Early in April, Lieutenant General Gregory Newbold was lionized in Time Magazine and the Sunday talk shows for his dissent to Operation Iraqi Freedom. 
(See Daily Dispatch, Vol 2, #3 and Vol 2, #4)

But while Newbold basked in the media spotlight, a much more serious critic of the war, four-star Gen. Barry McCaffrey, was touring Iraq – and reaching a different conclusion. 

 Unless you get your nightly news from Brit Hume on Fox, you probably missed it.

McCaffrey was once Def. Sec. Donald Rumsfeld’s severest critic.
“Iraq is a military and political mess, and its not getting better,” wrote Gen. Barry McCaffrey in a Wall Street Journal opinion piece titled “Rumsfeld in Denial.” Nov. 30, 2003.  

McCaffrey, who commanded the 24th Infantry Division during Desert Storm, served as an assistant to General Colin Powell.  And he was a disciple of Colin Powell’s doctrine of overwhelming force, which put him at odds with Rumsfeld’s battle plan for Operation Iraqi Freedom.

The fall of Baghdad did little to change his mind.  As he told MSNBC, “We had none of the force structure that our fighting doctrine calls for to conduct land operations.”
 
On top of the 190,000 Army and Marine Corps troops Rumsfeld and Gen. Tommy Franks deployed, McCaffrey remained convinced that American success required an extra “two or three army divisions, an engineer brigade, a military police brigade, and an armored calvary regiment.”
[See: “Revenge of the ex-Generals”]

But this General, once known as a harsh critic of Operation Iraqi Freedom, has revised his assessment, both politically and militarily.

Following a fact-finding trip to Iraq, April13-20, 2006, McCaffery reported the following conclusions:

On American forces in Iraq:
“The morale, fighting effectiveness, and confidence of U.S. combat forces continue to be simply awe-inspiring…This is the most competent and brilliantly led military in a tactical and operational sense that we have ever fielded.”

On Iraqi combat troops:
“The Iraqi Army is real, growing, and willing to fight.  They now have lead action of a huge and rapidly expanding area and population.  The battalion level formations are in many cases excellent – most are adequate.”

On Iraqi police:
“The Iraqi police are beginning to show marked improvement in capability since MG Joe Peterson took over the program.  The National Police Commando Battalions are very capable – a few are superb and on par with the best U.S. SWAT units in terms of equipment, courage, and training.  Their intelligence collection capacity is better than ours in direct HUMINT.” (human intelligence operations — ed.)

On Al Qaeda in Iraq:
“The foreign jihadist fighters have been defeated as a strategic and operational threat to the creation of an Iraqi government… They cannot successfully stop the Iraqi police and army recruitment.  Their brutal attacks on the civil population are creating support for the emerging government.”

On the prospects for civil war:
“The bombing of the Samarra Mosque brought the country to the edge of all-out war.  However, the Iraqi Army did not crack, the moderates held, Sistani called for restraint, the Sunnis got a chill of fear seeing what could happen to them as a minority population, and the Coalition Forces suddenly were seen correctly as a vital force that could keep the population safe….”

The Political Situation:
“The foreign fighters have failed to spark open civil war from the Shia …The Iraqis are rejecting the vision of a religious state… The Iraqi political system is fragile but beginning to play a serious role in the debate over the big challenges facing the Iraqi state – oil, religion, territory, power separatism, and revenge… There is no reason why the U.S. cannot achieve our objectives in Iraq… a viable federal state under the rule of law which does not enslave its own people, threaten its neighbors, or produce weapons of mass destruction.”

Gen. McCaffrey once believed that absent 80,000 more coalition troops, U.S. failure in Iraq was certain.  His recent report of coalition progress is not based on a predisposition to optimism.  He lists a string of obstacles that could still derail our efforts.  Among them:

Overcompensation for the abuses of Abu Ghraib.
Gen. McCaffery finds that the chain-of-command confusion that resulted in prisoner abuse in the first year of Operation Iraqi Freedom has been rectified – perhaps too much so.  He describes the treatment of prisoners as “firm, professional, humane, and well supervised.”  However, he reports, many prisoners now assume that the U.S. routinely release detainees after 14 days.  This discourages co-operation.  The General also contends that many detainees game the system by filing unfounded claims of prisoner abuse, knowing that such claims trigger automatic investigations.

The historical political culture of Iraq.
McCaffery describes the widespread distrust among the tribes and sectarian groups – a distrust fostered by Saddam Hussein as an instrument of control during his 35-year tyranny.  Iraq, he says, “is a traumatized society with a malignant political culture.”

The hostility between the press and the military.
The general describes “a rapidly growing animosity in our deployed military forces toward the U.S. media.”  It is critical, he contends, that the military maintain its efforts to communicate to the American people through the media.  “Armies do not fight wars,” he writes. “Countries fight wars.”  In a democracy, if an army cannot inform the people it protects, its prospects for success are severely diminished.

Despite these obstacles, McCaffery’s perspective on American prospects in Iraq, informed by the facts on the ground, has shifted decisively.

“In my view,” he writes, “the Iraqis are likely to successfully create a governing entity.  The intelligence picture strongly portrays a population that wants a federal Iraq, wants a national Army, rejects AIF [anti-Iraq forces] as a political future for the nation, and is optimistic that their life can be better in the coming years.  Unlike the Balkans, the Iraqis want this to work.”

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