In a Volatile Region of Iraq, U.S. Military Takes Two Paths

By Ann Scott Tyson
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, September 15, 2006; Page A01

AL-FURAT, Iraq -- With a biker's bandanna tied under his helmet, the Special Forces team sergeant gunned a Humvee down a desert road in Iraq's volatile Anbar province. Skirting the restive town of Hit, the team of a dozen soldiers crossed the Euphrates River into an oasis of relative calm: the rural heartland of the powerful Albu Nimr tribe.

Green Berets skilled in working closely with indigenous forces have enlisted one of the largest and most influential tribes in Iraq to launch a regional police force -- a rarity in this Sunni insurgent stronghold. Working deals and favors over endless cups of spiced tea, they built up their wasta -- or pull -- with the ancient tribe, which boasts more than 300,000 members. They then began empowering the tribe to safeguard its territory and help interdict desert routes for insurgents and weapons. The goal, they say, is to spread security outward to envelop urban trouble spots such as Hit.

But the initial progress has been tempered by friction between the team of elite troops and the U.S. Army's battalion that oversees the region. At one point this year, the battalion's commander, uncomfortable with his lack of control over a team he saw as dangerously undisciplined, sought to expel it from his turf, officers on both sides acknowledged.

The conflict in the Anbar camp, while extreme, is not an isolated phenomenon in Iraq, U.S. officers say. It highlights two clashing approaches to the war: the heavy focus of many regular U.S. military units on sweeping combat operations, and the more fine-grained, patient work Special Forces teams put into building rapport with local leaders, security forces and the people -- work experts consider vital in a counterinsurgency.

"This war was fought with a conventional mind-set. The conventional units are bogged down in cities doing the same old thing," said the Special Forces team's 44-year-old sergeant, who like all the Green Berets interviewed was not allowed to be quoted by name for security reasons. "It's not about bulldozing Hit, driving through with a tank, with all the kids running away. . . . These insurgencies are defeated by personal relationships."

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Pentagon concludes US defeated in key Iraqi province

Bill Van Auken

A series of Pentagon and other government documents either released or leaked in the last week have underscored the deepening debacle confronting the US occupation of Iraq. The most startling among them is a classified report drafted by the US Marine Corps’ chief intelligence officer in Iraq concluding that the US has already lost in its effort to suppress the resistance in the country’s restive Anbar province. According to a Washington Post account of the secret document, the intelligence officer, Col. Pete Devlin, concluded that "there is almost nothing the US military can do to improve the political and social situation there."...

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