[xoxoxoBruce]

Yon, on Anbar, talks perspectives.

For a time, Fallujah garnered nearly 100% of the media battle-stage. A speck of a city in a dysfunctional country standing toe-to-toe with a Super Power whose guns were hot and loaded. In the eyes of many, Fallujah was the frog strangling the stork, the defiant mouse giving the finger to the eagle, or more nobly, the Tankman of Tiananmen Square. The fact that Fallujah’s “defiance,” like the attacks on 9/11, was delivered in the form of celebratory murder was carefully omitted from the publicity campaign. (Hollywood press agents have nothing on al Qaeda’s media squad.)
~snip~
Many Vietnam veterans fear that our leaders never learned the lessons they paid dearly for. And mostly they are right. However, some of our officers—like James Mattis and David Petraeus—have studied the lessons of Vietnam in great detail. But for a long time, although these two officers realized we were in the middle of an insurgency, it was tantamount to “un-American” to call insurgents insurgents. They were “dead-enders,” and since there was no insurgency, there was scant need for counterinsurgency warfare. Had these two officers been running this war from the beginning, it probably would be finished by now.

It took enormous guts to take the job at this stage of the war, when it’s like an airplane with one of the wings blown off, and there is this pilot in the back of the airplane who easily could have parachuted out the back—where some of the others already have gone—but instead he says, “I can still fly this thing!” Had David Petraeus jumped and landed safely, he’d still have been one of the few who could land with a sterling reputation after his previous commands here. If this jet crashes while Petraeus is flying it, we will always know that the best of the best did not jump out the back; he ran to the cockpit.

Despite that Petraeus has the cockpit as under control as it can be, the jet is still nosing down. The only way this is going to work is if the majority of the subordinate commanders, and our troops, are applying the difficult lessons of counterinsurgency. Lessons that we failed to apply for most of the first few years of this war. Lessons our Vietnam veterans paid for in full. Lessons lost on others from wars here long ago and seldom mentioned these days. Lessons whispered by the Ghosts of Anbar.(The ghosts of Anbar he's refering to are pictures of Aussie and Brit grave markers from WW I & WW II era)

~snip~

The sheiks of Anbar turned against al Qaeda because the sheiks are businessmen, and al Qaeda is bad for business. But they didn’t suddenly trust Americans just because they no longer trusted al Qaeda. They are not suddenly blood allies. This is business, and that’s fine, because if there is one thing America is good at, it’s business.

But in Anbar a perspective less lofty but infinitely more practical has evolved which acknowledges that, first and foremost, peace is better for business and self-interest is a more reliable motive for cooperation than is self-sacrifice.

Winning the hearts and minds of businessmen with greed, is probably a better bet than preaching democracy.