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Let's talk about
war
By Daniel Smith
Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)
General John Abizaid, who heads US Central
Command, is all for full dialogue about American
policy on Iraq. In testimony before the Senate
Armed Services Committee on June 23, he said:
"Maybe it's something we're not doing right in the
field. But I can tell you that when my soldiers
... ask me the question whether or not they've got
support from the American people, that worries me.
And they're starting to do that. So I would say we
better have a frank discussion with ourselves. I
am not against the debate."
Combined with
Abizaid's acknowledgement that the insurgent and
resistance fighters in Iraq are as strong as they
were six months ago, this statement is a
remarkably candid warning to US politicians that
the present course of American policy in Iraq is
in trouble.
I would expect nothing less
than absolute candor from Abizaid and the public
should accept nothing less from everyone in the
Bush administration. Unfortunately, Abizaid and
the public received no real discussion, no
direction other than "stay the course" from
President George W Bush on June 28. Thus being
equally candid if there is to be meaningful
dialogue, it will have to be with the public and
in public. Such would be a rare but most apropos
development. After all, the people are the
ultimate authority and hold ultimate power in a
democracy. And while I do not claim to represent
the US body politic, someone has to be willing to
start the conversation with Abizaid.
Battlefield performance
Perhaps
the first point is to reassure soldiers that
overall, their battlefield performance reflects
well their technical training and their
adaptability to changes in the tactics of their
opponents.
But while US firepower can
always carry the day, it is not carrying the Iraqi
population or, increasingly, the American
population. What is painfully clear, more than 27
months after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq, is
that there are not enough security forces to hold
Iraqi towns and villages and even some sections of
Baghdad once an operation ends. This flies in the
face of every modern counterinsurgency experience;
it is documented in official reports and accounts
of sotto voce comments by villagers talking to
reporters. The people know from experience that
without a steady presence of coalition or trained
and equipped government security units, once an
operation ends, it will not be long before
insurgents resurface.
Moreover, the lack
of sufficient numbers of security forces leads to
heavy reliance on "search and destroy" operations
which, in addition to the physical havoc caused,
are hardly conducive to winning the hearts and
minds of ordinary Iraqis. If it is true that the
Iraqi population does not support the terror, then
coalition forces and political leaders are not
focused on the decisive "center of gravity" of
their armed opposition when conducting these
punitive sweeps. For the locals, the extent of
cooperation with either side becomes a life and
death decision especially if government forces
are seen to be as ruthless as the resistance.
When a population is beset by armed groups
trying to intimidate and turn the people against
their government, the government must ensure that
any military response it undertakes scrupulously
observes human rights and international agreements
protecting noncombatants and combatants alike.
The next two points are related to the
first.
More troops?
In response
to calls to send more US troops to Iraq, the
Pentagon and the White House fall back on the
excuse that the field generals have not called for
more troops. But what never is spelled out
convincingly is the reason(s) for not asking for
more when the intuitive reaction would be an
increase in troop strength on the ground.
You can say that the Iraqis are the ones
who need to respond and field a larger security
force a process underway. You can say that more
US troops would simply provide more targets for
the resistance. As valid as these points may be,
and as real as are those Iraqis who do stand
against the terror strikes, all of this is
discounted when the US public reads that Iraqi
police, ill-equipped and outgunned by insurgents,
leave their posts (or never get there) at the
first indication of an attack.
What
response is there to those who ask, "If Iraqis
will not stay and fight for their country's
future, why should foreign forces fight and die?"
Then there is the suspicion that CENTCOM
has been told that the personnel well is dry. That
is to say, there are no more active, reserve and
National Guard units of the type needed (infantry,
transportation, military police, civil affairs,
aviation) that can be rotated into Iraq without
subverting policies on intervals between combat
tours. And while surges in troop strength will
happen in anticipation of milestones (elections)
or in reaction to events, changing the policy is
not an option because, among other considerations,
it would depress further the steep decline in new
enlistments for the army. (June's achievement,
after falling short four months in a row, may be
an anomaly.) In this context, the active duty
army's reorganization to 43 from 33 brigades
appears more like simply rearranging the pawns on
the chessboard than a real change.
Recruiting shortfalls have led to
speculation about and calls for resuming the
draft, either on its own or as part of a larger
mandatory national service program. In this
regard, the illegal activities of a few
recruiters, such as making false promises to
potential candidates, the quota pressures on them,
the large monetary bonuses as much as $70,000
for joining the military, and the imposition of
"stop-loss", extended tours, and mobilization of
thousands of soldiers in the Individual Ready
Reserve suggest that in Iraq, as in Vietnam,
something important is being concealed from the
public. Add in administration actions that amount
to data-mining on the 16-25 year-old population
for the purpose of increased targeted recruiting,
and the public has more reason to suspect that the
truth is being concealed just as the very
existence of the data-mining operation was not
reported, as required by law, for more than three
years.
Assaults on the truth
In
a phrase, truth once again has become a casualty
in this war. Whether it is a fatality or "only"
wounded depends, unfortunately for the military,
on how candid the administration will be over the
next half year.
You will recall that at
the end of the Paris talks in the early 1970s
about US disengagement from Vietnam, an American
colonel observed that the North Vietnamese had
never won on the battlefield to which a North
Vietnamese officer replied that this was
immaterial in that the US was leaving, not the
North Vietnamese. In Vietnam neither the various
Saigon regimes nor US troops ever won the
psychological war. This failure set the stage for
the collapse of the entire effort as the public
rebelled against the whole enterprise.
The
same possibility exists in Iraq, as evidenced by
the Iraqi who lamented: "We have transformed from
a dictatorship into something far worse. We have
lost our country." ( Los Angeles Times, June 24)
Living conditions are far worse today than before
the invasion; billions of dollars have
disappeared, regime-induced violence, targeted
against regime opponents, has given way to
massive, unpredictable violence, which is much
more stressful and is compounded by sometimes
heavy-handed reaction by Iraqi authorities or
coalition forces.
If Vietnam was a
quagmire, Iraq is a black hole that is sucking
lives and treasure and talent into its maw. And as
already noted, as in Vietnam, it is tearing at the
public's trust in the government and the veracity
of administration officials. Richard Nixon had a
secret plan to end the Vietnam War; many today
believe Bush has no plan other than to "stay the
course" for as long as one terrorist remains alive
and free. As far as the US public ever knew,
Nixon's plan if it existed at all was to bomb
North Vietnam back to the Stone Age (or some
approximation thereof), if necessary, to force
Hanoi to come to the negotiating table on US
terms. In Iraq, "staying the course" is nothing
more than "Iraqization", replacing coalition
forces and coalition (especially US) casualties
with Iraqis.
Iraqis, having endured
decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein's
military, now face a new fear: that the lessons
being taught the new Iraqi army reflect not the
psychology of defense of the state from external
powers but the psychology of occupation. That is,
the new army is absorbing the mindset of those
doing its training of an alien force in an alien
land where the entire indigenous population is
suspect and untrustworthy. The result is
predictable: The "new" army is becoming alienated
from the people it is supposed to protect, making
it little better than Saddam's elite units.
Another assault on truth is the "happy
news" syndrome that manifests itself in
congressional pronouncements and administration
announcements. The daily news briefings in Saigon
at 5:00 pm were so transparently a farce they were
nicknamed the " five o'clock follies". The nearest
equivalents today are the Pentagon news briefings,
but these are not held every day. Nonetheless,
Vietnam's false assurance of a "light at the end
of the tunnel" is matched by "we've turned the
corner", or "we've broken the back of the
insurgency", or the insurgents are "dead-enders
about to reach the end of the line", or the
"insurgency is in its last throes". All are
serious misjudgments at best, intentional
obfuscation at worst.
Yet again, the worst
case seems the operational one. Every reason
propounded by those favoring the war has been
confounded by careful investigation by the US-led
Iraq Survey Group, interrogations, or other means.
Among the latter is a series of nine pre-March 19,
2003 British cabinet-level memos addressing
London's view of the Bush administration's
evolving policy to go to war with Saddam. By June
2002, the British were convinced that Bush would
go to war. Significantly, they also noted that
intelligence would be molded to fit policy.
Politically, it is true that the Iraqis
have been in charge of running their country for a
year (beginning January 28, 2004). But with
foreign military forces still numbering 160,000,
with the transitional government taking three
months to organize itself and elect constitutional
drafters, with the government and national
assembly having to work inside the highly defended
"Green Zone" because physical security is so
unpredictable, are the Iraqis really in charge of
anything? Most observers would, I suspect, heavily
qualify that assertion.
Given the above,
Abizaid's response to the litany of concerns,
misjudgments, missteps, misanalyses,
exaggerations, and at least a few lies, might well
be similar to another part of his Senate
testimony: "We that are fighting the war think
it's a war worth fighting ... but we can't win the
war ... without your support and without the
support of our people."
Undoubtedly,
senior officers would agree, if for no other
reason than to maintain troop morale. In
principle, many others would agree; after all, who
would oppose elections, freedom, liberty and the
other accoutrements of a market democracy?
Actually, there would be many, or many who
would reject parts of this package or possibly
wish to suspend certain features for a few years.
For example, most Iraqis would reject attempts to
separate Islam from the functioning of government.
Islam is woven into the fabric of daily life in
many countries, informing and directing the
activities of believers. Without Islam, Arab
culture atrophies not news to Abizaid who is a
scholar of all things Islamic and Arabian, but
easily a revelation to key members in the US
political hierarchy.
In other words, other
than to maintain unit spirit in a difficult
situation, what is important is not what the US
commanders and soldiers on the ground think about
the war. What the Iraqi people think, what they
hold as "worth it", ought to be the determining
factor. It is their country; the US invaded and
occupied it, has killed many thousands of Iraqis
and injured many more thousands, all without
showing any concrete intention of leaving
(although showing quite a bit of concrete for
permanent bases for US forces).
Given
sentiment in Iraq today, declaring a clear
intention to withdraw all US troops and bases from
Iraq could well be the key to really ameliorating
armed opposition and separating the
nationalist-inspired Iraqi resistance from
hardcore perpetrators of terror and in winning the
support of Congress and the US public for a policy
under which foreign forces withdraw without
foreign countries abandoning Iraq.
Iraq's future
Iraq's ultimate
future, like that of all nation-states, lies in
the political realm, and insofar as its future
poses political uncertainty, it must search for or
devise a political path that can remove this
uncertainty. But after nearly 25 years of
continuous warfare, the Iraqi people expected to
have seen much less war and more political
progress as a result of regime change in Baghdad.
This failure to meet a not unreasonable
expectation may, in the end, be the catalyst that
accelerates the departure of coalition forces,
with the Iraqis finally resuming full sovereignty
in their land.
Three months after Iraq's
January parliamentary election, forbearance is
thin. As one Iraqi observed: "We sacrificed our
soul and went out to vote. What did we get? Simply
nothing."
It's time to give them
something.
Dan Smith is a
military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In
Focus, a retired US Army colonel, and a senior
fellow on military affairs at the Friends
Committee on National Legislation.
(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus) |
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