in Anbar and that's why the Awakening happening but this is the first time I've ever seen it in person. Do you completely discount the role played by people like McFarland, Lechner, and Patriquin?

This dude right here is why we almost won in Iraq:
http://www.amazon.com/Soldiers-Dream-Captain-Patriquin-Awakening/dp/B00C01I09U


God rest his soul...

The Chairman of the JCS , Adm Mullen, was fond of saying “we cannot kill our way to victory.”  That was political drivel.  If the Taliban weren’t killing people, there would not be 100,000 Americans troops in AFG.   It was comparable to a police chief saying “Arrest are not the solution for Crime”-A vacuity sure to result in fewer arrests.  War centers upon killing.  The grunts knew that, even if their own generals did not.   Killing was not the solution, but it was the means to a solution.

When generals bemoaned the killing, there were trying to make themselves seem moral and intellectually enlighten, while indicating their shallow understanding of what their grunts were doing day after day.

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I disagree that it has been defeated.  It wins every engagement it undertakes.  The problem is that when you define "victory" as making a bunch of savages into civilized men you set yourself up for failure.  Even the Romans took generations to turn places like Gaul and Briton into some semblance of civilization.  

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I disagree that it has been defeated.  It wins every engagement it undertakes.  The problem is that when you define "victory" as making a bunch of savages into civilized men you set yourself up for failure.  Even the Romans took generations to turn places like Gaul and Briton into some semblance of civilization.  

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the only reason our military does not get every victory is politicians

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So because at the squad level the majority of operations are kinetic means that COIN doctrine wasn't implemented? And that when suddenly "peace broke out" it was because somehow the enemy capitulated? At what point did that happen? What was the operation that broke the Iraqi's back? How collective were the insurgent groups operating in Anbar province? How many were there, when did they hold leadership conferences to discuss peace with the US military because they were losing too many people?    

COIN wasn't implemented anywhere in Iraq in 2004 because there was a national uprising. Its hard to create building programs and such when every time you roll out the wire its a fight for your life. But that had nothing to do with failure in COIN policy. It had to do with the Ba'athist led insurgency having a full year to get their shit together, the organization of the new insurgency groups like AQI gaining power, anger and resentment against the US led coalition fueled by the stupid fucks at Abu Graib. It had to do with the US trying to create Iraqi military run forces out of scratch from dogshit and having them fail. It was trying to cut out the Sheikhs from every single deal because we wanted to support a national elected govt and not "gangsters," who actually controlled everything. It was from the sectarian violence running amok as AQI blew up massive Shia numbers, including famous mosques, in an attempt to start a civil war and regional Arab/Gulf state war. It was caused by fucktards in charge of Iraq like Sanchez and Casey who couldn't pour piss out of a boot if the instructions were on the heel. Not to mention their staffs who thought the only way to quell uprising is by resorting to massacres...

In 2004, our military as a whole in Iraq was only trained or prepared to break shit, not govern shit. That changed only after common sense military leaders were given a voice and free reign to institute policies such as the Awakening. If the democrats hadn't won the congressional election in 2006 largely over Iraq (forcing Rumsfield's sorry ass finally to get fired), Bush and the Pentagon would never had been desperate enough to allow mavericks to do their thing and actually implement proper COIN tactics. We'd probably still be trying to do it hard, going gung ho, "kill them all", we'd still fighting a combined Sunni population as well the Madhi Army, instead of having made peace with a high majority of the Sunni insurgent groups and having a cease fire with the Mahdi Army. Or ran away in gross defeat.


Instead we stopped focusing on killing people and started working on winning them over. Having AQI do most of the recruiting helped, since they were insufferable assholes that basically pushed most moderate Sunnis into our camp. The enemy of my enemy is my friend.

Please point me to any articles in Leatherneck, Marine Corps Gazette, Marine Corps Times, Washington Post, hell, even the National Enquirer, that support your theories. Link me to another memoirs of an officer who'd served, or a political leader's autobiography. Or a history account of the war. I get your point of view, I want to read it from others. Thus far, the most honest accounts I've read favored the "key leader engagement" route over the "kinetic" side. Having been in country when the Awakening kicked in, and having seen Anbar province afterwards, I'd definitely say something right happened and it probably wasn't that we finally capture/killed enough people. Because I remember clearly large groups of CLC militia, with well maintained weapons who absolutely knew what they were doing, who were suddenly working for the US military in large groups. These dudes were insurgents the months before. They didn't switch sides because we killed their neighbors or cousins, it was because their Sheikhs told them to, and we won the Sheikhs by promising them political power and allying with them against AQI and the Shia govt death squads.

War is more than just breaking shit.  

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I already admitted that Mattis and the 1st Marine Division was wrong in our 04 approach; that actual caused the more of the insurgency.  The softness we showed up front and not crushing Fallujah caused the insurgency to grow.   But that is kind of the point the insurgency was fuelled by weakness and only when we started killing a lot of people did the local start to change their minds.   Qiam was the most  violent place in Iraq for most of 05, after steal curtain and by mid 06,you could patrol in a reduced state of alert and no enemy contact because they knew we would crush them.
The post awaking surge "victory" was not a victory but instead us paying people not to fight; similar to what many of our allies do in AFG

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Nation building can be done. You need to pick the group you want to prop up and kill everyone else. You also need a strong American presence to reshape the government and culture. We did it in Germany, Italy, Korea, and Japan.





Its that killing everyone else part that we won't let the military do.