My Contribution
I've been reading with interest everyone's thoughts on the US portion of the Iraq war ending. I couldn't put together anything on my experience, so I put this together to try to apply our experiences towards the future.
This is my contribution. It is the culmination of what I've learned in war and studied here and elsewhere since.
I hope it does the boys justice.
It's Time We Moved Beyond COIN
Mike:
As you know, I have been involved in the COIN debate through the recent FP articles, and would love to see a credible and exhaustive review of COIN and the issues raised their (maybe we should just launch a few more threads).
I keep seeing the ???? reference by all parties to the fact that COIN success is 20% military and the rest political, economic, social, etc... which I wholeheartedly agree with.
That disconnect, including as Steve Metz explains: the empty civilian surge, dumping the responsibilities on an ill-equipped military, is a big part of my regrets about Iraq.
I recognize that the 1.499 million deployed were military, and that my .001 were so few (and so late) as to be a drop of water on a dry sponge. There were 12 senior civilian advisors to my knowledge---12---for all of Iraq during the surge.
For DoS in 2007/8, there was exactly one---count 'em--- one Senior City Manager, one Senior Transportation Planner, and one Senior Urban Planner. This is the whole country you are talking about at the peak of the surge...
The City Manager started by EPRTing to Tikrit, then worked his way, over eighteen months, south through Dour, Ouija, Samarra, and Balad. He was excellent, but how, in reality, could he have made a serious dent in the issues in Iraq?
We went to these provinces, and down to their field offices. There were no resources, no past experience, no records, no plans, no phones.
In April 2008, we took a drive with some combat engineers down from Tikrit to Baghdad to tout facilities and projects. Stopped at the Salah Ad Din Highway Department complex outside of Sammara as an example. No trucks. No staff. No phones. No equipment. All had been looted long ago.
How were these people seriously going to be expected to start running their country with a newly invented "slogan" of provincial governance. It was a complete joke. Dressed up by SitReps intended to make everyone look good.
What was our end mission "supposed to be" in Baghdad? To ask the ministries to help us force the provinces to do things. That too became a joke once we understood, as the Iraqis did all along, that it was impossible.
So, while proud of our accomplishments during our all-too-brief tours, I recognize how feeble and seriously under-resourced the civilian effort was, and how, despite all the happy talk of agency self-defenses, the woefully inadequate civilian effort, from Bremer and beyond, put so much at peril.
How many lives might have been saved, US and Iraqi, had the operation not been so completely botched from the start?
Could COIN have actually worked had there been an effective civilian effort?
Would Falluja have become so fierce and deadly for all parties?
Those are the kinds of questions that run through my mind as I read military parties struggling to explain, defend or condemn COIN, when, in effect, COIN could never have worked without an effective civilian ground game.
The entire civilian field was, in effect, a marketing scam pitched at the military and washington. The provincial self-governance target was an impossibility, an empty "slogan," with no possibility of success in our time or sphere. Same in Afghanistan.
Having said that, and in keeping with the reverence that an end of mission thread should follow, I find myself between two sets of memories, the US soldiers who died for us, and the Iraqis caught in the middle.
Even the Kenyans guards we befriended at Speicher who were doing night patrols in Bayji. Boom (2008).
Our USACE civilian checking a PEZ project. Bang (2008).
ITAO senior advisor. Boom (2009)
94 Tikrit civilian provincial government officials. Boom and Bang and Burned (2011).
Visiting the provincial staff after the Governor's son was accidentally shot in 2008 was no less of a picnic than when you were briefed as to which officials were leering at you and would not talk at meetings because so many of their families had died, been seriously injured, or were imprisoned by US. (A figure recently was that 50% of all Tikriti males had experienced a US confinement).
I read Wiki Cables from my group that stated "Specially Protect" next to the contact's name, who has long since been disappeared given what they disclosed to us, which is stated in the cables.
The terps that remain are, like many of yours, on the net trying to get help to get to the US before they and their families are caught up to as collaborators.
The eeriest experience for me was to return from leave to Baghdad in Summer 2008 to work on assignment (secunded) to UN. Two PRTs had just been killed so it took a huge con on my part for my wife to let me go back. And I had just read the frighteningly accurate "Chasing the Flame" about the internal challenges/limitations of the UN, and Sergio De Mello's (and 26 others) Baghdad bombing.
Just like in a military unit, the UN had a large plaque in front of its office for those who had fallen.
The eerie part came, however, when, with help from a lot of other sources, we began, as part of the dispute resolution process, flagging and tagging the hundreds of mass murder locations, town removals, forced relocations, and minority extermination projects during Saddam's time.
It occurred to me in October 2008, as enumeration continued in my quiet little UN office next to Pheonix Base, how many Iraqis, just from a sheer logistical standpoint, must have been involved in or exposed to these activities: truck drivers, guards, bulldozer operators, machine gunners, gas launchers, burial details, or stood as silent witnesses, became victims, or survivors. The numbers must be in the millions.
Add to that the 1 million lost on each side in the Iran/Iraq War, and the many border towns on each side, like Mandali, Diyala, that were virtually eliminated (with their populations), and the internalized vengeance against porous populations on each side.
Add to that the chaos and sectarian violence during five years of our watch.
At that point, I knew that the scope of true and lasting reconciliation in Iraq, and serious post-conflict resolutions, could never be resolved by US, and that our surge was, at best, scratching the surface of a very deep and lasting injury that only Iraqis could solve, and only over decades if not generations.
That is what I knew as the SOFA Agreement was negotiated and concluded.
However tough it was going to be for them in the next few years, only they could do it, and only after we left. Reconciliation in a deeply divided nation, scarified by decades of fighting and destruction, can not be accomplished by third party military so interwoven with the problems. (not the same as a peace-keeping mission).
The important thing that is frequently disregarded in discussions of Iraq is that the US invasion/occupation was just a layer on top of many different catastrophies that fell upon Iraqis. Finding our particular part is like trying to separate body parts from a fifty-car high speed pile-up in the fog.
All those fragments are still settling in my mind.
Great respect for the people who did what they could when they were there, but serious, albeit historical, questions as to why they were set up to be there. Sadness for the losses on all sides. Questions of how it could be avoided in the future. Knowledge that no parties in authority are looking at the real problems, issues, and lessons to be learned.
Refighting 2003
Steve,
In the article, I tried to highlight your statements by showing how from the CPA in Iraq to A'stan's "Gov't in a Box" we still don't get it despite a lot of talk in the Post-Cold War Era. I refrained from using "lip service."
I have a friend in the Jedi School (SAMS) right now, and for his thesis, I think he is going to argue that if we sent in more troops initially and hijacked Paul Bremer!, then much of the mess in Iraq would not have happened.
While I feel his sentiment, I think that I disagree b/c (as Toby Dodge has argued) Iraq was already on the brink of collapse- Saddam was holding it together. We took out Saddam, ergo too much change too fast was going to cause chaos.
I think that Libya and Egypt will provide us with a better sense of who is more right unless we're all wrong.
Mike:
I have a little different perspective.
Having assessed the infrastructure and essential public services systems in the North in 2008, two things were immediately evident:
1. A feather could have knocked the whole thing over. Targeted attacks on bridges, infrastructure systems, etc... a few dirty tricks accidents like happen with greater frequency in Iran, etc...
2. It "takes a village" to create nuclear power, and that village---the supporting infrastructure---simply did not exist after the late 1990s.
But there was still an essential problem.
Once a regime turns to mass murders within its own country, and does so by engaging its own people as the instrument, a toxic brew is created that just cannot be addressed by a standoff approach.
There were plenty enough Iraqi generals and colonels that knew the things they had done, and that, with Bosnia in the news, would turn to war crimes investigations sooner or later. Their risks, in that regard, were within Iraq and the people upon which they were perpetrated.
Someone or something has to go in and change the status quo, or its is just a Jonestown or After Me the Deluge system that assured (through guilt, shame, greed, fear of exposure.... whatever) a rigid last defense of those in power against those who were not.
While it is helpful to see our enemies in certain lights, it is also true that the Shias, Kurds, and others had an understandably lethal view of the other side.
Under those now-famous scowling images of Sadr, and the as-yet-unresolved sectarian divides, looms a very real history of potentially genocidal policies and acts which, in context, play heavily into deeper rythms at the core of religious schisms within Islam.
Our past history, of encouraging but not defending Shias and Kurds rising up against Saddam, and previously going only so far, were real factors for the opponents who had been scourged before. (Maybe the root of the problem lies in that past?)
As much as I would like to be completely against any foreign military adventures, absent US actions of any kind in and around 2003, there was still a toxic brew in Iraq which, under the best circumstances, foretold a future genocide of potential biblical dimensions for which the only defense/protector would have been Iran.
Following the lines, a new Iran/Iraq War, with broad implications in the Gulf and beyond, was inevitable at some point without some outside intervention.
Thus, the question: Could an effective civilian ground game, more troops, etc.., have proven a better way for all parties concerned?
I do not believe that there was not an essential mission and necessary mission to be performed in Iraq (by some entity). Just that much was mishandled, and that an appropriate autopsy, hopefully, can improve our understanding for the future.
Again, looking solely to military analysis for an essentially civilian problem is not going to produce a useful answer.
And one that needs to be heardI have a little different perspective.
well saidOriginally Posted by Steve the Planner
PS:
The UN Inspectors were right: There were no WMDs.
But that was not the point.
Every week, the present Iraqi government goes out into the desert, turns a shovel and finds another mass grave.
Holbrooke had no idea how right his focus on Halabja was, nor did anyone (including the pockets of Iraqi victims and survivors) have a clear picture of the full scope of the problem.
A revised narrative is warranted to understand this action and the real contributions of our soldiers.
We can, and should, grieve the large number of Iraqi civilians killed and maimed during our term, but there was a truly ugly default process already in motion that, by any reasonable review, would have continued in probably far larger numbers.
We can regret, on a humanitarian and human level, each civilian loss, and especially those that may have been preventable by better handling.
But the "ethnic cleansings" in Iraq were pretty inevitable as score settlings even if, regrettably, those who typically paid the price were, as too often happens under these circumstances, not those who were personally responsible.
"Will Fight For World Peace," is not just a philosophical slogan. Sometimes, and particularly where genocide looms, it is, regrettably, a military mission statement.
The latest from Christian Science Monitor on post-withdrawal Iraq:
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Backc...ivil-war-again
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