Archive for the 'Iraq' Category

Hopes are high that the success of the Anbar Province can be repeated in Diyala and other provinces.

Sunni merchants watched warily from behind neat stacks of fruit and vegetables as Lieutenant General Raymond Odierno walked with a platoon of bodyguards through the Qatana bazaar here one recent afternoon. At last, one leathery-faced trader glanced furtively up and down the narrow, refuse-strewn street to check who might be listening, then broke the silence.

“America good! Al Qaeda bad!” he said in halting English, flashing a thumb’s-up in the direction of the second-ranking U.S. commander in Iraq.

Until only a few months ago, the Central Street bazaar was enemy territory, watched over by U.S. machine-gunners in sandbagged bunkers on the roof of the governor’s building across the road. Ramadi was the most dangerous city in Iraq, and the area around the building the deadliest place in Ramadi.

Now, a pact between local tribal sheiks and U.S. commanders has sent thousands of young Iraqis from Anbar Province into the fight against extremists linked to Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia. The deal has all but ended the fighting in Ramadi and recast the city as a symbol of hope that the tide of the war may yet be reversed to favor the Americans and their Iraqi allies …

… the question is whether the Anbar experience can be “exported” to other combat zones, as Bush suggested, by arming tribally based local security forces and recruiting thousands of young Sunnis, including former members of Baathist insurgent groups, into Iraq’s army and police force.

Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, who leads the Shiite-dominated national government, has backed the tribal outreach in Anbar as a way to strengthen Sunni moderates against Sunni extremists there. But he has warned that replicating the pattern elsewhere could arm Sunni militias for a civil war with Shiites.

Anbar has been a war zone now for four years, and the Americans are as much a part of life as the blasting summer heat.

Ramadi, which lies on the edge of a desert that reaches west from the city to Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Syria, had a population of 400,000 in Saddam Hussein’s time. That was before the insurgents – a patchwork of Qaeda-linked militants, die-hard loyalists of Saddam Hussein’s ruling Baath Party and other resistance groups fighting to oust U.S. forces from Iraq – coalesced in a terrorist campaign that turned much of the city into a ghost town, and much of Anbar into a cauldron for U.S. troops.

Last year, a leaked U.S. Marine intelligence report conceded that the war in Anbar was effectively lost and that the province was on course to becoming the seat of the Islamic militants’ plans to establish a new caliphate in Iraq.

The key to turning that around was the shift in allegiance by tribal sheiks. But the sheiks turned only after a prolonged offensive by U.S. and Iraqi forces, starting in November, that put Qaeda groups on the run, in Ramadi and elsewhere across western Anbar.

Not for the first time, the Americans learned a basic lesson of warfare here: that Iraqis, bludgeoned for 24 years by Saddam’s terror, are wary of rising against any force, however brutal, until it is in retreat. In Anbar, Sunni extremists were the dominant force, with near-total popular support or acquiescence, until the offensive broke their power …

“We couldn’t go more than 200 meters from this base when I arrived,” said Captain Ian Brooks, a Marine officer at one new neighborhood base. “Now, I can walk the streets without any problem.”

The change that made all the others possible, U.S. officers say, was the alliance with the sheiks. In Ramadi, 23 tribal leaders approached the Americans and offered to fight the extremists by forming “provincial security battalions,” neighborhood police auxiliaries, and by sending volunteers to the Iraqi Army and the police.

Across Anbar, the 3,500 police officers in October jumped to 21,500 by June. In Ramadi, where there were fewer than 100 police officers last year, there are now 3,500.

Many recruits, U.S. officers acknowledge, were previously insurgents. “There’s a lot of guys wearing blue shirts out there who were shooting at us last year,” Charlton said.

In Settling with the Enemy I discussed the necessity to put erstwhile Sunni insurgents to work ensuring security.  But it was more than enlisting the insurgents to work for us that has at least partially pacified the Anbar province.  There have been four years of hard work by the Marines to effect security.  The past regime ensured that the population, accustomed to acquiescing in the face of brutality, and who had seen much of it over the past several years, would come ever so slowly to the U.S. and Iraqi side.

The insurgents with whom no settlement could be reached were foreigners who came to Iraq to fight jihad, along with a radical religious element which had begun within Iraq in the last decade or two of the prior regime.

By the late 1980s it had become clear that secular pan-Arabism fused with socialist ideas was no longer a source of inspiration for some Ba’th Party activists. Many young Sunni Arabs adopted an alternative ideology, namely, fundamentalist Islam based essentially on the thought of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. A minority even moved toward the more extreme Salafi, and even Wahhabi, interpretation of Islam. The regime was reluctant to repress such trends violently, even when it came to Wahhabis, for the simple reason that these Iraqi Wahhabis were anti-Saudi: much like the ultraradical Islamist opposition in Saudi Arabia, they, too, saw the Saudi regime as deviating from its original Wahhabi convictions by succumbing to Western cultural influences and aligning itself with the Christian imperialist United States. This anti-Saudi trend served the Iraqi regime’s political purposes.

This element, along with the foreign jihadists, would never settle with the U.S. forces and had to be rooted out and killed or captured.  The insurgents who would settle with the U.S. were upstarts who were disenfranchised and out of work men who felt power drain away as Shi’ite supremecy took its toll on Anbar.  These things (i.e., killing the hard line insurgents and settling with those who would do so) was necessary in order to effect security, and the so-called Anbar awakening where tribes began cooperation with the U.S. should not be seen without context.  Its proper context is the blood of U.S. warriors who fought to provide security for a people whom they didn’t know.  The hope is that the seeds of this effort do not lie fallow, but rather, produce fruit ten-fold and expand to the balance of Iraq.

In Iraqi Government on the Verge of Powerlessness, I rehearsed my counsel to effect what I called the “strategic disappearance” of Moqtada al Sadr.  Sadr’s presence on the political and religious scene will not only cause radical Islamic forces to have sway, but will undermine the pitiful Maliki government as well as give Iran forces deployed throughout the region.  Then I linked Omar Fadhil who, after giving us brilliant prose concerning the situation in Iraq, summarized the affect that Sadr has on Iraq, saying:

While Al-Qaeda poses a serious security challenge in some provinces, Sadr threatens the future of the whole country. He can paralyze or disrupt the proper functioning of whole ministries and provinces.

Omar concludes with his recommendations, similar to my own:

Sadr is not simply an outlaw; he represents Iran’s project in Iraq just like Hamas and Nasrallah represent it in the Palestinian territories and Lebanon. These are the three arms of Iran in the Middle East that have worked consistently to ruin every emerging democratic project. And these arms must be cut off sooner rather than later.

I had lamented the return of Sadr from Iran the first time he left Iraq, believing his reapperance to be the end of our opportunity to effect his disappearance from the scene in Iraq.  As it turns out, Sadr has presented us with another such golden opportunity; according to U.S. military sources, he has returned to Iran.

Maliki has attempted to enlist the help of the Sunnis and crack down on the Shi’ite militias, while Sadr has made a public ruse of joining the political process.  Maliki’s job is tenous, where he attempts to hold accountable the very bloc that put him in office.  There is a growing rift between Sadr and Maliki.

A powerful Shia bloc lashed out at Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki today after he accused it of failing to take a clear stance on violence, signalling a deepening rift between Maliki and a former backer.

Followers from the movement of anti-American Shia cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, whose support propelled Maliki into the prime minister’s office last year, also held street protests in Baghdad in the wake of the Iraqi leader’s comments yesterday.

“This government is at the edge of an abyss. It will collapse,” said Ahmed al-Shaibany, a prominent cleric and member of Sadr’s inner circle of advisers.

“Maliki … wants to send a message to the (US) occupiers: ‘I can implement your requests’ … We tell you that you are committing a mistake,” he said in a statement. Another top Sadr aide made similar comments in a statement. Maliki, himself a Shia, yesterday demanded the Sadr bloc take a clear stance against rogue elements within the movement’s Mehdi Army militia that Washington blames for killing US troops.

The Sunni politicians had already begun a boycott of the Maliki government, and now a vote of no confidence looms over Maliki’s administration.

For four years, Iraqis have been waiting in lines at gas stations in Baghdad, waiting for their lives to get better. But, as CBS News chief foreign correspondent Lara Logan reports, the situation has gotten worse and their government is now in crisis.

That has led senior Iraqi leaders to demand drastic change. CBS News has learned that on July 15, they plan to ask for a no-confidence vote in the Iraqi parliament as the first step to bringing down the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.

Even those closest to the Iraqi prime minister, from his own party, admit the political situation is desperate.

“I feel there is no strategy, so the people become hopeless,” said Faliy al Fayadh, an MP from the Dawa Party. “You can live without petrol, without electricity, but you can’t live without hope.”

Iraq’s prime minister is facing his most serious challenge yet. The no-confidence vote will be requested by the largest block of Sunni politicians, who are part of a broad political alliance called the Iraq Project. What they want is a new government run by ministers who are appointed for their expertise, not their party loyalty.

The Iraq Project is known to the highest levels of the U.S. government. CBS News has learned it was discussed in detail on Vice President Dick Cheney’s most recent visit to Baghdad, when he met with the Iraqi Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi.

Al-Maliki has announced his own alliance to try save his government, but even his vice president says that’s little more than a short-term fix.

“Cosmetic change is not going to serve the interests of Iraqis is not going to stabilize, is not going to improve security , what we need is much bigger that that,” said al Hashimi, the leader of the Iraqi Islamic Party.

Leaders of the Iraq Project claim they have the necessary votes to force al-Maliki to resign, but that has yet to be tested in parliament. For now, the U.S. is still standing by the Iraqi leader – publicly at least.

Maliki cannot give control fast enough to the bloc that put him into power (including driving the U.S. forces from Iraq which will likely lead to a bloodbath by the Sunnis at the hands of the Shi’a).  They are dissatisfied, but so are the Sunnis who are coming out on the short end of the stick regarding hospitals, reconstruction, funds, oil revenue sharing, and all of the other things that should be split according to population.

This is an extremely problematic development.  Unless and until the blocs in Iraq can enact power and revenue sharing as well as empower the government to govern, population security from the “surge” will be temporary.  And the U.S. still has a chance to effect the “strategic disapperance” of Moqtada al Sadr, catalyst for much of the turmoil, without which there will be no peace in Iraq.

Secretary of Defense Robert Gates envisions a smaller, long term presence in Iraq.

LONDON (Thomson Financial) – US Defense Secretary Robert Gates is seeking a political deal in Washington to trade off troop cuts in Iraq for support for a long-term, smaller presence there, the Wall Street Journal reported Tuesday.

Citing unnamed US government officials, the Journal said that Gates and some political allies are pursuing political support for maintaining a US military presence in Iraq to continue the fight against Al-Qaeda.

The tradeoff, according to the report, is a commitment to slashing back troop levels — now about 155,000 — by the end of President George W. Bush’s term in office, in January 2009.

Gates’s goal is to mollify the strong US sentiment for a pullout of US forces, while not abandoning Iraq altogether.

‘The complicating factor is how long the administration will stick with its ‘surge’ strategy of keeping high levels of troops in Iraq to try to tamp down violence there. On this issue, the administration — and even the military — is deeply divided,’ the Journal said.

In Gates’s plan, the US would trim back its presence and its goals to fighting Al-Qaeda and simply containing a civil war that might erupt, rather than the current aim of defeating all insurgents and ending the conflict between Iraqi groups, mostly aligned on Sunni and Shiite Muslim lines.

It’s nice to be on the cutting edge.  In Settling with the Enemy, I said:

When the U.S. forces begin to stand down and withdraw, to remove the U.S. men and materiel in Iraq will take more than a year.  Withdrawal will be slow and deliberate.  Furthermore, it is likely that complete withdrawal will not happen for a long time.  More likely is that the U.S. will re-deploy to the North in Kurdistan, assisting the Iraqi army and police with kinetic operations upon request, while also serving as a stabilizer for the Middle East and border security for Iraq.

But it is just as likely that U.S. forces will not be performing constabulary operations for much longer.  The counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, was written based on the presupposition that the U.S. has the ten to twelve years necessary to conduct the classical counterinsurgency campaign.  This was never true, is not true now, and will not be true in the future.  Military needs aside, the public – by the power of the vote – has the right and prerogative within the American system to make the policy decision on the conduct of war.  Asking the American pubic to support a counterinsurgency campaign over three consecutive presidential administrations is expecting the impossible, no matter how well the administration communicates the conditions of the campaign to the public.

All wars must end.  The end of Operation Iraqi Freedom necessitates settling with the enemy, a high stakes strategy, absent which there is only loss of the counterinsurgency campaign.

Under Gates’ plan, the duties of the U.S. forces who are left would likely be (1) region stabilization, (2) training of Iraqi troops and police, (3) support for kinetic operations against known terrorists, and (4) border security.  Constabulary operations would not be in the strategic interests of the U.S., and policing of the population would be left to the Iraqis.

In Air Power in Small Wars, I outlined the real re-involvement of air power (both Air Force and Navy) in the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq, and in the scenario described above air power would take a much larger role.  Intelligence and reconnaissance would be key in this strategy, and it is likely that much of the effort of ground troops would go to this support role.  Trade cannot be completely shut down between Iraq and its neighbors, but if the trafficking of weapons and militants can be ascertained, air power can be readily used to interdict and destroy enemy targets flowing in from Syria and Iran.

It has become clear that the Multinational Force command is clear and confident of Iranian involvement in Iraq at the highest levels.  On July 2, 2007, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner had some words for the world concerning what we knew about Iranian meddling by special groups of Iranian combatants in Iraq.

“These Special Groups are militia extremists, funded, trained and armed by external sources…specifically by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force operatives,

In Settling with The Enemy we discussed the turn of many of the former Sunni insurgents, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades, against al Qeada and in favor of cooperation with U.S. forces.  This Anbar Province model has taken root to the Northeast in the Diyala Province.

BAQOUBA, Iraq — Two months ago, a dozen Sunni insurgents — haggard, hungry and in handcuffs — stepped tentatively into a U.S.-Iraqi combat outpost near Baqouba and asked to speak to the commander: “We’re out of ammunition, but we want to help you fight al-Qaida.”

Now hundreds of fighters from the 1920s Revolution Brigades, an erstwhile Sunni insurgent group, work as scouts and gather intelligence for the 10,000-strong American force in the fifth day of its mission to remove al-Qaida gunmen and bomb makers from the Diyala provincial capital.

Little so well illustrates the Middle Eastern dictum: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

And as it struggles in the raging heat and violence of central Iraq, the U.S. military appears to have bought into the tactic in its struggle to pull what victory it can from the increasingly troubled American mission in Iraq, under congressional pressure for a troop pullout and a presidential election campaign already in the minds of voters.

Each U.S. Army company in Baqouba, an hour’s drive northeast of Baghdad, has a scout from the Brigades, others have become a ragtag intelligence network and still others fight, said Capt. Ricardo Ortega, a 34-year-old Puerto Rico native of the 2nd Infantry Division.

The Army has given some of the one-time insurgents special clothing — football-style jerseys with numbers on the chest — to mark them as American allies.

U.S. commanders say help from the Brigades operatives was key to planning and executing the Baqouba operation, one of a quartet of U.S. offensives against al-Qaida on the flanks of the Iraqi capital.

The informants have given the American troops exact coordinates of suspected al-Qaida safe houses, with details down to the color of the gate out front, said Lt. Col. Avanulas Smiley, 40, commander of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment and a Tacoma, Wash., native.

Most of the Brigades members, whom U.S. officials call “concerned local nationals,” hail from eastern Baqouba, while the bulk of the fighting has so far raged in western Baqouba.

But with contacts among fellow Sunni fighters on the city’s west side, they have fed American soldiers critical information about al-Qaida positions.

The use of militias will be necessary in the future in part because the Iraqi army is not ready for performance of duties upon turnover of control.

American military commanders now seriously doubt that Iraqi security forces will be able to hold the ground that U.S. troops are fighting to clear _ gloomy predictions that strike at the heart of Washington’s key strategy to turn the tide in Iraq.

Several senior American officers have warned in recent days that Iraqi soldiers and police are still incapable of maintaining security on their own in the most crucial areas, including Baghdad and the recently reclaimed districts around Baqouba to the north.

Iraqi units are supposed to be moving into position to take the baton from the Pentagon. This was the backbone of the plan President Bush announced in January when he ordered to five more U.S. brigades, or about 30,000 soldiers, to Iraq. The goal is to reduce the violence to a level where the Iraqis can cope so that Americans can begin to go home.

But that outcome is looking ever more elusive. The fear is that U.S. troops will pay for territory with their lives _ only to have Iraqi forces lose control once the Americans move on.

Unless Iraqis can step up, the United States will face tough choices in months ahead as pressure mounts in the Democratic-controlled Congress to draw down the nearly 160,000-strong U.S. force.

Iraqi forces may be able to handle security in the Kurdish north and parts of the Shiite south. But that would face huge challenges in Baghdad and surrounding provinces where Sunni insurgents are deeply entrenched. The Americans then would face the dilemma of maintaining substantial forces in Iraq for years _ perhaps a politically untenable option _ or risk the turmoil spreading to other parts of the Middle East.

“The challenge now is: How do you hold onto the terrain you’ve cleared?” said Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, the operations chief of the current offensive in Baqouba, where Sunni insurgents have taken root in recent months. He said this week that U.S. forces have control of much of Baqouba.

“You have to do that shoulder-to-shoulder with Iraqi security forces. And they’re not quite up to the job yet,” Bednarek said.

The Brigadier General is being gratuitous in saying that “they’re not quite up to the job yet.”  They are nowhere near ready for turnover.  This assessment doesn’t differ from that of David Danelo in his stunning piece in Parade Magazine in March of 2007, but one must study Danelo’s piece to understand how fully and remarkably different the Iraqi army is from a disciplined Western army.

This difference is cultural, and has to do with a number of things: officer elitism and bifurcation from their troops, mistreatment of enlisted men, lack of an effective non-commissioned officer corps, educational problems, and many other things.  An important study was published entitled Why Arabs Lose Wars, by Norvell B. De Atkine.  The introduction is a worthy tease for the reader.

ARABIC-SPEAKING ARMIES have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s. Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers. Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds. The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre. And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors — economic, ideological, technical — but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.

This study should be required reading for all officers and NCOs, and serves to remind us of just why we are where we are in Iraq.  It is significant that a major tenet upon which the U.S. strategy was built, i.e., capture the terrain and turn it over to Iraqi forces, has become unhinged.  The reasons for this are deeply rooted and cause the problem to be intractable in the short term.  The use of militias and erstwhile insurgents in not just an expediency.  It is an adaptation and adjustment, and is necessary to hold ground that U.S. forces have captured.

In U.S. Presses for Amnesty for Insurgents, October of 2006, I discussed the press towards a broad-based amnesty program for the Sunni insurgents, observing that:

This is without question an attempt to quell the violence in al Anbar, and the hope appears to be that the tribes in al Anbar will root out al Qaeda (and other foreign elements), while a deal with the former Saddam loyalists will end the bloodshed associated with the insurgency.

But a deal will without doubt create many personal and emotional wounds with mothers and fathers of Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors and Marines who have died in Iraq fighting the insurgency.  There are still difficult times ahead.  Either these emotional wounds are created – probably never to heal – or the fight continues, with an uncertain end.

More than simple amnesty, U.S. forces are making allies of former insurgents, in spite of the unease that this creates with the Shi’a and Kurds.

Shi’ite and Kurdish officials expressed deep reservations yesterday about the new US military strategy to partner with Sunni Arab groups to help defeat the militant organization Al Qaeda in Iraq.

“They are trusting terrorists,” said Ali Al Adeeb, a prominent Shi’ite lawmaker who was among many to question the loyalty of the Sunni groups. “They are trusting people who have previously attacked American forces and innocent people. They are trusting people who are loyal to the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Throughout Iraq, a growing number of Sunni groups profess to have turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq because of its indiscriminate killing and repressive version of Islam. In some areas, these groups have provided information to Americans about Al Qaeda members or the deadly explosives that target the soldiers.

The collaboration has progressed furthest in the western province of Anbar, where US military commanders enlisted the help of Sunni tribal leaders to funnel their kinsmen into the police force by the thousands. In other areas, Sunnis have not been fully incorporated into the security services and exist as local militias.

Some of these groups, believed to be affiliated with such organizations as the Islamic Army or the 1920 Revolution Brigades, have received weapons and ammunition, usually through the Iraqi military, as well as transportation, food, handcuffs, and direct assistance from US soldiers. In Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood, a local group of Sunnis, the Baghdad Patriots, were driven around earlier this month in American and Iraqi vehicles and given approval by US forces to arrest suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq members.

In Fallujah, Regimental Combat Team 6 is training former insurgents to fight al Qaeda.

Marine Sgt. Tony Storey doesn’t like to think about what-ifs as he watches the young Iraqis he is helping to train take target practice. He recalls one man who was a natural with his AK47.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Storey asked.

“Insurgent,” the man said with a smile.

“Was he joking?” Storey asked while surveying the 50 men from the Albu Issa tribe firing their weapons at a distant target. “I don’t know.”

For the men of Regimental Combat Team 6, who are training members of Anbar province tribes to fight Al Qaeda, Storey’s question isn’t simple curiosity. Less than a year ago, the tribes viewed Al Qaeda in Iraq as an ally in their effort to push Americans out of the province.

Now, the tribes see Al Qaeda as a threat to their society and their businesses — many of them dependent on illegal smuggling — and they’ve turned to the U.S. military for help.

This model is also being implemented in the Diyala province.  The alliance goes to the point of arming the Sunnis to manage security in their own geographical areas.  After some aborted starts at a coherent reply to this, Prime Minister Maliki who initially repudiated this idea later claimed credit for it.

Maliki, representing the Shi’a, doesn’t appreciate the new alliance with and arming of the Sunni no matter what he claims, and there is a tense relationship between him and General Petraeus.  But the point goes far deeper than interpersonal relationships between U.S. generals and Iraqi politicians.  The alliance being implemented in Iraq is a high-risk / high payoff strategy that must be successful if Iraq is to be pacified, Maliki’s objections notwithstanding.

When the U.S. forces begin to stand down and withdraw, to remove the U.S. men and materiel in Iraq will take more than a year.  Withdrawal will be slow and deliberate.  Furthermore, it is likely that complete withdrawal will not happen for a long time.  More likely is that the U.S. will re-deploy to the North in Kurdistan, assisting the Iraqi army and police with kinetic operations upon request, while also serving as a stabilizer for the Middle East and border security for Iraq.

But it is just as likely that U.S. forces will not be performing constabulary operations for much longer.  The counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, was written based on the presupposition that the U.S. has the ten to twelve years necessary to conduct the classical counterinsurgency campaign.  This was never true, is not true now, and will not be true in the future.  Military needs aside, the public – by the power of the vote – has the right and prerogative within the American system to make the policy decision on the conduct of war.  Asking the American pubic to support a counterinsurgency campaign over three consecutive presidential administrations is expecting the impossible, no matter how well the administration communicates the conditions of the campaign to the public.

All wars must end.  The end of Operation Iraqi Freedom necessitates settling with the enemy, a high stakes strategy, absent which there is only loss of the counterinsurgency campaign.

 Sun Tzu — “If I am able to determine the enemy’s dispositions while at the same time I conceal my own then I can concentrate and he must divide.  And if I concentrate while he divides, I can use my entire strength to attack a fraction of his