Yesterday I spent most of the day at one of the Marines’ battle positions, watching Iraqi Police recruits pass through the screening process.

The battle positions are old-school counter-insurgency—instead of basing out of one big base and doing mostly vehicle patrols, the Marines are spread across the whole area in smaller outposts.  One of the things that separates the Marines from the Iraqi soldiers and police is the ferocity of their commitment to their organization and its history.  You see that everywhere in Iraq.  I sometimes wonder if it’s so ubiquitous that it’s become ingrained, part of the background of their lives.

Some of this stuff is kind of funny.  There are posters up around the camp about safety in hot weather—how much water to drink, what to eat, what to do if you think someone is dehydrated.  At the bottom, in small-ish type, it read VALUES, and then ticks off a list of attributes like courage, devotion to duty, etc.  After a few days of seeing the poster I realized that someone had blacked out a word, and that the original poster had read ARMY VALUES.  I thought it was one guy striking a blow for the Marine Corps, but when I saw the same poster in the dining hall ARMY had been blacked out, too.

The battle positions, more than a dozen of them, are named after Marine Corps engagements:  Tripoli, Tarawa, Chosin, Hue City.  Somewhat ominously, given the nature of the threat in Iraq, one of the BPs is named Beirut.

The battle position where they recruited the cops was on a rise in the desert.  In three directions there’s nothing but desert, as barren and rocky as the surface of Mars.  To the north, though, is the Euphrates—surrounded by a ribbon of green fields and clusters of buildings.  After being on big Forward Operating Bases like Fallujah, Mosul and Tal Afar, places where the scenery is either empty desert or a big wall, it was strange to stand in the middle of a US base with a clear view in all four directions.

I don’t know if this is part of a truly effective counter-insurgency strategy.  If it is, I don’t know if there’s still time for it to work given the political dynamic in Baghdad and in Washington.  And, obviously, my perspective is limited by the fact that I can’t unembed and see things from the outside in (even if I could swing it logistically to get Iraqi staff out here, this is still a crossing for foreign fighters and therefore not a great spot to be bumming around town as a lone American).  But in the little time I’ve spent here I’ve decided this is about as good a strategy as you’re going to get in Iraq.  The Americans can walk out their front gate and be on the streets of the towns for which they’re responsible.  Corporals and sergeants and lieutenants are interacting with Iraqis every day.  In the next few days I’ll be out at a couple of the BPs full-time to get a better sense of how they’re working.

The police recruiting was a strange site.  In typical Iraqi fashion most of the guys looked either like pale imitations of American hip-hoppers (track suits, fake gold watches, etc.) or like guys from North Jersey ready for a night out on the other side of the Holland Tunnel (too much hair gel, too-tight jeans, too-loud shirts with too-wide collars).  They also looked young, more like guys who should be trying out for the high school soccer team than guys who are ready to walk a beat in towns where insurgents are still a threat.

The recruits were searched out on the road for weapons and suicide vests before being passed up the road to sit on the ground under the shade of camouflage netting.  After that they were brought through in groups of ten to a big military tent where they sat in plastic lawn chairs and filled out a literacy test on clipboards.  Some of the Marines and civilian cops who run the training program said they sometimes flunk half of their recruits for illiteracy.  The guys I saw did pretty well, though; I’d say at least 75 percent got passed through.

The next stop was an abandoned little concrete-and-cinderblock building where Marines and US cops (dressed in paramilitary khaki and armed with rifles) had the guys fill out some forms and take some basic medical tests.  This is another hurdle for Iraqis—high blood pressure and weak lungs rule out a lot of the recruits.  There’s a “stress test” that seems more like an opportunity for amusement than a barrier to service:  the Iraqis have to do some sit-ups and push-ups, and then run in place for a while.  For a while they were doing this on a piece of plywood directly under the sun, but soon the guys running the test showed some mercy and moved the test under some camouflage netting.

The last step is a return to the concrete building to get checked through some security measures (picture taken, retina and fingerprint digitally scanned) and answer a few questions.  From what I heard the questions are mostly what you’d expect from a US government security clearance process—are you susceptible to blackmail, have you done drugs, do you have a criminal record, etc.  But these guys are also asked if they’re former Baathists, and if they’d continue to work if insurgents threatened their families.

I’m having some trouble figuring out what to make of all this.  For the first time in a long time I’m seeing what looks like a well-thought-out, well-executed plan for combating the insurgency.  At the same time I’m seeing Iraqis who look a long way away from being able to take over from the Americans.

I’m a little wary of jumping to the conclusion that we’re choosing to leave just as we’ve hit on a workable strategy.  For one thing, what works in a tribal area of 80,000 people may not work in a city like Ramadi, with over 400,000 people.  But, in any case, there are political considerations that are real, and have nothing to do with whatever posturing or fighting is going on in Washington.  The pressure to reduce US troop levels isn’t just coming from Nancy Pelosi and Donald Rumsfeld.

The Shi’ites who have the dominant position in Baghdad want more authority and some of that will come at the expense of the American presence.  I wonder what the government counter-insurgency will look like in a year or two.  It will certainly be more brutal and less precise than American strategy and tactics.  Whether it will be brutal by the standards of the region is tough to say, but that’s a pretty high bar to clear in the Middle East.