Worth a post.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q=NjRhYzBkN2Y5NWQyM2I4MjA1ZjNhMWEzOGE3MTQ0ODY=
Today’s counterinsurgency strategy does not shrink from the truth — and that is good news. I recently met an Egyptian doctor (and reformed member of an Islamist terrorist group) who told me: “You Americans have a very big problem. You prefer being politically correct to the telling the truth, and this enemy can only be defeated by telling the truth.”
As one Iraqi Army officer told me at the COIN academy, America did not understand the Iraqi mentality when it invaded. We did not’ know the customs and we ’did not know the history, and that made mistakes out of many of our most well-intentioned decisions.Most people remember the problems there were at first — soldiers disrespecting local customs without realizing it, touching the women, or the traditional headdress on a man. Those led fairly quickly to cultural sensitivity training. But that’s not what gets taught at the COIN academy. One of the courses — Cultural Intelligence — is structured like a graduate seminar, exploring all aspects of local culture and psychology. And it is not for the faint at heart: it does not make the mistake of preferring political correctness to the truth. One Iraqi Army officer, a seminar leader at the academy, confronted me with what he thought was the most glaring example of America’s ignorance of the local population. “Why did the Americans not fire on the mob when they started looting after the fall of Baghdad? Didn’t you realize that criminals would take over after this?”
Another participant went further. “What these people wanted after the fall of Saddam was absolute domination by the United States. They knew that the alternative was chaos.” He went on to say: “You need to understand, this is a very violent society. To get respect, you need to be ready, willing, and able to use force. Once you get people to understand that, then you engage them” as friends and allies — but not before.
We didn’t know much about Iraq when we got there. But we’ve learned a lot since — and very fast. That’s why, in the words of one Pentagon official, “When it comes to counterinsurgency, we’re the best in the world.”
