Unity of Effort

This is the editorial I mentioned in yesterday's entry. I think it is important enough to reproduce here:

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WONDER LAND
By DANIEL HENNINGER

'Unity of Effort'

January 12, 2007; Page A12

Immediately after the president's speech, House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer said, "I heard nothing new." Nothing? When Gen. David Petraeus takes command of U.S. forces in Iraq, it will mark the start of an historic turn in military strategy in Iraq and perhaps in U.S. war-fighting doctrine.

The U.S.'s primary problem in Iraq, manifest across 2006, has been an urban insurgency in a 30-mile radius around Baghdad and in Anbar province. The Petraeus command is the overdue beginning of the counterinsurgency.

This isn't a one-off effort as at Fallujah, but counterinsurgency as daily U.S. military policy. It is the product of an enormous amount of self-criticism and analysis done by military and civilian analysts in and out of government. It does not mean, as often suggested the past 24 hours, that 20,000 U.S. troops are now going to run out and look for gun battles with insurgents in back alleys.

In broadest outline, the plan divides Baghdad into nine districts, essentially neighborhoods. The job of providing daily security in each district will be undertaken by an Iraqi army brigade of several thousand soldiers, a U.S. support battalion of up to 1,000 troops, and most importantly, about 20 U.S. military "embeds" or advisers.

Some of us predicted late last year that advisory embeds would be part of the new Bush strategy on reading National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley's November memo of advice to the president in the New York Times. After a late November trip to Iraq, Mr. Hadley said four times in the memo that the U.S. should embed coalition forces with Iraq's army and dysfunctional police.

The source of this idea, in part, was a successful Marine experiment in Anbar province. Rather than attach just a single U.S. military adviser to an Iraqi commander at the division level, the Marines put advisers alongside Iraqi units down to the NCO level. They stayed with and fought with their Iraqi counterparts 24/7. And the Marines reported that the Iraqis fought with more confidence and effect, aka spine-stiffening.

In 2004, a similar but broader effort at integration between U.S. and Iraqi forces was planned in Anbar province by Marine Maj. Gen. James Mattis. The Mattis plan is summarized in the middle of the Army's new Counterinsurgency Manual, released just last month. The manual's drafting was overseen by Gen. David Petraeus, who will now direct the U.S. military effort in the neighborhoods of Baghdad. It's not a coincidence. The manual describes in detail the purpose, theory, tactics and problems (including spikes in violence and casualties) likely to emerge during the new counterinsurgency strategy.

At the end of the manual there is a bibliography of books, studies and articles on fighting insurgency. It includes classics, such as Alistair Horne's "A Savage War of Peace," but what's interesting is how many of them were published since 2003, amid the Iraq war. Out of this effort has emerged a "best practices" for the U.S. when fighting an insurgency, as now.

Whether the U.S. should have done this back when Abu Musab al-Zarqawi and his foreign suicide bombers emerged is a legitimate question. The point is this: The Iraq violence has not been running like an untended open hydrant. Some of our best and brightest have been thinking hard about how to shut the valve. Last month AEI released a plan reflecting similar counterinsurgency ideas by military specialist Fred Kagan and the Army's former vice chief of staff, Gen. Jack Keane.

In November, the Bush administration joined the rethinking. The participants in that process looked at the whole range of criticisms and formal critiques of what the U.S. had been doing in Iraq to that point. They concluded the one thing that wouldn't change is the goal, mainly establishing a democratic government in Iraq. What would change, heretofore a nonsubject, were the strategic concept and the level of resources.

Some of this came out of Gen. Petraeus's Counterinsurgency Manual, some from U.S. commanders in the field and some from the military think tanks. Suggestions that had gotten a "no" before, now got a "yes."

Is it all a day late and a dollar short? Maybe. Some 20,000 more troops may be insufficient. The inevitable front-page casualty reports and blood-soaked photos may still drain the will of domestic pundits. But what we are seeing in the Petraeus command is the kind of step back that the military sometimes excels at. This the U.S. military at its potential best -- remaking itself, as it did with the transition to training a volunteer army after Vietnam.

It is not the least bit obvious that this counterinsurgency plan will fail, and only the most churlishly neurotic Bush hater would want it to. The stakes for the region and the war on terror have been described many times. There is another reason: How this ends will have an important effect on the morale of our officer corps, the people who must summon the gumption to protect us. They deserve a final chance to succeed. This is the chance.

An idea one finds in the counterinsurgency literature, crucial to the success of any such strategy, is known as "unity of effort." Basically, it means all oars pulling in the same direction. The Iraqi government, for instance, has told the U.S. it will stop interfering in the military's rules of engagement. Tuesday's victorious 10-hour battle on Baghdad's Haifa Street, by a combined U.S.-Iraqi force, looked like a successful test of unified effort. It remains to discover whether anything resembling unity of effort can be achieved along Constitution Avenue.

Nothing would more raise the tenor of this debate than if some member of the Democratic Party would take ownership of the subject of military doctrine in Iraq. On the evidence of their statements the past 24 hours, barely a Democrat exists with has a clue of what Gen. Petraeus is about to do or why.

Sen. Barack Obama, presidential second-runner, said, "We are not going to babysit a civil war." Democrats will get a chance soon at Senate confirmation hearings to question Gen. Petraeus. Babysitter is not the word he brings to mind. His appointment is the result of a ferment in American military thinking on Iraq that goes well past George Bush "alone." They should hear him out before deciding whether to support this effort, or remain in the opposition.

• Write to henninger@wsj.com