George Pyle: Operation Rio Grande could drag out — unsuccessfully — like Operation Iraqi Freedom

Fred Kaplan graduated from the same high school I did, got fired by the same newspaper company I did and was named a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, like I was.

(OK, so, a few years before that, Kaplan was part of a Boston Globe team that actually won a Pulitzer. Not the team in the movie “Spotlight.” The team that covered the nuclear arms race. So I’m reminded of what Katherine Hepburn said to Jane Fonda when Hepburn won her fourth Oscar, “You‘ll never catch me now!”)

So all that is why I read Fred’s Pulitzer-nominated book, “The Insurgents: David Petraeus and the Plot to Change the American Way of War.” I’d recommend it even if it hadn’t been written by a fellow Salt Hawk.

The story of how the tactics and strategy of counterinsurgency rose and fell in the American military during conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan should have special meaning to the folks in Salt Lake City who are arguing about the best way to deal with the mess of homelessness and crime and drug-dealing in the Rio Grande neighborhood.

Because the chances that Operation Rio Grande could still turn out like Operation Iraqi Freedom are very large indeed.

In the role of President George W. Bush — or, if you are really steamed at him, as Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld — we have Utah House Speaker Greg Hughes. Except that Hughes’ argument that the place was crawling with drug dealers is much more grounded in fact than was the Bush claim that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.

In both operations, the person in the lead sees the situation as very serious, having been foolishly ignored for so long by others, and in need of an armed intervention. The armed forces of the U.S., U.K., Australia and Poland in Iraq. City, county and state police on Rio Grande.

Of course, invasions by overwhelming force upon inferior targets are generally successful. Mission Accomplished and all that. Then what?

From “The Insurgents”:

“And so, at the outset of the war, Rumsfeld followed an age-old formula, familiar to so many generals and politicians wishing to avoid a specific course of action. He didn‘t want to get bogged down in securing and stabilizing Iraq after Baghdad has fallen — so he didn’t make any plans to do so, and he didn’t approve any proposals for such plans from his top officers. He didn’t plan for the postwar because he didn’t want a post war. It wasn’t an oversight; it was deliberate.”

So, of course, the war in Iraq dragged on for years. In a sense, it isn’t over yet, though we Americans are mostly out.

Among those who might be seen in the role of Gen. Petraeus, mastermind of long-form counterinsurgency tactics, is Iain De Jong. He’s the out-of-town expert on homelessness who has done some consulting here.

The one who called out Hughes and Operation Rio Grande as “a disaster” because the invasion of the neighborhood came with too little planning for what would happen to the drug dealers who were arrested, the drug users who were left without promised rehab slots and the rank-and-file homeless who have, predictably, scattered all over town.

It is hard to avoid the thought that a prime motivation for Operation Rio Grande, especially the shock and awe part of it, is that Hughes’ day job is in the real estate game and the territory under the feet of all those pesky homeless people is logically seen as the next boomlet in land values. Just like Iraqi oil wealth was the sometimes-admitted motivation for the invasion of that territory.

Operation Rio Grande, as Hughes says, clearly succeeded in pulling down Saddam Hussein’s statue. The area does look appreciably different and does feel much safer, both for the non-criminal homeless people who remain and their non-homeless neighbors and visitors.

But they haven’t even started building the three new homeless service locations that are supposed to replace the current epicenter of homelessness hereabouts, The Road Home shelter. And De Jong has a great point about the operation being run by a bunch of old white guys in clean clothes, folks with little knowledge of or interest in counterinsurgency values that include understanding the indigenous population, its cultural mores and chain of command.

Hughes and De Jong have gone around a few times on social media and apparently are looking to set up a face-to-face debate on the issue, maybe as soon as Dec. 22.

That would be interesting. The question to be answered might be worded thus: “We‘ve had our Normandy Invasion. Now where the hell is our Marshall Plan?”

Cause we need one. Really badly.

George Pyle, the Tribune’s editorial page editor, is gearing up for Operation Polygamy Porter. gpyle@sltrib.com