|
11/24/2005
Iraq / James Fallows
James Fallows wrote an extensive piece on Iraq in the December
issue of The Atlantic Monthly that is garnering quite a bit of
press. Titled “Why Iraq Has No Army,” following are a few of
his thoughts.
---
Four months after the invasion the first bomb went off that killed
more than one person. The first major attack on Iraq’s
policemen occurred in Oct. 2003, when a car bomb killed ten.
This past summer an average of ten Iraqi policemen were killed
every day. And while U.S. officials like to point out that the vast
amount of violence is taking place in only four of Iraq’s 18
provinces, these four contain Baghdad and about half of the total
population.
Despite Sec. of Defense Rumsfeld’s usual upbeat assessment,
“Time and again since the training effort began, inspection teams
from Congress, the Government Accountability Office (GAO),
think tanks, and the military itself have visited Iraq and come to
the same conclusion: the readiness of many Iraqi units is low,
their loyalty and morale are questionable, regional and ethnic
divisions are sharp, their reported numbers overstate their real
effectiveness ..
“In short, if American troops disappeared tomorrow, Iraq would
have essentially no independent security force. Half its
policemen would be considered worthless, and the other half
would depend on external help for organization, direction,
support. Two thirds of the army would be in the same dependent
position, and even the better-prepared one third would suffer
significant limitations without foreign help.”
[Ed. For starters, the Iraqi army doesn’t have the equipment.]
--
“How the Iraq story turns out will not be known for years, but
based on what is now knowable, the bleak prospect today is the
culmination of a drama’s first three acts. The first act involves
neglect and delusion. Americans – and Iraqis – will spend years
recovering from decisions made or avoided during the days
before and after combat began, and through the first year of the
occupation. The second act involves a tentative approach to a
rapidly worsening challenge during the occupation’s second
year. We are now in the third act, in which Americans and Iraqis
are correcting earlier mistakes but too slowly and too late.”
May 23, 2003 the decision to disband the Iraqi military will be
debated for years to come.
“Once Baghdad was taken, Tommy Franks checked out,” says
Victor O’Reilly, who has written extensively about the U.S.
military. “He seemed to be thinking mainly about his book.”
Fallows: “In retrospect the looting was the most significant act
of the first six months after the war. It degraded daily life,
especially in Baghdad, and it made the task of restoring order all
the more difficult for the U.S. or Iraqi forces that would
eventually undertake it. But at the time neither political nor
military leaders treated it as urgent.”
--
“Marines I interviewed consistently emphasized how debilitating
the language barrier was. Having too few interpreters, they were
left to communicate their instructions with gestures and sign
language. The result was that American troops were blind and
deaf to much of what was going on around them, and the Iraqis
were often terrified.
“General Mattis had stressed to his troops the importance of not
frightening civilians, so as not to turn those civilians into
enemies. He, too, emphasizes the distractions in the first year
that diminished the attention paid to building an Iraqi security
force. ‘There was always something,’ he told me. ‘Instead of
focusing on security, we were trying to get oil pipelines patched,
electrical grids back into position, figure out who the engineers
were we could trust, since some of them hated us so much they
would do sabotage work.”
--
Corruption has been a constant and destructive factor. In one
independent survey of $1.3 billion in arms contracts, $500
million was estimated to have simply disappeared in kickbacks
and payoffs.
--
“The career patterns of the U.S. military were a problem. For
family reasons, and to keep moving up in rank, American
soldiers rotate out of Iraq at the end of a year. They may be sent
back to Iraq, but probably on a different assignment in a different
part of the country. The adviser who has been building contacts
in a village or with a police unit is gone, and a fresh, non-Arabic-
speaking face shows up. ‘All the relationships an adviser has
established, all the knowledge he has built up, goes right with
him,’ Terence Daly, the counterinsurgency specialist from the
Vietnam War, says. Every manual on counterinsurgency
emphasizes the need for long-term personal relations.”
--
“Although most people I spoke with said they had warm
relations with many of their Iraqi counterparts, the lack of trust
applied on the U.S. side as well. American trainers wondered
how many of the skills they were imparting would eventually be
used against them, by infiltrators or by soldiers who later
changed sides.”
[Ed. This is why the U.S. is supplying Iraqis with inferior
equipment, in case it’s turned against them.]
--
“ ‘There is still no sense of urgency,’ T.X. Hammes [a Marine
colonel who was stationed in Iraq and is now an author] says. In
August, he pointed out, the administration announced with pride
that it had bought 200 new armored vehicles for use in Iraq.
‘Two-plus years into the war, and we’re proud! Can you
imagine if in March of 1944 we had proudly announced two
hundred new vehicles?’ By 1944 American factories had been
retooled to produce 100,000 warplanes. ‘From the president on
down there is no urgency at all.’
“Since last June, President Bush has often repeated his ‘As Iraqi
forces stand up ’ formula, but he rarely says anything more
specific about American exit plans. When he welcomed Iraq’s
president, Jalal Talabani, to the White House in September, his
total comment on the training issue in a substantial welcoming
speech was ‘Our objective is to defeat the enemies of a free Iraq,
and we’re working to prepare more Iraqi forces to join the fight.’
This was followed by the stand up / stand down slogan .
“A Marine lieutenant colonel said, ‘You tell me who in the
White House devotes full time to winning this war.’ The answer
seems to be Meghan O’Sullivan, a former Brookings scholar
who is now the president’s special assistant for Iraq. As best I
can tell from Nexis, other online news sources, and the White
House web site, since taking the job, late last year, she has made
no public speeches or statements about the war.”
--
“What is needed for an honorable departure is, at a minimum, a
country that will not go to war with itself, and citizens who will
not turn to large-scale murder. This requires Iraqi security forces
that are working on a couple of levels: a national army strong
enough to deter militias from any region and loyal enough to the
new Iraq to resist becoming the tool of any faction; policemen
who are sufficiently competent, brave, and honest to keep
civilians safe. If the United States leaves Iraq knowing that non-
American forces are sufficient to keep order, it can leave with a
clear conscience – no matter what might happen a year or two
later.
“In the end the United States may not be able to leave honorably.
The pressure to get out could become too great. But if we were
serious about reconstituting an Iraqi military as quickly as
possible, what would we do? Based on these interviews, I have
come to this sobering conclusion: the United States can best train
Iraqis, and therefore best help itself leave Iraq, only by making
certain very long-term commitments to stay.”
--
Hott Spotts returns Dec. 8.
Brian Trumbore
|
