Why Iraq isn146;t D-Day

It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry when you hear President Bush comparing D-Day to the US invasion of Iraq and the war on terrorism. If President Franklin Roosevelt had thrown the meagre manpower resources into D-Day that George Bush threw into Iraq a year ago, France would be a German-speaking country today.

Alas, it is too late now to send a lot more US troops, if we had them. Now that the interim Iraqi government is assuming sovereignty, it will be increasingly important for US forces to assume a lower profile and eliminate any impression that the new government is our puppet.

The whole strategy of the bad guys in Iraq now is to wreak havoc and try to provoke a US reaction that might accidentally kill a lot of Iraqis8212;in the hope that this will embarrass and delegitimise the new Iraqi officials.

We are up against some really evil, cynical forces: die-hard Baathists, Qaeda-inspired Islamists and criminals. They continue to kill large numbers of innocent Iraqis without ever spelling out a political demand. That8217;s because their only interest is that America fail. Because if the US succeeds in tilting Iraq onto a more progressive track, Baathism and Islamism will be diminished everywhere.

There is nothing more difficult to fight than an enemy whose only interest is that you fail. That kind of enemy can only be overwhelmed and crushed. But the D-Day solution for Iraq is not for America to throw all its troops into Iraq. As I said, it8217;s too late for that. It is for America to throw all its resources into getting Iraqi soldiers trained and able to take on their own opposition. Only Iraqis will find out who their bad guys are.

As the Stanford University democracy specialist Larry Diamond, a former US adviser in Baghdad, put it: 8216;8216;If you don8217;t have security in Iraq, you don8217;t have anything. We have to throw everything we have8212;everything8212;into getting the new Iraqi forces operating.8217;8217;

How close are we to that? I called Lt Gen David Petraeus in Baghdad, the widely respected US commander for rebuilding the Iraqi army. He told me that contracts for more than 3 billion worth of equipment, uniforms, training facilities, weaponry, bases and communications gear for the new Iraqi army are finally being signed and executed8212;so by the end of summer, a lot of it should be getting to units. Moreover, he said, the first battalion of Iraqi internal security forces, trained for urban warfare, will be deployed in Baghdad. If the training stays on schedule, says Petraeus, a critical mass of trained Iraqi forces should be up and running by January, in time for elections.

8216;8216;Early on, just after we got here, we talked a lot about how to win Iraqi hearts and minds,8217;8217; Petraeus said. 8216;8216;But we understand now that what we really need is for them to love the new Iraq. That is what needs to happen. Bombs are going to go off every day, but what we need to do is somehow keep looking to the longer term and focus on building the new Iraq. This is really, really hard work.8217;8217;

That8217;s what this D-Day looks like. It is not a single charge up a Normandy beach, but a long, hard slog to train an Iraqi army to finish the war that we started. This is the Iraqis8217; real war of independence. If they beat back the bad guys and hold elections, they8217;ll be free of us and the worst of their past. If they don8217;t or can8217;t, this will be our Waterloo, and theirs.

8212; The New York Times