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Ralph Peters is a regular columnist with the New
York Post.
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 The
Gangs of Baghdad
Operation Swarmer & Ahmed Capone…
[Ralph
Peters] 3/20/06
As
Operation Swarmer corners terrorists and insurgents north of
Baghdad,
the bloodshed elsewhere remains far below the civil-war level.
Rogue Iraqis are turning on each other. You're seeing gangland
violence on amphetamines.
Think
of it as the Mafia shooting it out with the Ku Klux Klan
and the IRA. With automatic weapons and car bombs.
Some
of the violent factions - notably the foreign terrorists
- are driven by a demented religious vision. Others, such
as the Sunni insurgents, fight for turf. Shia militias seek
political power. And every faction employs Iraq's criminal
element to do its dirty-work.
The
gangs are now at each other's throats. A lot of those
bodies turning up aren't innocent democrats. Many are
thugs who enraged other thugs.
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Ralph
Peters is a retired Army officer and the author of 19 books,
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Once
it settles its own turf battles, the new Iraqi government
isn't going to face a civil war with
organized armies backed by artillery and tanks fighting pitched
battles. Iraq's leaders will have to be, first and foremost,
gangbusters.
Iraq
doesn't need a Grant or Sherman.
It needs an Elliot Ness. On steroids.
Iraqis
hate the foreign terrorists of al Qaeda and its ilk, who
they view as ravaging their country. They
also despise the bullies from the militias. They've had
enough of guns, blood and death. They want peace in the streets.
But achieving that peace will take time. (It took us a century
to destroy the KKK - the Iraqis are moving faster than we did.)
Our
own mistakes early on fed into the present troubles. We never
had enough troops on the ground, and the
Pentagon's civilian leadership made a colossal error by
not imposing the rule of law the moment we reached Baghdad.
Those
blunders may be unforgivable, but they're
far from insurmountable. Because the Iraqis themselves won't
give in to the "gangs of Baghdad."
As
this column's written, U.S. and Iraqi
forces have embarked on a major air and ground operation near
Samarra, Operation Swarmer. It's a classic air assault
designed to catch the enemy off-balance. I can tell you that
the operation's been very carefully planned.
You'll
hear reflexive complaints that the need for a new offensive
suggests some sort of failure,
but the contrary is true. This current strike has been enabled
by a dramatic increase in tip-offs from Iraqis sick of the
killers in their midst, by improved U.S. intelligence operations
- and by the maturing capabilities of the Iraqi military.
The
Iraqis want the gangs gone - and they're
doing something about it.
This
doesn't mean that everything's
happy-face. The Iraqi police remain factionalized and undependable
- and the cops are crucial to breaking the power of gangs anywhere.
Militias will have to be disarmed. That's going to be one
of the toughest challenges since the fall of Saddam.
Many
Iraqi politicians can't see past
their personal or party interests to the national interest
(sound familiar?). And Saddam - not the Coalition - left the
country in a physical and moral shambles.
So
let me share my greatest fear. It's
not the terrorists. Or that we'll bail out on the Iraqis
- I don't think we will. It's that we may not be planning
adequately for the possibility (not probability) that
Iraq may fail to congeal as a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional
democracy.
The
gangs can't win, but Iraq's leaders
could fail.
Laying
down a bet today, I'd wager on
the Iraqis muddling through to a reasonable, if flawed, success.
My concern is that our civilian leadership, which refused to
plan adequately for the aftermath of war, now may be failing
to plan for all potential outcomes.
The lesson of our inadequate post-war planning
is that wishful thinking is no substitute for a strategy. You
may hope for the best, but the sound military rule is always to
plan for the worst.
As
this column recommended three years ago, we should have broken
Iraq into three pieces immediately after
Baghdad fell. We didn't. That choice may have been the
right one; we don't yet know. Anyone who tells you that
Iraq is bound either to succeed or to fail is blowing smoke.
Only the future will tell.
But
just in case the new Iraq founders on factional squabbling
and a deficient political culture, we
need to have contingency plans to keep the state's breakup
as peaceful as possible. That means keeping Iran, Turkey and
Syria out of a decomposing country.
Don't misunderstand: The odds are good
that Iraq will continue to move forward in fits and starts
toward a far better future than its people could have had under
Saddam. But while you work for the best outcome, you prepare
for the worst. That's simple common sense. Is the administration
planning ahead, or just crossing its fingers?
Ultimately,
strategy is like dating: Always have
Plan B. -ONE-
Ralph
Peters says he has been privileged to spend the last few
weeks with America's men and women in uniform.
Ralph Peters'
latest book is New
Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy
This
piece first appeared in the New York Post
copyright 2006 - NY Post
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