Archive for the 'Iraq' Category

This one is rather different from the room-clearing and military operations on urban terrain (MOUT) in so much of Iraq.  But it’s not too different from the footage of the battle where Travis Haley was making successful kills at 600 meters.

The battle is long range, and a collection of forces (US Army, Blackwater, Spanish troops) are defending a FOB when it came under attack from Sadr’s fighters.

The first scene is in daylight, with some slower targeted shooting and also some use of crew-served weapons, while the second (and more interesting) scene is a night battle where they are making big use of fires targeted by use of an M203.

Then:

When it comes to private contractors, there is room for private contractors to work in the mess hall providing basic supplies and doing some logistical work that might have been done in-house in the past. I am troubled by the use of private contractors when it comes to potential armed engagements.

I think it puts our troops in harm’s way. I think it creates some difficult morale issues when you’ve got private contractors getting paid 10 times what an Army private’s getting paid for work that carries similar risks.

When it comes to our special forces, what we’ve seen is that it’s a potential drain of some of our best-trained special forces, and you can’t blame them if they can make so much more working for Blackwater than they can working as a master sergeant. That, I think is a problem.

[I]f… you start making decisions on armed engagement based on the availability of private contractors to fill holes and gaps that over time you are, I believe, eroding the core of our military’s relationship to the nation and how accountability is structured. I think you are privatizing something that is what essentially sets a nation-state apart, which is a monopoly on violence. And to set those kinds of precedents, I think, will lead us over the long term into some troubled waters.

Now.

Wary of putting combat troops in Iraq, the U.S. government is gauging contractors’ interest in advising the Iraqi Defense Ministry and Counter Terrorism Service in a range of capacities, including force development, logistics and planning and operations.

The U.S. Army Contracting Command posted a notice last month seeking contractors willing to work on an initial 12-month contract, who should be “cognizant of the goals of reducing tensions between Arabs and Kurds, and Sunni and Shias.”

They would focus on administration, force development, procurement and acquisition, contracting, training management, public affairs, logistics, personnel management, professional development, communications, planning and operations, infrastructure management, intelligence and executive development, the notice stated.

Those services “fall within the existing mission” of the Office of Security Assistance-Iraq, “which is to help build institutional capacity of Iraq’s security ministries,” Defense Department spokesman Commander Bill Speaks said in an email.

The rapid advance of Islamic State militants in Iraq in recent months has spurred the deployment of almost 1,000 American troops to protect U.S. diplomatic facilities in Iraq’s capital Baghdad and the northern city of Irbil, in the semi-autonomous Kurdistan region.

Nearly 100 additional servicemembers are there as advisers with the Office of Security Assistance–Iraq, and civilian advisers may not be far behind.

Analysts say hiring contractors is a way to avoid deploying such forces.

David Johnson, a former Army lieutenant colonel who is executive director of the Center for Advanced Defense Studies in Washington, said contractors aren’t considered “boots on the ground” in conflict zones.

“The government always seeks to minimize boots on the ground to reduce domestic political risk,” he said in an email. “The American people and media do not consider a paid contractor to represent them in the same way that they do a soldier.”

It rings hollow to say that this isn’t a combat mission and the contractors will be in no danger.  If that was true, there would be no objection to sending Special Forces to do the training and act as a stopgap (this is a perfect mission for the U.S. Special Forces, or Green Beret, not Special Operations).

But if I was a contractor in Iraq now given the tepid support I sense from Washington, I would make sure I had means of evasion, escape, egress and evacuation.

Obama: “I hated military contractors then, but now I love them.”  Because Obama is a perpetual and incorrigible liar.

ABC News:

The video, set to sweetly lilting religious hymns, is chilling. Islamic militants are shown knocking on the door of a Sunni police major in the dead of night in an Iraqi city. When he answers, they blindfold and cuff him. Then they carve off his head with a knife in his own bedroom.

The 61-minute video was recently posted online by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant, an al-Qaida splinter group of Sunni extremists. The intent was to terrorize Sunnis in Iraq’s army and police forces and deepen their already low morale.

CNS News:

While hundreds of thousands of Iraqis are affected by the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant’s takeover of key cities including the Ninawa (Nineveh) provincial capital, Mosul, minority Christians – some of whom trace their origins to the earliest years of Christianity – are among those with the most to lose.

In previous years, Christians fleeting violence in Baghdad or elsewhere in the south often headed for the Mosul area. The Nineveh Plain formed the historic homeland of Assyrians, an ancient non-Arab ethnic group in Iraq. Main Christian denominations include Chaldean Catholic, Assyrian, Syrian Orthodox, Armenian and evangelicals.

Syria was another key destination for Christians who were able to leave Iraq, but the civil war there made life even riskier across the border than at home, prompting some to return.

For many Christians in the Mosul area now, the autonomous Kurdish region to the north-east may offer the best short-term hope – if they are able to cross over. Chaldean archbishop Amel Nona told the Catholic charity Aid to the Church in Need (ACN) he believed all Mosul’s Christians had left the city, and spoke of efforts to find emergency accommodation in ancient Christian villages in the Nineveh Plain.

As the jihadists swept into Mosul this week, they reportedly looted and torched churches, raised their black “there is no god but Allah” flags and started demanding that women wear the Islamic veil.

The Assyrian International News Agency identified two of the targeted churches as the Chaldean Church of the Holy Spirit, and an Armenian church under construction, which it said was bombed.

Barnabas Fund, an aid agency that supports minority Christians in Islamic countries, said the attacks on churches were “a clear statement from ISIS that they are no longer welcome in Mosul.”

“It is feared that this latest exodus could be the final death knell for the Christians of Iraq,” said Barnabas international director Patrick Sookdheo.

World Net Daily:

About 200 Americans under contract with the Department of Defense at Balad Air Force Base in Iraq are trapped by the al-Qaida-inspired jihadists who have seized control of two cities and are now threatening Baghdad, according to WND sources.

The sources, private contractors who have recently returned to the U.S. from Iraq, said Friday their former colleagues effectively have been abandoned by the U.S. military and are fighting for their lives against an army of jihadists surrounding the base who belong to the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, or ISIS.

The U.S. contractors are at Balad to help the Pentagon prepare the facilities for the delivery of the F-16 aircraft the Obama administration has agreed to provide the Iraqi government.

The surrounded Americans said they currently are under ISIS fire from small arms, AK47s, and rocket propelled grenades, or RPGs.

The contractors so far have been able to hold the base, but those on the scene reported it was only a matter of time before the ISIS terrorists succeeded in breaking through the perimeter. The sources confirmed the contractors were still under siege, despite an Associated Press report Thursday, citing U.S. officials, that three planeloads of Americans were being evacuated from Balad.

As usual, Walter Russell Meade astutely notes the emerging Kurdish state in northeastern Syria:

Syria’s Kurds once waged a fruitless struggle with Damascus against discrimination and for basic rights like citizenship and official recognition of a distinct Kurdish language and culture. Now, however, the equation has changed, and large chunks of northeastern Syria are now under the sole control of the Kurds.

Back in July, Butcher Assad ceded the responsibility of governing and maintaining law and order in northeastern Syria to Kurdish leaders. In return they would keep out of the uprising. Syrian Kurdish leaders have taken this responsibility and run with it.

Of particular value is the accompanying map:

This illustrates the haphazard nature of current national boundaries in the Middle East, the result of post-World War I deals by the British and French.  Much of the conflict in the Middle East results from the incoherence of diverse ethnic groups arbitrarily compressed into a nation state.   As the Middle East continues to snowball into chaos and war, it may be that more sensible states will necessarily emerge.

Interestingly, Meade appears worried about the emergence (or re-emergence) of Kurdish nationalism in Syria and elsewhere, but from the viewpoint of U.S. national interests, the Kurds seem to be a natural ally of the U.S. in a critical part of the world where such allies are few and far between.

The Kurds are a distinct people group from the Arabs, Persians and Turks.   The Kurds in northern Iraq are one of the most pro-American populations in the entire Middle East and yet the Obama Administration has left them with little tangible support.   Syria presents an opportunity for the U.S. to establish a Kurdish enclave that can be a lever against an increasingly Islamist Turkey, as well as Iran, Iraq and whatever state emerges in the remainder of Syria.

The Kurds present an opportunity for the U.S. in Iraq as well.   After kicking ourselves out of Iraq last year, a new Romney Administration might take advantage of the autonomy of Kurds in Iraq to expand U.S. influence and presence there.  Iraq appears to be headed towards another civil war as the Shiite leadership in Baghdad increasingly excludes the Sunnis.   The U.S. could have a significant influence, through Iraqi Kurds, in curbing the excesses of the Shiite government or, failing that, to buttress the security and integrity of the Kudish region against pressure from the Baghdad government or Iran.

This is the kind of statecraft that the U.S. has seemingly forgotten.  We do not need infantry battalions on the ground nor billions of dollars in foreign aid to influence the direction of events in the Middle East.  The U.S. first needs to prove itself reliable as an ally (something that has suffered enormously under Obama).  Next, the U.S. must show the unique value it brings to vulnerable peoples like the Kurds:  expertise and training; economic development through private industry and trade; an unmatched (for now) diplomatic, military and humanitarian muscle available in times of need.   Like the Israelis, the Kurds have shown themselves to be fierce, independent, industrious, loyal and willing.   These are basic qualities necessary in an ally.   (Which is, perhaps, why, after 11 years, Afghanistan cannot be called an ally in any true sense of the word).

There are a lot of Milbloggers, military aficionados, knowledgeable members of the military, and veterans of wars that can and often do weigh in on issues of policy, strategy, tactics, techniques and procedures.  But occasionally a real warrior-scholar steps into the fray, and we are always blessed with insights beyond what we could normally bring to the table.  Gian Gentile is just such a warrior-scholar.  I do not believe that a man has to have waged war in order to be a scholar and great historian on it, but with Gentile, we have the entire package.  He has both studied it and lived it.  He is both a friend and a genuinely good man, and we are richer for having his insights.

Gentile uses the occasion of a new book to give us insights into Vietnam, extending his lessons into Iraq and Afghanistan.  The book is Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam, by Lewis Sorley.  Gentile begins his review thusly.

DID GENERAL Westmoreland lose Vietnam? The answer is no. But he did lose the war over the memory of the Vietnam War. He lost it to military historian Lewis Sorley, among others. In his recent biography of William C. Westmoreland, Sorley posits what might be called “the better-war thesis”—that a better war leading to American victory was available to the United States if only the right general had been in charge. The problem, however, is that this so-called better war exists mostly in the minds of misguided historians and agenda-driven pundits.

[ … ]

In 2008, former secretary of defense Robert Gates chided the American military establishment, and the army in particular, for its affliction of “Next-War-itis.” Parts of the American military, lamented Gates, were too focused on fighting hypothetical future wars rather than the immediate wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But the secretary also might have noted another dangerous affliction suffered by parts of the U.S. Army: “Past-War-itis.” Those afflicted with this disease obsess about a Vietnam defeat they believe should have been averted.

Sorley titles his book Westmoreland: The General Who Lost Vietnam. This is “Past-War-itis” run amok. Is it possible that a single man actually lost the war and all of Vietnam? The question is pertinent today because many seeking to bring logic to the past ten years of war in Iraq and Afghanistan have embraced the simplistic concept that to win those wars we just need to put the right guy in charge. One such example is the Council on Foreign Relations’ Max Boot, an enthusiastic supporter of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars … another example is writer Thomas Ricks, one of the purveyors of the better-war thesis for Iraq. Ricks wrote a glowing jacket endorsement for Sorley’s book, and he also noted on his military-affairs blog that it would probably end up as the “definitive” biography of Westmoreland. If one is interested, however, in a fair and balanced historical biography of William C. Westmoreland, Ricks is wildly off the mark.

The better-war thesis argues that there was a tactical panacea in Vietnam—a golden cipher of success—just waiting for the right general who could grasp and apply it. Instead, for the first three years of the war beginning in 1965, the U.S. Army was led by a fumbling general named William Childs Westmoreland, who did not crack the code that would have produced victory for the United States. Luckily, as the better-war thesis continues, once Westmoreland was replaced in the summer of 1968 by a savior general named Creighton Abrams, everything changed for the better, and Abrams’s army actually won the war in the South by 1971. The tragedy, according to this thesis, was that weak American politicians undermined the victory by eventually cutting off material support to South Vietnam after the United States departed in 1972.

Weak American politicians and an unwilling American public did indeed undermine the campaign, but I’ll basically state my agreement with Gian’s thesis on the better general, while I’ll also [later] demur with some of his specific findings on Vietnam and Iraq. We’ll continue with Gian’s observations.

The tale of a better war in Vietnam is seductive. It offers a simple explanation of an army redeemed through tactical innovation brought about by a savior general. But the United States did not lose the Vietnam War because it didn’t have the right general in charge at the start, or because of weak politicians toward the end of the war. Washington lost because it failed at strategy. It failed, in short, to discern that the war was unwinnable at a cost in blood and treasure that the American people would accept. There was never a “better war” in Vietnam.

THIS FAITH in the promise of better tactical wars with savior generals has emerged in full force in the current wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. In August 2007, as the violence in Iraq dropped precipitously, Clifford May, former New York Times reporter and current president of the Foundation for Defense of Democracies, identified Petraeus as the main cause of the reduction in violence. May wrote that this enlightened general replaced a failed general and then equipped his army in Iraq with new methods for conducting counterinsurgency. Later, in October 2009, Sorley penned a New York Times article that praised the counterinsurgency tactics of General Stanley McChrystal, then senior American commander in Afghanistan. May and Sorley saw Iraq and Afghanistan as better wars in the making based on the arrival of savior generals.

[ … ]

But the conditions in Iraq that would lead to the lowering of violence in late 2007 were already in place. They included the spread of the Anbar Awakening and the decision of Shia militias to end attacks against Sunni civilians. Recently published databases such as the Iraq Body Count project’s show quite clearly that the sectarian violence peaked in December 2006 and then started to drop a good two months before Petraeus ever rode onto the scene with his new counterinsurgency manual in hand. Petraeus, the savior general, played only a marginal role in the greater series of events and circumstances that brought down the level of Iraqi violence.

I do indeed think that there was a “better war” in Vietnam – not in the sense that Gian critiques – but we’ll get to that later.  His observations on Iraq contain a number of things I have personally addressed with Gian, but it will be useful and productive to lay it out for closer inspection.

First, let’s address the so-called Anbar Awakening.  The Awakening – primarily in 2006 and beyond – was significant.  It certainly truncated the Marine Corps campaign for Anbar shorter than what it would have been.  But it was primarily a feature of Ramadi, and it was primarily a feature that obtained as a result of hard Marine Corps combat operations in the Anbar Province convincing the population that the victor would ultimately be the Marine Corps.

In Haditha late in 2006 and early in 2007 pacification is primarily attributed to a former officer in the Saddam Hussein army known simply as Colonel Faruq, with the power and charisma to bring the town to heel, along with sand berms around the city (constructed by the Marines) to prevent transnational insurgents from coming in from Syria and causing problems.

In Al Qaim, the fight against al Qaeda began in 2005 when Abu Ahmed took them on, lost, fled to the desert, and sought (and obtained) help from the U.S. Marines to defeat AQ.  In Fallujah in 2007, al Qaeda fighters were so firmly ensconced in the city that the people, fearing for their lives, were sending their own children out to mark and encircle Marine patrols with balloons (at the direction of the AQ fighters) so that the patrols could be targeted with crew served weapons.

It took the 2/6 Marines using extremely hard and aggressive tactics, coupled with local IPs and block captains, or Mukhtars, recruited from among the population, again using extremely hard and aggressive tactics, to drive AQ from the city.

My point is that invoking the Anbar Awakening has become in many ways symptomatic the campaign.  It’s as if without it, the Marines wouldn’t have been successful, but with it, Anbar was Shangri La.  Neither view is true.  Nor is it true that the Marines weren’t grateful for what awakening that did occur in various parts of Anbar.  The truth is more complex than simple narratives can possible convey.

Similarly, to say that the Shia militias decided to end attacks on the Sunnis misses the point, and in the superlative degree.  Perhaps they did, but this bit of historical myopia is tailor made for constructing false narratives about Baghdad and the Shia South.

In 2003 the 3/2 Marines had Moqtada al Sadr in their custody (this is as conveyed from the Battaion Commander to Andrew Lubin).  They were ordered to release him.  Then as the U.S. Marines (BLT 1/4) and U.S. Army Calvary swept through al-Najaf in 2004, for all practical purposes they obliterated the Sadrist militia.  The year of 2004 could have seen the virtual end of the organized Shi’a militia threat.  The 1/4 Marines had surrounded Moqtada al Sadr (see this John Burns interview, beginning at 17:20 into the discussion).  Sadr and his militia were essentially finished twice, once in 2003 and again in 2004, due to 3/2 and 1/4 Marine Corps combat operations.  Both times they were ordered to stand down.*

We could have chosen to kill Sadr, finish the Shi’a militia, and end the threat of a violent Shi’a uprising against the Sunni population.  We chose unwisely, and the order came down to let Sadr go.  To say that the Shi’a militia later decided to end attacks against the Sunnis is to miss the bigger picture, i.e., there wouldn’t have been any Sadr to command them, and likely no militia to speak of, had we engaged in the “better war” in Iraq when we had the chance.  Instead we had Paul Bremer, the British and horrible leadership.  It was a toxic combination, and it cost precious lives.

Meanwhile to the West, campaign command pulled the Marines back from Al Fajr I, creating the necessity for Al Fajr II, more loss of lives, more time wasted, and more legitimacy lost.  We didn’t fight the better war in Fallujah either.  And when we completed the job, we sent Marines on wasteful MEUs rather than into Fallujah to ensure stability, and thus the 2/6 Marines had to deal with an ensconced al Qaeda in 2007.

But something tells me what while Gian and I may disagree on the details of the campaign in Iraq, he would concur with my general theme.  Gian observes of Vietnam:

The better-war thesis argues that if only the U.S. Army had concentrated from the start on building up the South Vietnamese armed forces and winning the hearts and minds of the South Vietnamese people through limited applications of military force, we would have won the war. But the question remains: Precisely how could tactical adjustments early in the war have overpowered the political constraints placed on the army by the Johnson administration, which kept it from taking the fight to the North Vietnamese? Or the dysfunctional nature of the South Vietnamese government and military that precluded them from standing on their own? Or the declining popular support and political will in the United States as the war dragged on without a decent end in sight? Or, perhaps most importantly, how could tactical adjustments toward better methods of counterinsurgency have overpowered a communist enemy that fought the war totally while the United States fought it with limited means? In his Westmoreland biography, Sorley essentially ignores these questions.

Could the United States have prevailed in Vietnam? Yes, but it would have had to commit to staying there for generations, not a mere handful of years. The Vietnam War was an attempt at armed nation building for South Vietnam.

The better fight in Vietnam to which I earlier referred has nothing to do with staying for generations or armed nation-building.  These are the policy mistakes we have made in Iraq and Afghanistan.  We tend to see campaigns as failures unless they install governments and re-create populations that never pose another threat to the U.S.  But this isn’t reality, and this is certainly not the way the U.S. Marines think about these issues.

This last point isn’t mere inter-service rivalry.  I cannot count the number of times I have heard Marines express their desire to end campaigns quickly, and then go back and do it again in two, five or ten years if the need arises.

The better war to which I refer was alluded to by Gian when he posed the question, “Precisely how could tactical adjustments early in the war have overpowered the political constraints placed on the army by the Johnson administration, which kept it from taking the fight to the North Vietnamese?”

If this question isn’t explored, the book is essentially worthless no matter how many endorsements the author obtained.  Consider for a moment how we dealt with the threat from Germany during World War II.

The burning of Hamburg that night was remarkable in that I saw not many fires but one.  Set in the darkness was a turbulent dome of bright red fire, lighted and ignited like the glowing heart of a vast brazier.  I saw no flames, no outlines of buildings, only brighter fires which flared like yellow torches against a background of bright red ash.  Above the city was a misty red haze.  I looked down, fascinated but aghast, satisfied yet horrified.  I had never seen a fire like that before and was never to see its like again.

Roads melted, and some people were seen stuck in the melted asphalt, having put their hands out to try to get out, only to get their hands stuck as well.  Many were seen on fire, eventually melting in their own fat.  Eight square miles of Hamburg were completely burned out that night, killing 45,000 Germans.

If we had not done this, countless more American lives would have been lost, and the war may not have been won by the allies at all.  Destruction of the will and industry to wage war was necessary to end the war, whether this fits into the American clinical view of bloodless war or not.

Compare this with the decision to refuse to take the fight to the North Vietnamese.  Consider for a moment what would have happened if we had bombed the dikes and dams on the Red River Delta.  To be sure, the cost in human tragedy would have been staggering, but this is exactly the point.  We wish to wage war, but only partly.  The Viet Cong insurgency in the South was for all practical purposes defeated (in spite of the succor given to them by the North via the Ho Chi Minh trail), and it was the entrance of the NVA regulars that saved the insurgency.  A hobbled North Vietnam from having bombed the Red River Delta for year wouldn’t have been able to give the kind of assistance that the VC got.  It might have even brought down the regime.

Back to Iraq, if we had taken on the Syrian pre-deployment camps for AQ fighters (80 – 150 fighters per year crossed the border to fight in Iraq), and if we had fought the Iranian Quds forces by targeting them in Iraq and elsewhere (while we also engaged in a program of targeting Quds generals like Suleimani), and if we had allowed the Marines to kill Sadr and finish off his militia, and if we had allowed them to continue the sweep through Anbar like they started it in Fallujah, and if we had sent more Marines into Anbar instead of on wasteful MEUs … what would the campaign have looked like?

Gian continues:

In war, political and societal will are calculations of strategy, and strategists in Vietnam should have discerned early on that the war was simply unwinnable based on what the American people were willing to pay. Once the war started and it became clear that to prevail meant staying for an unacceptable amount of time, American strategy should have moved to withdraw much earlier than it did. Ending wars fought under botched strategy and policy can be every bit as damaging as the wars themselves.

The better-war thesis, with its seductively simple cause-and-effect schema, buries the reality of American strategic failure in Vietnam.

The campaign in Vietnam was unwinnable under the stipulations dictated by the President, Congress and perhaps the Secretary of Defense.  And the campaign was unwinnable if winning was defined as building an American-like democracy (in which Gian is correct, taking multiple decades of toil).  On this Gian and I concur.  The proposed end was wrong, and the means weren’t defined in a manner that matched the proposed end.

Gian goes on to supply data that contradicts Sorley’s theses.  Again, I concur.  Westmoreland didn’t lose the war in Vietnam any more than Creighton Abrams could have won it with alternative tactics.  Tactics, techniques and procedures don’t replace strategy, and they certainly don’t replace policy.

The “better” general in Iraq didn’t win Iraq.  As we have [briefly] discussed, the hard work of the U.S. Army and Marine Corps was done before and during the tenure of all the generals who commanded the campaign.  It was a matter of time, endurance and professionalism by the U.S. military.  To the extent that we attained success in Iraq, it is attributable to the U.S. military.  To the extent that we failed in Iraq, it is attributable to lack of vision or clear policy by the administration(s), e.g., the failure to fight Iraq as a regional war, the support of corrupt Iranian apparatchiks like Nouri al-Maliki, the failure to secure the borders, the engagement of protracted nation-building, etc.

Afghanistan is lost due to the same reasons.  I generally give the U.S. military more credit and attribute more capabilities to them than does Gian.  But one thing the U.S. military cannot pull off is replacement for national policy.  Gian reminds us again that seeking out military heroes to do just this is a distinctly American pastime, but it is mistaken and dangerous, at least for the thinking men among us.

* Thanks to  Wes Morgan and Andrew Lubin for assisting me to get the Marine Corps units and dates correct regarding operations in 2003 and 2004.

As if it wasn’t bad enough that the U.S. could not figure out how to negotiate an extension of the Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) with Iraq, leading to the “premature evacuation” of our forces in two months time, the Turks have decided to make it clear to the world (and, more importantly, the regional powers that matter) the decidedly unmanly U.S. foreign policy.

Turkey has apparently decided that it is really just too inconvenient to keep dodging back and forth across the northern Iraqi border in pursuit of Kurdish militants.  Instead, according to this news item from August (which seems to have slipped under the collective radar), the Turks are fortifying bases in northern Iraq and settling in for a seemingly long stay.

ANKARA, Turkey, Aug. 19 (UPI) — Turkey targeted Kurdish rebels in northern Iraq for a second day, broadening the reach of its fight against the rebels, officials said.

The attacks Thursday came as Turkey said it’s turning intelligence outposts into operations garrisons to fight the Kurdistan Workers’ Party, known as PKK, to northern Iraq, where Turkey has 2,500 troops.

Turkey, which has had intelligence outposts in the region since 1995, will transform a Bamerni garrison into a logistics center for supporting major operations against PKK, Today’s Zaman reported.

The publication, citing sources, said fortification of outposts would enable Turkish troops in Iraq to stay there longer to search for members of the outlawed PKK. Bombings are to continue and units from Sirnak province will be deployed in the region, officials said.

Today’s Zaman did not give casualty figures in the latest attacks.

The 25 cross-border operations Turkey has conducted so far have been short because of pressure from allies and regional governments, but sources told Today’s Zaman Turkey would now continue operations as long as necessary to end the threat of terrorism in northern Iraq.

After a regular meeting Thursday, led by President Abdullah Gul, Turkey’s National Security Council said it’s embarking on “more effective and decisive strategy in the fight against terrorism.”

About 20 million of Turkey’s 74 million residents are Kurds, living mainly in the southeast near the country’s borders with Iraq and Iran, and the PKK’s fight for Kurdish independence has claimed 40,000 lives in the past three decades.

There are so many knife wounds in such a short story.  The actions of Turkey here could not present a stronger contrast with U.S. actions if Hollywood wanted to script it.

First off, the Turks do not seem to have learned that Iraq is a sovereign state and that any bases in Iraq used to pursue Turkey’s enemies must be subject to arduous and infinite negotiations, full of lavish offers of foreign aid and support.    How long did Turkey negotiate with Nouri al-Maliki in order to get these basing rights in a supposedly sovereign Iraq?  The article is silent but it is a safe bet that there were no negotiations.   Turkey essentially told the Iraqis, “We’re doing this.  Get used to it.”

Next, what about immunity for Turkish soldiers from prosecution under Iraqi laws?   Obama has told us that those Iraqis are absolute sticklers about this sort of thing.  Why the Iraqi people would never allow foreign soldiers on their soil who can violate Iraqi law with impunity.   The U.S. just couldn’t get that point resolved, so time to pack up in a hurry and get out of Dodge.    Somehow, though, it doesn’t look like the Turks are at all worried about Iraqi prosecutors putting Turkish soldiers in jail.

And how about that nasty Turkish attitude about a few, measly PKK fighters taking shelter in Iraq?  Kurds make up over 25% of Turkey’s population and have historic claims to parts of Turkey, Iraq and Iran.   Arguably, the Kurds were robbed of their own state when the victors of World War I split up the Ottoman Empire.   Unlike the U.S. in Pakistan, Turkey seems to have no problem treating the Iraqi border as purely optional and, now, it seems that part of Iraq itself will become effectively Turkish until the PKK is sorted out.   If that ever happens.

And what to make of Turkey’s methods for defeating the PKK?  It sure does not sound like Turkey is establishing these bases in Iraq in order to win the hearts and minds of PKK guerillas.   I sure hope that Turkish forces are going to be culturally sensitive and not commit any grievous offenses like flatulence in the presence of Iraqi Kurds, but we cannot expect that Turkish leaders will be nearly as enlightened as American leadership in this regard.  Instead, it appears that the Turks are intent on finding and killing as many of the PKK militants as possible, hence the talk by President Gul about “effective and decisive strategy in the fight against terrorism.”   Sounds way too warlike.   Not at all a COIN-centric policy.

Nonetheless, these actions by Turkey should not diminish the crowning achievement announced by President Obama that U.S. forces will be completely withdrawn from Iraq by January 1, 2012 and the war officially “over.”

Funny.  Wasn’t there a time in U.S. history when a war was not “over,” it was “won” ?

UPDATE: Michael Rubin has just posted this damning bit of information that relates how the once openly-pro American Kurds of Iraq have now (correctly) read the complete collapse of American foreign policy in the Middle East and are embracing the Iranian Regime:

So this is the way it comes to an end?

Throughout the summer and autumn, as talks on a continued U.S. military presence in Iraq foundered, President Barack Obama and his point man on Iraq, Vice President Joe Biden, remained aloof from the process, not even phoning top Iraqi officials to help reach a deal, according to logs released by the U.S. Embassy here.

The omission is an unusual one, given the high priority that U.S. officials had given to achieving an agreement for some sort of residual U.S. presence in Iraq after the Dec. 31 pullout deadline set in a 2008 pact between the two countries. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and other senior Pentagon officials spoke often about the need for an agreement in a pivotal country in a volatile region and insisted talks were continuing up until Friday, when Obama announced that all U.S. troops would be coming home before the end of December.

A listing of direct conversations provided by the embassy — drawn, the embassy said, from the White House website — indicates that Obama had no direct contact with Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki between Feb. 13, when he telephoned the prime minister, until Friday, when he called al-Maliki to tell him U.S. troops would be withdrawn by Dec. 31.

Also absent for nearly the entire year was Biden. According to the official listing, Biden telephoned al-Maliki on Dec. 21, the day al-Maliki formed a new government, and visited here Jan. 18, but had no direct contact after that date, according to the official listing.

U.S. Embassy officials, asked in July whether Biden was coming to help secure the deal, which military officers said needed to be concluded by July 31 for planning purposes, said the vice president was too busy trying to end the donnybrook in Congress over raising the national debt ceiling to visit Iraq.

On Tuesday, a White House spokesman, Tommy Vietor, denied that Obama and Biden had not talked to al-Maliki during the negotiations. But he did not respond to a request for the dates of conversations between the president and al-Maliki.

So I decided to hop on over to Abu Muqawama’s place at CNAS (for the first time in about a year) and see if he had anything to say about Iraq.  He had this to say.  “Having pretty carefully considered the arguments for and against leaving troops in Iraq beyond this year, I ultimately found Doug Ollivant’s argument to be the most persuasive. So I support the president’s decision to end U.S. military involvement in the war in Iraq.”  Douglas Ollivant had this to say.

Let me be clear. The United States should have no — zero — troops in Iraq on Jan. 1, 2012, when the Status of Forces Agreement signed between the two countries requires a complete withdrawal (this number excepts, of course, a small military presence at the U.S. Embassy’s Office of Military Cooperation — a presence that exists in almost every embassy worldwide). This is not about delivering on an Obama campaign promise or saving money. This is about doing the right thing for both the United States and Iraq. Although the White House’s proposal to keep approximately 3,000 troops in Iraq is better than the rumored 17,000 desired by the commander of the U.S. forces in Iraq, Gen. Lloyd Austin, maintaining any American presence is simply the wrong decision for both parties.

Despite having both a political problem and a terrorism problem, Iraq is now a reasonably stable country that must have the opportunity to chart its own course.

Now that Ollivant has been “clear,” let me also be clear.  Maliki’s puppet-masters are the Mullah’s in Iran.  Regardless of what one thinks of OIF1, OIF2 and OIF3 were necessary.  And a certain Marine and I had a conversation the other day about the 100+ foreign fighters flowing across the Syrian border per month and Iraq as a terrorist haven in 2007 during the height of the surge (when he deployed to Fallujah).  He also remarked to me about the poverty he witnessed, and the wealth that it takes to arm a society.

“As little money as I make, I am rich compared to most Iraqis,” he said.  “Yet they had AKs, handguns, explosive ordnance, and RPGs.  The RPG is an EFP device.  Do you know how much it costs to make and deploy one of those?  The weapons came in from Iran.  Typical Iraqis could not possibly have had the size caches we seized of those weapons after combat ops.  Thousands upon thousands – just in our AO.  You just can’t imagine the scope.  The money doesn’t exist.  These people don’t have it, and neither did the foreign fighters we killed, although the foreign fighters had better equipment than we did.”

He continued, “So do you think we finished the job?”  “No,” I said.  “We are leaving Iran empowered.  We could have enjoined the covert war they declared against the U.S., but we refused to do it.”  “I agree,” he replied, somewhat wistfully.  And we continued to discuss the possibilities that even a small force in Iraq could accomplish with the will to do it at the senior administration level.

And now I find that the President is busy printing and spending trillions upon trillions of dollars and throwing it away on worthless projects, while the Vice President is busy attempting to raise the debt ceiling so that our children and children’s children can be impoverished and bankrupt, while we ignored Iraq and Iran, refusing even to invite the PM for a visit so that we could strong arm him and negotiate a new SOFA.

Children.  Children in the White House, being led by a senior child, surrounded by children for policy advisers, being advised by children at think tanks who have absolutely no idea whatsoever of the ramifications of their counsel forward in time ( and who quote even more childish and un-serious think tanks for their sources).

Please, dear God, please, send someone serious to help these people.  Gravitas, please?

From The Washington Post:

The United States will continue to support Iraq as it moves toward democracy, U.S. Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton said Saturday as she wrapped up a weeklong overseas trip.

Without mentioning Iran by name, Clinton warned Iraq’s neighbors against meddling and said the U.S. and Iraq would remain close allies.

“As we open this new chapter in a relationship with sovereign Iraq, to the Iraqis we say: America is with you as you take your next steps in your journey to secure your democracy,” she said.

“And to countries in the region, especially Iraqi’s neighbors, we want to emphasize that America will stand with our allies and friends, including Iraq, in defense of our common security and interests.”

She said the United States would have a “robust, continuing presence throughout the region, which is proof of our ongoing commitment to Iraq and to the future of that region.”

The problem with Iran began more than a quarter century ago, and for Operation Iraqi Freedom, even before the campaign began.  We could have addressed the present problem, at least in part, when Maliki’s rule was hanging by a thread and Iraqi lawmakers were waiting to see who the U.S. would support.  While I argued for support of Allawi, the U.S. policy-makers decided to support the Iranian apparatchik Maliki.  At that point we may as well have withdrawn troops, and afterward a downward spiral took effect in Iraq, from a poor status of forces agreement to increased Iranian hegemony.

To be sure, the Obama administration could have projected strength, but did not and will not, and hence Maliki feels even more emboldened to follow the dictates of his puppet masters in Iran.  While the Obama administration did nothing whatsoever to help the situation, the problem began years ago with our refusal to engage Iran in the war that they declared on us.

I haven’t recommended full scale conventional warfare with Iran.  That’s clearly not necessary.  But what is necessary – support for the Green movement, a campaign of assassinations against Quds commanders, fomenting an insurgency within Iran, and robust covert warfare against Iranian forces around the Middle East, from Quds forces in Iraq, to Hezbollah in Lebanon – will not happen because neither the Obama administration nor the Bush administration has or had the stomach for winning the global war on terrorism.

The Iranian Mullahs know that.  We don’t even have the sway left in Iraq to have gotten a renewed status of forces agreement that prevents our Soldiers from being held on charges in Iraqi courts, much less to prevent the expansion of Iranian power in the Middle East.

Thus, this warning to Iran must seem like the silliest, most self-delusional piece of propaganda ever to be issued from the offices of the State Department.  We have sunk to a new low.  We now traffic in complete lies without  the slightest concern over the fact that not even the enemy believes us any more.

I just want to know.

General Petraeus.  Once you get settled in over at the C.I.A., can you check around the closets or under the desks at Langley and see if there are any covert ops people left?   I know we are too high-tech for that sort of thing nowadays, but every so often a job comes up that just can’t be done by the drones or the snooping satellites or wire intercepts.

The Washington Post publishes this article concerning the rising numbers of Syrian soldiers defecting to the opposition:

Paul Krugman bears his soul to us on the events of 9/11 and thereafter.  He sets the framework for his short post with his title: The Years of Shame.

Good grief.  A columnist for the New York Times leaves a spelling error in his post, and the Times runs it anyway.  And Krugman doesn’t seem to care enough to correct it.  Is it me or do many bloggers care more about their prose than the New York Times, and isn’t this odd?  Actually, I don’t think it’s me, and it’s not really that odd.

But on to the main point.  Let’s do this thing about Iraq … one … more … time.  My own son did a combat tour of Iraq, so I have the right to say just about anything I want to concerning Operation Iraqi Freedom (though not as much right as those families who paid the ultimate sacrifice).  Knowing something about nuclear technology and thus knowing the kind of infrastructure it takes to accomplish enrichment, I was ambivalent about the invasion (we call this phase Operation Iraqi Freedom I).  With Michael Fumento and others, I know that chemical weapons are a poor substitute for military weapons (conventional ordnance is much more effective), and so that justification failed with me.

But whatever policy differences or questions I might have had with that phase of the campaign, there was no vacillation in my support for Operation Iraqi Freedom II (generally taken to be late 2003 – 2006) and III (2007 and on, i.e., surge and post-surge).  During the height of the conflict, eighty to one hundred foreign fighters per month crossed the Jordanian and [mainly] Syrian borders to fight the U.S. in Iraq.

Al Qaeda poured an immense amount of capital into the campaign in Iraq, including money, philosophical  underpinnings and personnel.  Their writers went to work trying to justify suicide as a legitimate form of jihad, they spent a large amount of the monies donated by wealthy Saudis on Iraq, and they lost thousands of fighters who would otherwise have been able to fight in Afghanistan or come to the shores of the U.S.  And I don’t buy the notion that Iraq was their raison d’être.  I believe that they would have fought us anyway, anywhere.

Iraq was a quagmire for al Qaeda.  It was a tremendous loss for them, regardless of the final disposition of the campaign for Iraq.  I am proud of the role played by the American Soldier in Iraq.  As a Marine father, I am proud of the role played by the U.S. Marines in the pacification of the Anbar Province.  The ridiculous notions of … flipping … a tribe, as if this is some sort of parlor game, is a poor excuse for explaining what happened there.  More than 1000 Marines perished in Iraq, and years of fighting set the preconditions for “flipping” those tribes.

I am proud of the first responders on 9/11.  I am proud of how our nation responded, and I am proud of the contribution our warriors have made and are making to Operation Enduring Freedom.  I am proud of the strengthening of our nation’s security apparatus since 9/11, and have noted that much more is needed.  I am particularly proud of God’s grace to this country in the days since 9/11.  Lastly, I am proud of the combat tour my son did in the U.S. Marines.

Isn’t it telling that Krugman is ashamed of the days since 9/11?  It demarcates world views, no?  Is it just me and is it odd that this seems more like Paul Krugman’s shame than America’s shame?  I don’t think it’s just me, and it really isn’t all that odd.

Unlike the coward Krugman, I’ll leave comments open on this post.