By David Ignatius
The Washington Post
Gen. John Abizaid commands probably the most potent military force in history. The troops of his Central Command are arrayed across the jagged crescent of the Middle East, from Egypt to Pakistan, in an overwhelming projection of U.S. power. He travels with his own mini-government: a top State Department officer to manage diplomacy, a senior CIA officer to oversee intelligence, a retinue of generals and admirals to supervise operations and logistics. If there is a modern Imperium Americanum, Abizaid is its field general.
I traveled last month with Abizaid as he visited Iraq and other areas of his command. Over several days, I heard him talk about his strategy for what he calls the ``Long War'' to contain Islamic extremism in Centcom's turbulent theater of operations. We talked about the current front in Iraq, and the longer-term process of change in the Islamic world that Abizaid views as the ultimate strategic challenge.
``We control the air, the sea and the ground militarily,'' Abizaid told one audience, and in conventional terms, he's unquestionably right.
From its headquarters near the huge new U.S. airbase in Qatar, Centcom's military reach stretches in every direction: To the west, the U.S. Navy's 5th Fleet has its base in Bahrain; to the north, the aircraft carrier USS Harry Truman and its task force are patrolling the Persian Gulf; to the east, about 7,000 troops are working to stabilize postwar Afghanistan; to the south, about 1,000 troops are keeping a lid on the Horn of Africa. And to the northwest lies the bloody battlefield of Iraq, where nearly 150,000 of Abizaid's soldiers are fighting a determined insurgency.
...
The costs of war came home for America in recent weeks. On Dec. 20, President Bush conceded the Iraq insurgents ``are having an effect,'' and that U.S. efforts to train Iraqi security forces have had only ``mixed'' success. The next day, a suicide bomber savaged a mess hall in Mosul in the deadliest single attack since the war began 21 months ago. The day after that, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld tried to fend off calls for his resignation because of setbacks in Iraq.
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Abizaid offers the best answers to these questions I've heard from any U.S. government official. In addition to being the military's top commander in the Middle East, he has an intellectual and emotional feel for the region. He's of Arab ancestry - his forebears came to the United States from Lebanon in the 1870s - and he learned Arabic during a stint in Jordan 25 years ago. He's a well-read man who analyzes contemporary issues against the background of history.
Abizaid believes the Long War is in only its early stages. Victory will be hard to measure, he says, because the enemy won't wave a white flag and surrender one day. Success will instead be an incremental modernization of the Islamic world, which will gradually find its own accommodation with the global economy and open political systems.
America's enemies in this Long War, he argues, are what he calls ``Salafist jihadists'' - Muslim fundamentalists who use violence to try to re-create what they imagine was the pure and perfect Islamic government of the era of the prophet Muhammad (sometimes called the ``Salaf'').
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``It won't ever be over completely, where you wake up one morning and the enemy has surrendered,'' says Abizaid. ``But one day you'll wake up and there will be more food, more security, more stability.''
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http://www.registerguard.com/news/2005/01/02/c1.ed.col.abizaid.0102.html
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