“Standing down” or screwing around?
If you have heard it once, you’ve heard it a thousand times from the likes of President Bush, former Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice et cetera. President Bush stated it this way in a speech at Fort Bragg on July 28, 2005, “”Our strategy can be summed up this way: As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down.”
Of course, this was easier said than done. The United States was barely getting serious about training Iraqi security forces back in 2005. And training Iraqi security forces in the midst of a full blown insurgency, when the security forces themselves are near constant targets for death is a mission from hell. This is no criticism of the Iraqis themselves, by the way. The fact that they are still volunteering to serve in such forces, when terrorists regularly attack recruiting stations for Iraqi police, is a tribute to their patriotism and bravery.
Still, if the prerequisite for the United States leaving Iraq is for Iraqi security forces to be suitably staffed, trained, and equipped, the question has to be asked, how ready are they? The answer, sadly, is not nearly good enough.
While, this is not exactly news, as some dispassionate analysts, such as Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies, hardly a liberal critic, has long documented the reality is that the gap between where Iraqi security forces are and where they need to be is as large as the Grand Canyon. And without effective Iraqi security forces the surge will never work, no matter how many U.S. troops are there or how long.
And even if Iraqi security forces were in far better shape it would not be enough. Cordesman wrote that:
What is clear is that the US cannot secure either Baghdad or Iraq without effective Iraqi security forces and this includes both the Army and Police. At the same time, no strategy that hinges solely on the successful development of the ISF can succeed. Iraq must establish both effective governance and a rule of law; not simply deploy effective military, security, and police forces. Legitimacy does not consist of determining how governments are chosen, but in how well they serve the day-to-day needs of their peoples. Security cannot come through force alone. It must have the checks and balances that can only come when governments and courts are active in the field.
Consider the June 27 bipartisan report by the House Armed Services Oversight and Investigations Subcommittee. Among its findings:
The United States has invested more than $19.0 billion to date in developing the ISF and intends to spend more. Return on that investment has not yet been realized. The security forces are not capable of taking over security responsibility, as timelines for transition are repeatedly extended and violence has not significantly decreased across Iraq.Initial assumptions that the Iraqi military and other security forces could be reformed were seriously flawed. When the security forces were largely disbanded, the Coalition had no plan to rebuild them. The Coalition decision to use a private company to build the New Iraqi Army also proved problematic. While the Coalition has organized, trained, and equipped about 350,000 Iraqis to take on the counterinsurgency mission, their operational capability to perform that mission has not been determined. Formal reporting to Congress focuses on the numbers, rather than the quality, capability, and sustainability of all these forces.
And a just released Human Rights Watch report finds that Kurdistan security forces in northern Iraq routinely torture and deny basic due-process rights to detainees.
Given these benchmarks those waiting for U.S. forces to stand down should not be holding their breath.
No related posts.
It seems to me that one of the biggest faults of policy-makers, throughout history, is a profound unwillingness to admit having been wrong. In this case, it seems that we’re still convinced that we’re being greeted as liberators; and, granted, large portions of Iraq are peaceful and stable. In fact, I would go so far as to say that even in the most dangerous parts of the country, a clear majority has no objection to our enforced regime change, which explains in part the ability of ISF to recruit.
We’re held from success, though, by a societal legacy from the Hussein era. Over the course of decades of his and his predecessors’ rule, people learned that the best way to stay alive was not to cross the people outside with guns, no matter how distasteful you might find them. Just as people wouldn’t have told the Republican Guards to go to hell, if the Mahdi Army is in the street, people aren’t going to put the stars and stripes in their window — they’re going to quietly look the other way, or even passively support our enemies in order that they might be around to see things get better.
Further, ISF are subject to subversion as insurgents enlist and desertion as people realise they would rather not be a target, on top of the usual headaches that one might expect when assembling a national security apparatus from nothing. They’ve been helped in recent months with the support of traditional tribal leaders, but even then we risk what’s happened in Afghanistan: de facto confederation of regional warlords who claim nominal allegiance to a powerless central government.
The first thing the ISF needs is legitimacy, which can only come about through the establishment of rule of law, a fundamental principle that we take for granted but does not exist in even many of the stable portions of Iraq. You mentioned security forces in Kurdistan as an example; they are committing the same abuses as Hussein’s government, except they answer to a different authority.
Bottom line, stabilising Iraq enough to begin a drawdown of US forces is almost a self-contradiction. Even if 99.5% of Iraqis support us, that still leaves thousands of insurgents; as long as we have insurgents, our troops will have to act first in self-defence, second in peacekeeping; and as long as they are so limited, it will be impossible to engage in the nation-building necessary to create a viable and self-contained sovereign state.
We probably shouldn’t have wandered in to a dark cave with no map, but if we ever want to get out, we’ll have to risk being eaten by the resident bear. And that, unfortunately, means to keep working at the problem until we have progress, at a massive cost.
Comment on July 3, 2007 @ 4:54 pm
Mr. Isenberg again has presented yet another reason why this administration should NOT transfer it’s problem (Iraq) to the next president. Unlike what Jim Suits concluded (“…keep working at the problem until we have progress”), there are alternatives to the continued wasting of American lives. We can internationalize the conflict–Democrat or Republican front runners for President should NOW apologize to the world for the lies, distortions, and virtually go-it-alone (with the exception of Britain and the handful of Coalition supporting nations) policies the Bush Administration has conducted in this war and occupation and start working as part of the pre-presidential transition process to negotiate a partnership with NATO, UN or a new broader coalition of nations with a goal of regional inclusion (negotiatiing seriously with Iran, Syria, and other neighboring nations).
More and more commentators, scholars, analysts, military veterans as well as active duty experts are recognizing that Bush made a HUGE error in subsuming this war into a generational global war on terrorism. The GWOT actually existed since the late Sixties, early Seventies when terrorism reared its head as an international force in the Arab-Israeli struggle and America and other Western nations WERE fighting that war and will continue to fight that war. Combining the preemption doctrine with GWOT has put America into the role of a heightened hegemonic power–in the eyes of even our closest ally Britain (see BBC TV news broadcast coverage and rhetoric about America’s Fourth of July celebrations of July 4, 2007) and more importantly in the eyes of all but a few (Israel, Australia) nations in the world. While our nation certainly needed to reform intelligence and homeland security spending after 9/11, going about it by launching a counter-crusade (to bin Laden’s warped crusade to Islamize the world) was the WORST POSSIBLE RESPONSE–it has played into the hands of bin Laden and created an unbelievable push of recrutiment into jidadists camps because of its often extreme and shotgun approach to “defending America.
Comment on July 5, 2007 @ 6:29 am