End of Mission-Iraq

[Steve the Planner]

Jcustis and Bill:

Sometimes, we should just let well enough alone.

My preference, as the one who started this thread, would be happy just to leave it with your last two hauntingly eloquent and enigmatic posts, and stand in reverence for what was said, and what its means, and what all of us are left to ponder.

Thank you very much for your deep and sincere expressions which I hope we all benefit from in struggling to understand theEnd of Mission-Iraq.

Steve

[Entropy]

Thanks John and Bill, for sharing those posts and your experiences.

[Dayuhan]

There are many questions about the future of Iraq, of course. There's a whole range of possibilities, from Civil War, dissolution, or emergence of a new dictator to peace and progress. Ultimately, though, don't those questions have to be answered by Iraqis?

I don't know that it was ever reasonable to think that the US could negotiate a collectively acceptable formula for sharing power or oil money among Shi'a, Sunni, and Kurd. I don't know that the US could ever assure that Iraq will continue as a US ally, or that other neighbors would not meddle. I don't know that the US ever had the ability to assure that Iraq would have a truly representative government. All of these things have to be worked out by Iraqis, and if they work them out the way others have, that process is likely to span decades or generations of effort, with successes and failures, false starts and steps backwards, violence and peacemaking. The new Iraq, whatever will be, is not a rabbit that's going to be pulled out of a hat by Americans. It will evolve, and the process of evolution is likely to be as painful and frustrating as it has been elsewhere.

If we left Iraqis with a half-chance at a better outcome, and with the ability to make those decisions themselves - neither of which they had under Saddam - we probably did all it was ever in our power to do.

[Steve the Planner]

The Daily Mail carries a picture of the Iraq-Kuwait gate being closed after the last convoy arrives.

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/arti...=feeds-newsxml

The soldiers on one wing of the gate are Americans, and the other wing are Kuwaitis.

[MikeF]

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

[Steve the Planner]

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.

[MikeF]

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.