In his recent speech, the President referred to tactics that many in the military are familiar with, including ‘clean and sweep’ and door-to-door home “visits” by U.S. military personnel. These approaches have failed miserably during the nearly four years of occupation, and have served to alienate and enrage the Iraqis against the U.S. presence in their communities. Clean and sweep operations haven’t worked, and they never will. The problem, contrary to what Bush states, is not that we have neglected certain areas or haven’t remained in one area long enough to ‘hold’ it after the sweep. The problem is that this is not a war of geography in which terrain can be “cleared” of resistance and “held.”

The people that Bush tries to paint as ‘terrorists’ are really local antagonists. They are citizens of Iraq who feel that the U.S. military is so oppressive that it is worth destroying one Humvee at a time. When sweeps are conducted the insurgents merely go to ground, sitting passively in their homes with their families as our soldiers rifle through their belongings in a vain attempt to find contraband that isn’t there, or is so well hidden that it would take far too long to uncover in the sweep of such a large area. They will always have more time to hide than we have to search. The entire time, American soldiers wearing full body armor and supported by armored vehicles and aircraft are breaking down doors, pulling up carpets and otherwise tearing the house apart. They will not, of course, put everything back in its place when they are done. The soldiers will speak directly to women, giving them orders and sometimes even making physical contact in order to get the women clustered together in one room, where they are easily controlled. The damage done to the familial and tribal honor by ignoring the patriarchal rules of this culture causes a hundredfold more harm than the success gained in these sweeps. There are hundreds of thousands of people who have had their houses tornadoed countless times in a vain attempt to find the ‘terrorists,’ and all of them are now supporters of the resistance.

Bush and his commanders continue to speak in terms of physical successes in which we kill the ‘terrorists.’ Because the American people have had such myopic rhetoric shoved down their throats so many times, it is impossible for them to see that this war is already lost; it is lost in the minds of the Iraqi people. The Iraqis see us as the enemy now, and for every AK-47 and artillery shell that we capture from the myriad insurgent factions during a sweep, those factions will gain a far more valuable gift in the form of young men and women willing to fight to defend their families’ honor. Later, when the sweep is over and our troops attempt to ‘hold’ the swept area, they will be attacked by IEDs every time they turn around. Many of those IEDs are preplanted, and are able to remain emplaced for up to a month before they are detonated. Others will be hastily buried every time the Americans are a couple blocks away, heading into another tragedy. It is so easy, 12 year-old boys do it with laughable ease.

In his speech, President Bush said that the Maliki government risks losing the support of the Iraqi people. The Maliki government does not have the support of the Iraqi people, and never has. The government has no legitimacy in the eyes of ordinary Iraqis. Legitimate governments levy taxes, control their borders, police their territory and provide social services. The Iraqi people have not seen any of these actions take place since 2003, when the existing government was uninstalled. The entire governmental infrastructure was deleted as if it was a faulty version of Windows that was due for a quick, easy upgrade-just pop in the “democracy” cd, hit “enter.”
The Iraqi population never sees hide nor hair of their national “government,” unless they turn on the television and watch Maliki speak whilst he is protected by the U.S. State Department’s private security contractors (who earn in one month what a uniformed soldier will earn in his entire deployment, by the way).

The true government of Iraq doesn’t have a ministry in Baghdad (though Sadr is changing all of that). The true government, or should I say governments, are the factions that have forcefully taken control of their own respective slices of Iraq. They are bound together by different combinations of loyalty to religion, politics, tribes and clans, organized crime, status, power, and/or good old-fashioned adrenaline. These factions provide police protection by killing insurgents who enter from other areas, and in some cases, capturing and punishing local criminals. They offer border protection by successfully attacking and repelling foreign invaders, who are forced to hunker down in little forts. These microgovernments have gotten so good at repelling invasion that the foreign soldiers now venture outside only to bring each other food, water and the latest adult DVDs. Occasionally, the soldiers dare to pause for a quick photo op in front of a local hospital, making sure to get moving again before the government’s snipers have had a chance to set up.

Another tragic flaw in Bush's so-called "new plan" is that the U.S. military will continue to train the Iraqi Army so that Iraq can defend itself. To further illustrate the Iraqi Government’s illegitimacy, look at the only arm of that government that would appear to exist outside of the Green Zone-the Iraqi Army. The Iraqi Army is comprised of young men who are there only to collect a paycheck with which to feed their family. These men aren’t there out of a sense of patriotic duty, and it shows. Their service contract gives them a week of leave for every month in service, and many of them complain and ask for more. For American units tasked with training the Iraqi Army, one of the most frustrating problems is the fact that whole units often desert without warning. When Iraqi soldiers don’t feel that their meager paycheck is worth dying for, they just quit and go home. There’s no way to prevent this constant desertion, since there is no governmental agency capable of locating, arresting, trying and sentencing the deserters. In units that actually show up for duty, the commanders are often tribal leaders who command what is really a tribal militia caught in a war with other tribes.

And don’t think that our training would make the Iraqi Army self-sufficient, if it cared to be so. We are merely training them in the same inappropriate tactics that have failed us since Vietnam. Our military is designed to defend the United States against an invasion from the Soviet Union. It flounders when required to fight forces that refuse to provide large, identifiable targets that can be reduced with the full range of conventional arms. Its problems are made worse when the enemy actually uses the collateral damage caused by the aforementioned armament to advance their cause. Every heavy machinegun burst fired in the general direction of city-residing insurgents, every house leveled by tank rounds or explosives because it is occupied by ‘terrorists’ is another strategic failure. Ask any well-known military analyst who does not depend on the president (or Fox News) for their paycheck, and they will tell you the same. The newly-trained Iraqi Army would just be another outdated, firepower-dependent American Army, only without the decades of leadership and superexpensive equipment that have managed to hold us together for so long.