Psst! Hey! We Won the War! Pass It On…

Iraq’s bloody Anbar Province is no longer an American battlefield.
Anbar, along with Baghdad, was the birthplace of the Iraqi Insurrection, which developed after we beat Iraq’s conventional forces in 2003 without any kind of cogent plan for military government afterward. Thank you Donald Rumsfeld and President Bush.
Beginning as the kind of lawless destruction and looting you typically get when no one is in charge of enforcing the law after a war, the Insurrection evolved into a loose coalition of tribes and Sunni veterans of Saddam Hussein’s army out to make the U.S. Occupation of Iraq as costly (and brief) as possible.
The world’s attention was finally caught by the insurrectionists when they ambushed a carfull of Blackwater civilian security personnel in Fallujah, lynched them and strung up their mutilated remains on a bridge.
Our response was slow in coming, but the city of Fallujah was to enter the annals of the U.S. Marines as one of its great battlefields. We fought in that city repeatedly, and in Ramadi, and along the highways of the province. We fought two enemies in Anbar, the Sunnis themselves and Al Qaeda in Iraq (AQI), which was made up mostly of foreign fighters.
We were on the defensive. We reacted to events. We won our battles, but typically went back to our snug bases after victory, leaving the battlefields, like Ramadi and Fallujah for the enemy to reclaim. We did not have the confidence of the civilian population, who said nothing when they knew when and where improvised explosive devices (IEDs) were being planted to mine the highways. Amputated limbs and grisly head wounds caused by the IEDs became symbolic of our war there.
In February 2007, General David Petraeus took command of coalition forces in Iraq. He authored The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century, which had become the Army’s counterinsurgency manual. Now he would apply it’s precepts practically.
Petraeus told Congress before shipping out that his plan called for decentralizing U.S. forces, especially in places like Baghdad. We would no longer concentrate in places like Camp Liberty, but go out to meet the enemy and stay on the battlefield after we’d won. It would require more troops to do this, which Bush and his new Defense Secretary provided –the famous Surge.
One thing that makes a commander great is that he is lucky. AQI made Petraeus lucky by acting like a combination occupying army, de facto government and Gestapo in Anbar Province. These Jordanians, Saudis and Syrians tried to run the Sunni province using terror and murder to enforce their fundamentalist Islamist rule over the native clans and their sheikhs. The Sunnis turned to the Americans for help just prior to Petraeus’ command.
Petraeus eagerly accepted the friendship of our erstwhile Sunni enemies and the two sides began to work in concert to crush AQI between them. With the people themselves on our side now, letting us know who were planting IEDs and where and where the enemy was basing their forces, American casualties began to taper off while AQI deaths and captures soared. Together, the Coalition armies, the Iraqi Army and the Sunnis drove AQI out of Anbar.
And now with AQI (for the moment) thoroughly beaten, with a competent Iraqi Army in existence, with the civilian government gaining more confidence and credibility every day ruling over a united Sunni-Shi’a Iraq, the most violent province of the war, Anbar, has been turned over to complete Iraqi control.
You might have missed the news, because the announcement came while Gustav threatened New Orleans, while Sarah Palin and her family was in the news and the Republican Convention was getting under way.
That’s how a modern war ends these days –slowly, gradually and unspectacularly. There is no surrender ceremony on the USS Missouri, just a statement to the press that, in effect, the war is over and we won.