Tommy Denton

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Reports and pictures of the savagery in Iraq numb the ability to make much sense of what, in Western eyes anyway, defies rationality.

Last week's horrible carnage at Mustansiriya University in Baghdad, where 70 people died and more than 140 were injured in a massive explosion, marked one of the deadliest attacks against academia since the U.S. invasion in 2003.

Similar outrages have become almost routine at such institutions, which help form the foundations of civilized societies.

In Iraq last year, the United Nations reported, 34,452 Iraqi civilians died violently, an average of 94 per day.

Even in Afghanistan, according to Lt. Gen. Karl Eikenberry, the senior U.S. military commander there, suicide bombings and other terror tactics are increasing the killing and bloodshed of innocent bystanders who are merely participating in the routines of daily life.

Those casualties are the tragic consequence of an unrelenting insurgency and sectarian civil war in Iraq and a resurgence of the al-Qaida-supported Taliban in Afghanistan.

To confront and reverse such trends, President Bush has ordered an additional 21,000 troops in Iraq, and Defense Secretary Robert Gates has indicated his approval of a request by commanders in Afghanistan to build up the ranks of the 24,000 American troops there.

The operative strategy for mitigating the violence on the ground is known as "counterinsurgency," which amounts to fighting the resistance roughly on its own terms. Consideration of other options went by the boards when the White House and Defense Department in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003 opted to reject an invasion/occupation strategy sufficiently deep and robust enough to accomplish the mission.

Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki proposed to send several hundred thousand troops to dislodge Saddam Hussein, pacify the country and comprehensively reorder civil authority. By negating the potential for an insurgency from the outset, Shinseki proposed the ancient wisdom of resorting to prevention rather than cure.

For his effrontery, Shinseki was forced by his civilian boss, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, into premature retirement. And the cure rages on.

So now the operative strategy and accompanying tactics center on counterinsurgency, the insurgency having exploded out of control for years now.

If the United States has anyone who can make that strategy work, it would be Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, appointed recently by President Bush as the top U.S. military commander in Iraq. As commander of the vaunted 101st Airborne Division during the 2003 invasion, Petraeus provided what could be called a textbook performance in counterinsurgency operations in the Kurdish northern sector of Iraq.

Actually, his expertise contributed to his co-authorship, with Marine Gen. James N. Mattis, of the Pentagon's current draft manual on counterinsurgency warfare.

Applying the manual beyond the Kurdish region will prove daunting, however. The Kurds essentially favor the U.S. presence and have experienced relatively little terrorist activity, so Petraeus' critics suggest his successes were inflated.

More challenging for U.S. policymakers may be a critical assessment of the very rationale of counterinsurgency. Noted economist and historian Edward Luttwak, who has presented respected contrarian military analyses for more than 30 years, wrote in the January edition of Harper's magazine that the United States is pursuing a "dead end" in applying counterinsurgency principles to Iraq and Afghanistan.

From Jews in Roman-controlled Palestine to the French and Polish resistance against the Nazis, insurgencies have a long history of being "controlled" by savage reprisals. Luttwak argues that democracies would have to abandon their core values to achieve what are essentially political objectives by "out-terrorizing the terrorists."

In other words, those insurgents do not hesitate to commit atrocities that intimidate civilians into concealing and protecting them against the foreign invaders. Occasions when the temptation was strong to fight fire with fire led to the shame of Abu Ghraib and other U.S. ventures into torture that violate American values.

Striving for neutrality is its own torture for innocents who care to live and protect their families.

When the U.S. policymakers chose to "liberate" Iraq with insufficient forces, they effectively chose not to govern in the brief aftermath of "victory." Thus, in that vacuum of negligence, did they sow the dragon's teeth of the proliferating insurgency. And the cure rages on.

Denton's column appears in the Sunday and Tuesday editions of The Roanoke Times.