Don't Forget Iraq Posted by Lorelei Kelly

...in New Orleans and southern Mississipi for Thanksgiving and just now found a laptop with cable. NOLA is looking significantly better than it did last January, but it is still a city in shock.(a resident told me that their post-Katrina motto is "together alone" the same as Sinn Fein in Ireland. Its not hard to understand why, given their virtual abandonment by the rest of us)

These past few  days have seen a jaw-dropping amount of carnage in Iraq....and my Thanksgiving prayers were for everyone over there and also about making sure Americans never allow an ideologically driven war to happen again.  Hopefully, the elections this month will start the long slow road back to a healthy democracy

Here are some comments sent to me by a friend who was deployed to Iraq a few years ago and has since followed the war closely and with a planner's perspective:

...with regard to U.S. war-policy and strategy in Iraq – no revisits of the past recent history of the Iraq War policy and strategy, but instead a deliberate focus on "new prescriptions."  ...a way to both change the course and stay the fight....

• A continuation of US support for the Iraqi Governance-Building enterprise. Specifically,
• Continued diplomatic, economic, military and "other" support to the Iraqi government in its ongoing "national reconciliation" efforts;
• Support in the Iraqi governments "DDR" process (Disarmament; Demobilization; and Reintegration) regarding the current militia threat to current and future Iraqi Nation-Statehood ;
• A "moderate" theater-strategic re-posturing of the preponderance of US military force units more toward the Iraqi territorial borders so as to enable two critical conditions for the future success of Iraq's continuing war for Nation-hood and the US/International Community's grand strategic interest in waging a successful long war against transnational and global terrorism:

Posture US forces at the operational center of gravity in the GWOT-in-Iraq and the surrounding region . . . at the borders, and in so doing, also . . .

Posture ourselves in locations that offer the Iraqi Government a means of ensuring the sovereignty of its own national borders (one important condition of nation-state sovereignty) as well as setting the best operational conditions for ensuring an internal conflict over the future of Iraq that is not dominated by unwanted and unwarranted "foreign" influences.

• Continue to reinforce the US military "advisory" program to Iraqi Security Forces, with a plus-up of officer-advisor commitments to ISF units (the US "Military Transition Team" program, or MTT) – this plus-up could come from a downsizing of the US forces in Iraq that would come from the theater-strategic re-posturing of US military forces to the Iraqi periphery.      

Any comments?

Comments

[Dan Kervick]

Lorelei, I’ve read your friend’s comments several times now, but I’m having a lot of difficulty understanding them. They seem to be written in some sort of military-bureaucratic code intelligible only to Pentagon staffers, and display the legendary military love of euphemism. But interestingly, he scare-quotes his own euphemisms, as though even he is embarrassed to be using them. Note the quotes around “new prescription”, “other”, “DDR”, “moderate”, “foreign”, “advisory” and “Military Transition Team”.

So now the new buzz expression is “new prescriptions”? I must have missed that press release. But I see that these new prescriptions are designed to split the difference between “changing course” and “staying the fight”. That’s slick. We chart a bold middle course between two euphemisms with a third euphemism.

I’ve hear much talk over the past week or so about increasing the number of advisors in Iraq. Well, anybody familiar with the history of the Vietnam War and US involvements in Latin America should feel a chill whenever they hear the word “advisors,” since the term seems to be nothing but a euphemism for “soldiers.” The escalation in Vietnam from a small skirmish to an all-out war came about through gradual increases in the number of “advisors” in country.

And what are these advisors supposed to do exactly? Command the units? Do most of the actual fighting? Baby sit? I’m having trouble believing that the failure over three years to produce an effective Iraqi national army is due to the fact that there aren’t enough US military “advisors” in Iraq. Instead my impression is that the problem is that not too many people are really interested in fighting in a sham army for a sham government, against people whom they like more than they like the government. They might be interested in drawing a paycheck, of course. So maybe the job of these so-called advisors is just to continue to do the actual fighting, but now to pretend that it is Iraqis who are doing the fighting, and to pretend that there aren’t as many US soldiers in Iraq – but just some advisors. It all strikes me as classic Pentagon doubletalk designed to pull the wool over the public’s eyes.

The “plus-up” of advisors is supposed to follow a “theater-strategic re-posturing of the preponderance of US military force units more toward the Iraqi territorial border.” (I love that one – “theater-strategic re-posturing” – it’s better even than “redeployment”). The description of the re-posturing contains the crux of your friend’s “new prescriptions”. The point is to:

§ Posture US forces at the operational center of gravity in the GWOT-in-Iraq and the surrounding region . . . at the borders, and in so doing, also . . .

§ Posture ourselves in locations that offer the Iraqi Government a means of ensuring the sovereignty of its own national borders (one important condition of nation-state sovereignty) as well as setting the best operational conditions for ensuring an internal conflict over the future of Iraq that is not dominated by unwanted and unwarranted "foreign" influences.

I presume the foreign influences to which he is referring are US influences. If I may be so bold, then, as to hazard a straightforward English translation of these hieroglyphs, this is how I read them: We’re going to get ourselves out of the insurgency-fighting business, withdraw our forces from the main battlefields of the actual war, hang out in safer locations near the borders, and let the Iraqis fight their own civil war without a lot meddling by Uncle Sam.

But mindful of the eternal military need for face-saving doubletalk in the event of retreat, your friend chooses to describe getting our soldiers out of Iraq’s business as “ensuring the best operational conditions” for Iraqis to fight the civil war themselves. And instead of admitting that one of the “new prescriptions” is that the soldiers are be removed to a safe distance, he would have us believe that the safer place they are being moved to is actually the new “operational center of gravity” in the Global War on Terror in Iraq. Later he forgets himself, though, and describes the re-posturing as a move to the “Iraqi periphery.”

So far, minus the bureaucratic bullshit, I would say this all sounds like a step in the right direction. But I worry again about all the talk of advisors, and wonder if this alleged “re-posturing” isn’t just designed as some sort of sham for public consumption. Your friend wants to “continue to reinforce the US military "advisory" program to Iraqi Security Forces, with a plus-up of officer-advisor commitments to ISF units (the US "Military Transition Team" program, or MTT)”, and says the reinforcements could come “from a downsizing of the US forces in Iraq that would come from the theater-strategic re-posturing of US military forces to the Iraqi periphery.”

This sure sounds like some creative bookkeeping to me. First we downsize the US forces in Iraq as part of a withdrawal … oh, excuse me…I mean a theater-strategic re-posturing… and then we re-insert those soldiers - except that now we call them “advisors”.

This sounds sensible to me, within the limits that we'd be staying in iraq.

Our troops are not particularly useful for fighting insurgents or fighting the civil war. We mostly can't tell who's on the other side until they shoot at us, except for places where we know everybody's against us like Haditha. Not useful.

But we can seal borders. We don't have to be able to tell people apart to kill them when they try to cross the border. And it gets us out of the way. When we're controlling the borders we officially give the iraqi government sovereign control of those borders, and to the extent that foreign terrorists are the problem we're handling it. Foreign terrorists are part of the GWOT in ways that iraqi civil war is not.

Advisors can do various things for the iraqi army. They continuously monitor the morale and desertion rates of the units they attend, far better data than we'd get otherwise. They can note problems with supply and possibly get them fixed. (Iraqi logistics is notoriously corrupt, which causes problems for the fighting units.) They can train iraqi officers on-the-job. They can train soldiers on-the-job. They can sometimes shame iraqi soldiers into doing their job when they'd otherwise chicken out.

When we expand US forces, the ideal is to mix the new guys into operational units. Put one green squad with two seasoned squads, and one mixed platoon with two seasoned platoons, and so on. Ideally, at every level you have two experienced people to coach the new guy. I've read that the best mix of advisors to iraqis is 1:1 which surprises me, I'd expect it to be 2:1 as it is inside our own units. Another way we could benefit iraqi units is to provide firepower. We're great on firepower but we tend not to know which way to aim it. If we had iraqis to tell us who to shoot we could attack without waiting to get shot at first. That would help with the civil war provided the iraqis who're telling us who to shoot happen to be on the right side.

I foresee some problems. We don't want our troops spread out in long