What Iraq Really Needs is an Elliot Ness

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THE GANGS OF BAGHDAD

Ralph Peters

March 17, 2006 -- OPERATION SWARMER & AHMED CAPONE

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.

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.

Ralph Peters' latest book is "New Glory: Expanding America's Global Supremacy."

http://www.nypost.com/postopinion/opedcolumnists/61042.htm