You noted you're rereading Pakenham's book on the Boer War. I suspect we could find some interesting analogies from the 1880s to the early 1900s in South Africa as well. While never explicitly stated as such AFAIK, isn't something like a neutral zone part of what the Boers were after in both their conflicts with the British Empire?Originally Posted by Tom Odom
Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit
The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught. — Sydney J. Harris
Essentially yes at least when you limit discussion to the old school Boers like Oom Paul Kruger. The original trek was to get away from the Anglos and do as they the Boers wished. Where that came into conflict with the Empire was when gold and diamonds were discovered. The magnates like Cecil Rhodes and Alfred Beit sought British control because they saw it more in line with their own interests. An irony that Packenham brings out is that the mine owners felt the Boers were making them pay the Africans too much to work the mines. One of the Empire's claims was always that it sought to protect the interest of the Africans and non-whites against Boer abuses.
The wild card played in the struggle were the Uitlanders (outsiders) who flocked to the mines and they included the gamut of Europeans, Americans, Canadians, and Australians. The Boers sought to control their influence by not giving them the vote; a logical step since they outnumbered the Boers. Empire builders like Milner as well as Rhodes and Beit saw the franchise as the means to end Boer control. Once diamonds and gold were discovered, the Boer vision of a volks land was doomed.
Tom
While not actually germane to this thread, your line above prompted the following paraphrase to me:
"Once natural gas and oil were discovered, the (pick the name of your favorite former Soviet Republic or Autonomous Region) vision of a volks land was doomed."
Vir prudens non contra ventum mingit
The greatest educational dogma is also its greatest fallacy: the belief that what must be learned can necessarily be taught. — Sydney J. Harris
I've become predominantly concerned with the effects of 5-10 years from now.
Specifically, how many men under arms is the Iraqi Army projected to have by 2011? Can the government sustain them after we are gone and the COIN requirements inevitably die down?
At worse, what pressure will this martial force put on the already fragile government that I suspect with continue to strain under the sectarian forces.
Related articles on the SOI issue from the LAT Times yesterday and Washington Times today--captured by Dave and Bill on the round up. The second is a dervative of the first but offers some additional viewpoints. it also rightly links this issue to US-Iraq SOFA.
Baghdad's misguided crackdown on the Sons of Iraq
There is a gathering storm on Iraq's horizon. Over the last several weeks, its central government has embarked on what appears to be an effort to arrest, drive away or otherwise intimidate tens of thousands of Sunni security volunteers -- the so-called Sons of Iraq -- whose contributions have been crucial to recent security gains. After returning from a trip to Iraq last month at the invitation of Army Gen. David H. Petraeus, the U.S. commander in Iraq, we are convinced that if Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri Maliki and his advisors persist in this sectarian agenda, the country may spiral back into chaos.
Much of Iraq's dramatic security progress can be traced to a series of decisions made by Sunni tribal leaders in late 2006 to turn against Al Qaeda in Iraq and cooperate with American forces in Anbar province. These leaders, outraged by Al Qaeda's brutality against their people, approached the U.S. military with an offer it couldn't refuse: Enter into an alliance with the tribes, and they would turn their weapons against Al Qaeda rather than American troops.Shi'ite resistance to Sunnis threatens progress of surge
Shaun Waterman, UNITED PRESS INTERNATIONAL
Wednesday, August 27, 2008
The Iraqi government is resisting U.S. efforts to incorporate former Sunni insurgents into Iraqi security forces, threatening a strategy that helped make the surge a success thus far and could allow U.S. forces to withdraw from Iraqi cities next year.
Fewer than 600 of the 103,000 Iraqis currently active in U.S.-supported Sunni militia groups have been absorbed so far, said Colin H. Kahl of the Center for a New American Security, a Washington think tank, citing figures provided to him by the U.S. military during a recent trip to Iraq.
Good finds.
The damn disturbing thing about this ties into Steven Simon's The Price of the Surge article in the May/June issue of FA, which I bought into the first time I read it.
As we step back on the military front and do more "by, with, and through", who's job is it to perform quality control in this integration process? Is it a PRT task, a Law Enforcement Professional (LEP) problem, or will this turn into another life in the emerald city problem where the blind start tring to lead the blind?
I worry because I am about to step back into Anbar, and wonder where these integration issues fit into the measures of effectiveness for LOO work. When I last stepped into Iraq, the 1st Mrine Division was trying to integrate Iraqi volunteers (predominantly Shiite) into small special formations to put an Iraqi face on our operations. I had a front row seat to the scheming and maneuvering from these "volunteers" to become a part of the fledgling security apparatus in order to reap greater reward down the road.Recently retired U.S. Army counterinsurgency expert Col. John A. Nagl, who traveled with Mr. Kahl to Iraq, partly attributed the slow integration to bureaucratic problems.
"I´m sure that there is some sectarianism in these decisions, but I also am confident that some of it is just inefficient bureaucracy," said Col. Nagl, the author of several books on counterinsurgency, who helped write the U.S. Army/Marine Corps Counterinsurgency Field Manual published in December 2006.
Mr. Kahl also warned against a strategy of limiting integration to Sunni leaders and placing them in low-level jobs.
"Oh, sure, we´ll let that colonel in the ... Republican Guard into the Iraqi police, but we´ll make him an enlisted beat cop," he said, describing the attitude of some Baghdad officials. "Do you know how low on the social scale that is in Iraq and how humiliating this is?"
"You don´t have to believe that 100,000 of these guys are going to turn back into insurgents," Mr. Kahl said. "If 5,000 of them do, that could be a big problem."
The start-up program died and got rolled into a large MOI/US effort, but the intentions of the Iraquis were clear: get in, establish what power base I can, and then run with it. Are the Sons of Iraq any different? If they want to infiltrate the security apparatus and the government is stonewalling, who is on the dime to break the impasse and move forward?
So this leads me back to my original question. If think tank guys are identifying potential friction points, who is smoothing them out...a suit and tie in Baghdad, a grunt in Rawah, or a State guy?
Ultimately the Iraqis will have to define the terms. That process is underway and this is part of it. Maliki is setting conditions for the SOFA via the press and as the process continues those conditions get tougher. No doubt that part of that is for the media effect. Equally no doubt that the sentiments that prompted those pronouncements are quite real. This is of course all happening in a seam of the US political backdrop; Maliki knows that and can afford to push the envelope. Where he cannot afford to push the envelope is inside Iraq against the Sunnis unless he really wants it to fall apart.
Bottom line: the Fat Lady is now where near the stage, much less ready to sing...
Tom
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