ENID, Okla. — The United States is winning the war in Iraq, said Brig. Gen. Douglas Raaberg, but victory will not come soon.
“What I want everybody to understand is that we’re winning,” said Raaberg, deputy director of operations for U.S. Central Command, “but that winning is slow and subtle.”
Raaberg, former wing commander at Vance Air Force Base, returned to Vance Tuesday night to speak to the local chapter of the Air Force Association.
Raaberg commanded the 71st Flying Training Wing from March 2000 until April 2002.
Since April 2004 he has worked for CENTCOM, the unified combatant command unit responsible for fighting the ongoing wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as assuring U.S. security in 23 other nations.
He is based at CENTCOM headquarters at McDill AFB in Tampa, Fla., but travels to the Middle East at least once a month.
There he has seen the ongoing battle against the insurgents in Iraq - a war, he said, between the United States and al-Qaida.
“What we’re doing now is posturing for the long war,” said Raaberg.
Ultimately, Raaberg said, the war will not be won with U.S. military might, but by the Iraqis themselves.
“We recognize that fight, between the extremists and their ideology, is not something that the military can take on,” said Raaberg. “A lot of people say, ‘Why don’t you just go kill them by the thousands?’ The answer is, we’re doing that. That’s not the issue. The issue is how do you deflate the ideology from being able to recruit people to do suicide bombings.
“How do you do that in a way that is sustained and maintained over time? The real conclusion is you’ve got to get Iraq to take over Iraq. You’ve got to get the Afghanis to take over Afghanistan.”
Progress in Iraq, he said, was evident in the recent Iraqi vote deciding on the parliament and constitution, in which 11 million of the 15 million eligible voters cast ballots. The 11 million voters, Raaberg said, far outnumber the 20,000 estimated insurgents.
“Iraqis are finally fed up with this, with terrorists who have no stake in their democracy and stake in their success, zero, they are murderers,” he said.
Calls to pull all U.S. troops out of the region are unrealistic, Raaberg said, because the Iraqis are not yet capable of defending themselves.
“What we did in 2005 was a fundamental shift to, literally, helping others help themselves,” he said. “By helping them we found out they were a lot stronger when they knew they were being mentored and trained. But they also recognized they were not capable of taking over immediately.”
Raaberg estimated there are some quarter million Iraqi police and troops assisting in the country’s defense. But the United States, he stresses, is in the region for the long haul.
“We will continue to fight al-Qaida,” he said. “It will be a long war, not a short war. It will be decades, not years. And we have to do our damnedest to make sure they never have weapons of mass destruction in their hands.”
The violence, which since the Dec. 15 elections has killed at least 498 Iraqis and 54 U.S. troops, won’t subside soon, Raaberg said.
“The bombings are going to continue," he said. "People are going to be in harm’s way.”
Jeff Mullin writes for the Enid (Okla.) News & Eagle.
Copyright © 1999-2005 cnhi, inc.
