Basra Police Chief Dismissed
8 Bodies found in Najaf
The political violence in Iraq continues apace.
11 bodies were found dead in Najaf. One of them was an Iranian. This according to al-Hayat.
A roadside bomb killed an American soldier Saturday morning.
Basra Governor Muhammad al-Wa'ili suspended his police chief, Major-General Hassan Swadi, for being ineffective against local guerrilla groups. Al-Wa'ili, from the Fadilah Party, also called for the removal of the commander of the 10th Division, Major-General Abdullatif Taaban, on grounds of inefficiency.
Patrick Cockburn does his usual excellent job of penetrating the conflicting accounts of what happened at Dhulu'iyah on Friday. A roadside bomb killed and wounded Kurdish soldiers in a convoy. They headed for the local hospital, firing in the air to clear the streets, and killing a local man. A Shiite battalion then came running, apparently afraid that the Kurdish troops would take revenge for their fallen comrade. The two battalions fought, leaving another soldier dead and one wounded in the firefight. This army is supposed to make it possible for US troops to rotate out?
The NYT reports Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who teaches at West Point, as estimating that the US military should have a big presence in Iraq for 5 to 7 years, while partnering with and building up the Iraqi military. So in 5 years the Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish battalions will like each other more than they do now? Will be more willing to fight against armed groups from their own ethnicities?
My problem with that is that they seem to think that the Tal Afar operation was a success, whereas it is a political disaster, and if they are planning another 5 to 7 years of that sort of thing, then we are doomed. At Tal Afar they used Kurdish and Shiite troops to assault Sunni Turkmen, emptied the city on the grounds that it was full of foreign fighters, killed people and made them refugees, and then only took 50 foreign fighters captive. The Sunni Turkmen, not to mention the Turks in Ankara, will never forgive us. And the press reports show substantial disappointment in the city even among Shiites with the results. The Tal Afar operation is considered a "take and hold" or "oil spot" strategy, as opposed to search and destroy. But you can't just empty out one Sunni city after another, bring in troops of other ethnicities to level neighborhoods, force people into tent cities in the desert or into relatives' homes, and call that a counter-insurgency strategy. Every year the US military has been in the Sunni Arab heartland they have alienated more and more Iraqis.
So I think we should get the US ground troops out of there. As a matter of politics ("hearts and minds"), they aren't making things better and have no early prospect of doing so. If it is a matter of keeping air capability, and some special ops and armor in the neighborhood, that might be necessary to keep things from collapsing. By the way, why does the Iraqi army have only 70 tanks after all this time? (In 1990 I think they had 8,000 tanks!) How can you take and hold territory with no armor? And what about helicopter gunships? My own guess is that the US doesn't build up those capabilities because they can't be sure the Iraqi military won't at one point mutiny against them. But if that is the case, then the US troop presence really is stunting Iraqi capabilities.
I'm so dissapointed in al-Zaman. They carried this completely bogus report of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the Salafi radical whose policy it is to blow up Shiites, meeting in Beirut with Hizbullah and Iranian Revolutionary guards and getting weaponry from them. Yeah, and W. secretly buys Ahmadinejad lunch, too. It is completely ridiculous and there is no evidence for it. Can you say, "black psy-ops"? The Badr Corps was trained by the Iranian Revolutionary Guards. They want Zarqawi to blow them up now why, exactly?
posted by Juan Cole @ 5/14/2006 12:30:00 AM
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Two To Five More Years of What?
Two to five years, five to seven years, forty to sixty years; what's the difference? None of these figures is "real" in any sense, they just serve to push any full withdrawal into the Great Indefinite.
Nothing nice is going to happen in the interim.
The muddle is the message. What we've got now is as good as it's likely to get, only it's likely to get worse instead of better. All it will take is a couple of shifts in tactics, some new weapons, or increased engagement of Shiites to send casualty rates climbing. Not to mention any sort of Tet-like effort.
Of course, maybe the Coalition is winning the battle, but there doesn't really seem to be much evidence for this, or for any battling going on, except for the wounded and killed list going up. Centcom doesn't seem to be running that many air sorties, there are few reports of engagements, and not even that many good will projects in the works.
So it does leave open the question, just what the heck are Coalition forces doing, and what impact are they having?
There is this view: "We are about to enter a phase here which is likely to be decisive in terms of the political transformation of this country," Lt. Gen. Robert Fry, a British Royal Marine and the deputy ground commander in Iraq, said.
The unspoken implication is that the troops are there not to vote, but to grow political power out of the barrels of their guns. Maybe, but that's not what is being touted, nor is it clear how foreign barrels will translate into "political transformation." Sounds more like military rule, by a group that doesn't have a ghost of local political support. How is this supposed to happen? Does anyone believe this, or can anyone persuasively argue this?
Then there's the whole "stand-up" comedy/tragedy argument, that the US needs to build up the shadow Iraqi army before the US leaves, though it is now clear that the US effort has been less than half-hearted.
"Logistics" is cited as something the Iraqi army needs that the US only can supply, though that doesn't seem to bother Sunni guerrillas or keep them from fighting. It's another code word for "we want to stick around indefinitely, because even though we don't have a clue what we are doing, it's better than going home, and at least we get a bought puppet government and don't have to admit defeat on our watch."
If it weren't so costly in killed, injured, damage inflicted, monetary cost and collateral damage to US interests and image world-wide, this wouldn't be a bad strategy. It makes sense for a bewildered, wounded, doesn't-have-a-clue lame duck regime, but it's too costly for the US public and wider interests.
Someone should take control of this slowly-moving train wreck, and get it to a side track before it blocks the main line. This means getting all troops out of Iraq cleanly and quickly while this can be done with good grace. A similar option may not be available later.
The propaganda machine has been spinning Tal Afar sucess stories and even managed to fake out some favorable (and fatally incomplete) coverage from PBS Frontline.
What they are spinning is a compromise, pardon my French half-assed counterinsurgency program.
By the end of the Vietnam War, the military had finally figured out that to fight insurgents the counterinsurgent forces had to become insurgents themselves after a fashion. They had to live and work among the population, gain intelligence, and trust so that they could provide stability and security.
The problems with applying those lessons to Iraq:
1. Insufficient troops
2. Insufficient native born troops - white Christian boys stick out like a sore thumb
3. The US military in its much ballyhooed post-VN reconstruction (culminating with the Powell doctrine) junked its counter-insurgency capability.
Now we're trying desperately to rebuild the capacity but in the end even that must fail because you can't execute counterinsurgency strategy and tactics without sufficient qualified counterinsurgents (Sunni or Shiite arabs).
Thus all efforts are doomed to failure but thus ever have been since March 2003.
For a more rigorously professional analysis, I recommend William Lind's writings at DNI. Lind, whom I actually worked with when we both young Senate staffers, knows his onions; is a consultant to the USMC, and a trenchant critic of this the Greatest Strategic Disaster in US History.
On War #130
August 18, 2005
Getting Swept
By William S. Lind
My guess is that building up the Iraqi army risks not only a mutiny, but a coup. I am sure that a strong military would have little patience for a civilian leadership that cannot form an effective government.
Dear Mr. Cole
You wondered that the Iraqi army does not have any tanks or armor? You might find it interresting that there are no support, navy forces or air forces abilitiys availabel for the Iraqis too.
Some people say it is becouse washington doesent want to leave iraq for the next 10-15 years becouse that would be the timeframe for a full equiped Iraqy army to emerge.
Without which no Government would be able to survive in Iraq.
So Iraqy politician will beg for the US army to stay for a long time. Which would ultimately ensure US influence in the area.
Sincerely
"...whereas it is a political disaster, and if they are planning another 5 to 7 years of that sort of thing, then we are doomed."
Dr. Cole, I appreciate your continued optimism, but we've been doomed since the day George W Bush and Dick Cheney took office.
Your remarks about the Iraqi army and American methods are very good sir. However, many American officers have made public statements that they deliberately keep the Iraqi Army weak.
It is not only the armor, all Iraqi supplies and logistics are handled by the US troops, who make racist slurs about how stupid the Hajis are as a justification.
Given that the Likudists still control US foriegn affairs, despite losing Israel, one should ask: why would the Likudists want a strong Iraqi Army.
Question 2: given the enormous cost of the war and the size of its machinery, wouldn't their experts and consultants have by now figured out what is so obvious.
Question 3: how long does it take to train a soldier for God's sake?
The American public may be buying the sitting down and standing up crap, but the Iraqis know what is happening.
The troops will be asked to leave despite the state of the Iraqi Army because the "resistance" will cease once they are certain that the occupation will completely end. The religous extremists will be sorted out by the police, as they should have been from the start.
I think the primary objective of the Bush administration is to somehow cultivate the "unity government" in such a way that it will never demand the departure of US forces.
Maybe within a year or so the Green Zone tacticians will spot a good prospect to lead a military coup, then engineer the coup, and then defend it as a best of all possible worlds solution to the chaos. Of course "return to democracy" will become the new mantra.
The beauty of this strategy is that the coup can be completely executed within the Green Zone - that's where the "unity government" works. The US will establish a comfortable corruption and graft fund for the coup leader to buy off the dissafected outside the zone.
Think the worst and you'll probably be not far off the mark.
Situation with the Iraqi militias
Remember about "Iraqi army and police training" promoted under Bremer? Not surprisingly, Iraqi armed and police forces created as a result of this ill conceived effort, are deeply penetrated by rebels, they have next to nothing to do with what is understood by the armed and police forces of a sovereign state.
Now the neocons start to admit this simple fact and spin it as some sort of "progress in fight against terrorists". Basically, this is all that can be decrypted from the WaPo article.
WaPo. Iraq Begins to Rein In Paramilitary Force. Iraq Begins to Rein In Paramilitary Force
Iraq's Interior Ministry has taken its first steps to rein in the Facilities Protection Service, a unit of 4,000 building guards that U.S. officials say has quietly burgeoned into the government's largest paramilitary force, with 145,000 armed men and no central command, oversight or paymaster.
Last month, Interior Minister Bayan Jabr accused the Facilities Protection Service, known as the FPS, of carrying out some of the killings widely attributed to death squads operating inside his ministry's police forces. A senior U.S. military official, speaking on condition that he not be identified further, said Saturday he believed that members of the FPS, along with private militias, were the chief culprits behind Iraq's death squads.
[jc] "By the way, why does the Iraqi army have only 70 tanks after all this time?"
To the best of my knowledge the US took all the Iraqi armour and heavy weapons that was still functioning and cut it up for scrap. A chap called Dale Stoffel was involved, and subsequently killed by Iraqi resistance. There was a big to-do about it in 2003 / early 2004. This move has ensured that US allies like Poland can cash in on Iraqi dosh by selling all their old Warsaw Pact rubbish to the Iraqis.
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