In today’s Washington Post, an Army lieutenant colonel writes a lengthy opinion piece criticizing an embryonic Marine policy to use a “velvet gloves” approach in the Sunni Triangle, in contrast to the often hard-nosed tactics used by the Army. Gian P. Gentile was the executive officer of the 1st Brigade Combat Team, based in Tikrit until recently. After relieving a Marine unit, soldiers of his battalion engaged and killed a number of Iraqis looting weapons from a warehouse. Gentile asks, “Was this approach ‘hard’ compared with that of the Marines? Yes. In this case, did it stop the looting and even the potential of remote-controlled mines and rocket-propelled grenades getting into the hands of terrorists trying to kill Americans? Absolutely. Had these kinds of activities by Iraqi terrorists been going on in Tikrit while the Marines were applying their velvet glove? Undoubtedly.”
The Marines are returning to Iraq in the coming months and, in their formulation of a new approach, they are implicitly criticizing the Army’s tactics. The debate has broken into the open and is of more than academic interest; to a great extent, the tactics used by the U.S. military will determine whether the insurgency will spread or be crushed. Last month, in an opinion piece in The New York Times, Lt. Col. Carl E. Mundy III, who commanded a Marine battalion in Iraq, wrote that “in the spirit of reconciliation, this may be a good time to hold back the iron hammer and extend our velvet glove…for every reported military success there are also reports of Sunni Iraqis who are angered by tactics like knocking down doors of houses and shops, demolishing buildings, flattening fruit groves, firing artillery in civilian neighborhoods and isolating large segments of the population with barbed wire fences….The ‘get tough’ approach resembles tactics used by Israelis in the occupied territories.” His conclusion was straightforward: “Now is the time to dangle more of the carrot and apply less of the stick in the Sunni region… By shifting to more of a velvet glove approach, the long hard slog may be a lot less painful.”
Either way, as Mundy notes, it will indeed be a long hard slog.
