One of the criticisms we level regularly at journalists is that they’re often possessed of pretty short memories.
We’ve seen this in some respects in the coverage over the last couple days concerning the proposal — put forward by John McCain, Joe Lieberman and the American Enterprise Institute’s Fred Kagan — for the United States to increase the number of troops in Iraq in order to secure and stabilize that savaged country.
Missing from virtually all of the coverage of this proposal is a little thing called Operation Forward Together, which was launched during the summer of ’06 in Baghdad. It’s an odd omission, since Forward Together was pretty much exactly what the advocates of the “go big” strategy have in mind, and there are lessons in what happened. As part of the operation about 6,000 Iraqi security forces were sent to Baghdad, along with about 5,500 additional American troops, to try and tamp down the spiraling violence in that city.
But despite McCain, Lieberman and Kagan’s conviction that more troops equals victory, Forward Together didn’t work out so well. On October 20, the Washington Post reported that according to the Army itself, the tactic failed: “A two-month U.S.-Iraqi military operation to stem sectarian bloodshed and insurgent attacks in Baghdad has failed to reduce the violence, which has surged 22 percent in the capital in the last three weeks, much of it in areas where the military has focused its efforts … The assessment by Army Maj. Gen. William B. Caldwell IV followed a 43 percent spike in attacks on U.S. and Iraqi forces in the capital since midsummer that has pushed U.S. military fatalities to their highest rates in more than a year.”
Still, reporters have been treating the more-troops argument as though it were actually something new under the sun, while ignoring a failed test case — and one that is ongoing.
We saw the at-times ahistorical nature of the press again this morning in the New York Times, in a piece that looked at the change in leadership that the American military is experiencing in Iraq. Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the second-highest ranking American officer in Iraq, is departing, while Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno is stepping in to take his place. On Odierno, the Times said that concerning the troop increase, he “is bullish, seeing a troop increase as a way for American and Iraqi troops to gain the upper hand in Baghdad and Anbar Province, a desert region virtually overrun by Sunni insurgents, the officials say.”
That’s a pretty neutral statement, and since Odierno doesn’t call the shots over how many troops are at his disposal, it’s a decision that is largely out of his hands. Still, since he is going to be in control of combat operations in Iraq, it’s vitally important that we know what he would do with these troops if he were given them. So it’s surprising that the article didn’t mention Odierno’s storied history in Iraq, dating back to when he commanded the 4th Infantry Division in the Tikrit region from March 2003 to April 2004.
In his book Fiasco: The American Military Adventure in Iraq, Washington Post writer Thomas E. Ricks was pretty tough on Odierno’s tactics, which, “according to numerous Army internal reports and interviews with military commanders, alienated large parts of the population.”
An official Marine Corps history of the transfer of responsibility of the area around Tikrit from the Marine First Division to Odierno’s 4th ID in April 2003 noted that the Corps disagreed with his strong-arm tactics. “Stores that had re-opened quickly closed back up as the people once again evacuated the streets, adjusting to the new security tactics. A budding cooperative environment between the citizens and American forces was quickly snuffed out. The new adversarial relationship would become a major source of trouble in the coming months.”
According to Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s book Cobra II, when the Marine First Division left, “it left convinced that the good work it had done would soon be undone by 4th ID heavy-handedness.” Those are some pretty significant criticisms of the man who is set to lead all combat troops in Iraq. And it’s significant that the Times story left them out.
We realize that every story can’t do everything at once, but now that Lt. Gen. Odierno is set to become the operational commander of combat operations in Iraq, shouldn’t the Times‘ readers be reminded a little of his history in the war?
Paul McLeary is a former CJR staff writer. Since 2008, he has covered the Pentagon for Foreign Policy, Defense News, Breaking Defense, and other outlets. He is currently a defense reporter for Politico.