When it comes to U.S. casualties in Iraq, more damage has been done by improvised explosive devices (IEDs) than any other culprit.
Thankfully, a more effective strategy in dealing with roadside bombs has saved countless American lives.
When Army Capt. Jeremy Gwinn’s company patrolled Baghdad in 2005, the approach toward roadside bombs was simple: avoid them or die.
By early 2006, that strategy had begun to shift: Instead of hunting for the bombs, the soldiers hunted for bombmakers. “We started to know a lot of people in the community and develop contacts,” recalls Gwinn, now a major. “There was a noticeable change … in the way we were doing things.”
Today, that change has swept across Iraq, and attacks using improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, have declined steadily for eight months. Casualties from the bombs are at their lowest point since 2003, the first year of the war. Troops have seized twice as many weapons caches this year as they did all of last.
“Just about every single night, we are identifying and engaging one or more cells caught in the act of planting IEDs,” Gen. David Petraeus, head of U.S. forces in Iraq, said in an interview.
Obviously, this is great news. IEDs have easily been the number one killer of American troops — 60% of all combat deaths have come from IEDs — and now this fundamental shift in how to deal with the weapons has made an enormous difference.
In the interest of accountability, though, it’s worth remembering that the IED strategy that’s working now was recommended years ago — but was rejected by the Bush administration.
[A] USA TODAY investigation shows that the strategy now used to defeat the bombmaking networks and stabilize Iraq was ignored or rejected for years by key decision-makers. As early as 2004, when roadside bombs already were killing scores of troops, a top military consultant invited to address two dozen generals offered a “strategic alternative” for beating the insurgency and IEDs.
That plan and others mirroring the counterinsurgency blueprint that the Pentagon now hails as a success were pitched repeatedly in memos and presentations during the following two years, at meetings that included then-Defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and Vice President Cheney’s chief of staff, Lewis “Scooter” Libby.
The core of the strategy: Clear insurgents from key areas and provide security to win over Iraqis, who would respond by helping U.S. forces break IED networks and defeat the insurgency.
Bush administration officials, however, remained wedded to the idea that training the Iraqi army and leaving the country would suffice. Officials, including Cheney, insisted the insurgency was dying. Those pronouncements delayed the Pentagon from embracing new plans to stop IEDs and investing in better armored vehicles that allow troops to patrol more freely, documents and interviews show. (emphasis added)
White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe says the administration weighed all strategy options and made “appropriate decisions.”
But it’s pretty clear the decisions weren’t “appropriate,” isn’t it? If they were, Bush and Cheney wouldn’t have been so catastrophically wrong.
Indeed, by all indications, this is yet another in a long line of examples in which the White House made decisions based on what it wanted to believe, rather than what the circumstances required. The gang that likes to “make its own reality” believed there was no insurgency, and even if there was, it would so be beaten into submission. There was no need to worry about the IEDs — the bad guys were in their “last throes.”
Except they weren’t, and the life-saving strategy was dismissed as unnecessary. The costs of the Bush gang’s error has been devastating.