SubscribeAmerica's hopes today for an orderly exit from Iraq depend completely on the emergence of a viable Iraqi security force. There is no indication that such a force is about to emerge. As a matter of unavoidable logic, the United States must therefore choose one of two difficult alternatives: It can make the serious changes including certain commitments to remain in Iraq for many years that would be necessary to bring an Iraqi army to maturity. Or it can face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly.Why Iraq Has No Army [pdf]
On June 8, 1969, President Richard M. Nixon announced the withdrawal of 25,000 American troops from Vietnam. Within the next few months, he would declare that tens of thousands more were coming home. "He was reluctant to withdraw," says John Mueller, a political scientist at Ohio State University and the author of several books on war and public opinion, "but he kept being pushed by politics."All Over but the Pullback
Nixon recognized that, without U.S. military support, the government of South Vietnam would fall to the communist insurgency, and he believed that such a fall would represent a humiliating and costly defeat for the United States. "But Nixon realized that his approval ratings would slip fast unless he made progress in bringing the boys home," writes Stanley Karnow in "Vietnam: A History." American officials searching for a "breaking point" in Vietnam had found one, but what had broken was not the insurgency. It was U.S. public opinion: Americans no longer believed the war was worth it.
President Bush may not know it yet -- or, then again, he may -- but in Iraq he is about to do a Nixon. Psychologically and politically, the withdrawal phase has already begun. Militarily, the pullback will start within weeks, or at most months, of the Dec. 15 Iraqi parliamentary elections.
...Support for the Vietnam War never recovered once a majority came to believe in 1968 that the war was a mistake. According to Gallup, last month a higher percentage of Americans called for an Iraq withdrawal immediately or within a year (52 percent) than wanted a comparably speedy withdrawal from Vietnam in the summer of 1970 (48 percent).
Perhaps worse still, conventional wisdom is dangerously narcissistic. It completely ignores the enemy, assuming that what we do alone determines success or failure. It assumes that only the United States can defeat the United States, an outlook that set the United States up for failure in Vietnam and for surprise in Iraq. Custer may have been a fool, but the Sioux did, after all, have something to do with his defeat along the Little Big Horn.Which was Martin van Creveld's very point.
Military victory is a beginning, not an end. Approaching war as an apolitical enterprise encourages fatal inattention to the challenges of converting military wins into political successes. It thwarts recognition that insurgencies are first and foremost political struggles that cannot be defeated by military means alone—indeed, that effective counterinsurgency entails the greatest discretion in the use of force. Pursuit of military victory for its own sake also discourages thinking about and planning for the second and by far the most difficult half of wars for regime change: establishing a viable replacement for the destroyed regime. War’s object is, after all, a better peace.
There can be no other justification for war...
The US military’s historical aversion to counterinsurgency is a function of 60 years of preoccupation with high-technology conventional warfare against other states and accelerated substitution of machines for combat manpower, most notably aerial standoff precision firepower for large ground forces. Indeed, past evidence suggests a distance between the kind of war the United States prepared to fight and the kinds of war it has actually fought in recent decades. Hostile great powers, once the predominant threats to American security, have been supplanted by rogue states, failed states, and non-state actors—all of them pursuing asymmetrical strategies to offset US military strengths. This new threat environment places a premium on stability and support operations—i.e., operations other than the powerful conventional force-on-force missions for which the US military is optimized. Such operations include peace enforcement, counterinsurgency, stability, and state-building.
The need for such stability operations has been reinforced in the Iraq War, which, once again, has exposed the limits of conventional military power in unconventional settings. Operation Iraqi Freedom achieved a quick victory over Iraqi conventional military resistance, such as it was, but did not secure decisive political success. An especially vicious and seemingly ineradicable insurgency arose, in part because Coalition forces did not seize full control of the country and impose the security necessary for Iraq’s peaceful economic and political reconstruction. Operation Iraqi Freedom followed not only three decades of determined US Army concentration on conventional operations but also over a decade of steady cuts in active-duty US ground forces, especially Army infantry. Most stability and support operations, however, including counterinsurgency, are inherently manpower-intensive and rely heavily on special skills—e.g., human intelligence, civil affairs, police, public health, foreign language, foreign force training, psychological warfare—that are secondary to the prosecution of conventional warfare. Forces postured to achieve swift conventional military victory thus may be quantitatively and qualitatively unsuited for post-victory tasks of the kind that the United States has encountered in Iraq.
In other words, he who fights against the weak — and the rag-tag Iraqi militias are very weak indeed — and loses, loses. He who fights against the weak and wins also loses. To kill an opponent who is much weaker than yourself is unnecessary and therefore cruel; to let that opponent kill you is unnecessary and therefore foolish. As Vietnam and countless other cases prove, no armed force however rich, however powerful, however, advanced, and however well motivated is immune to this dilemma.The following necessary steps cited and quoted above have nothing to do with political will:
It seems no less reasonable to conclude that highly motivated and skilled insurgents can be defeated if denied access to external assistance and confronted by a stronger side pursuing a strategy of barbarism against the insurgency’s civilian population base. Here, the militarily defeated insurgencies of the Boers in South Africa, the Insurrectos in the Philippines, and the National Liberation Front in Algeria come to mind.The article then goes on to say:
...insurgencies are first and foremost political struggles that cannot be defeated by military means alone—indeed, that effective counterinsurgency entails the greatest discretion in the use of force.Which does the author believe? And what is meant by:
War’s object is, after all, a better peace. There can be no other justification for war.Better for whom? Economic gain for the victor has almost exclusively been the driving force behind going to war, despite "worthier" causes being cited for public consumption.
While the rest of the ME has *paper* Divisions, they are uncoordinated, and thus no match for Brigades trained in Division operations. A fully operational Divisional HQ, composing four or five Brigades can fight and beat between two and five paper divisions of 10 to 20 separate Brigades acting independently. That training is that powerful. And Iraq is the only nation in the region that has it, other than Israel.So... uh...
Hostile great powers, once the predominant threats to American security, have been supplanted by rogue states, failed states, and non-state actors—all of them pursuing asymmetrical strategies to offset US military strengths. This new threat environment places a premium on stability and support operations—i.e., operations other than the powerful conventional force-on-force missions for which the US military is optimized.Are we remaking the Iraqi army in our own flawed image?
THEY have walls. The fact that rest of us don't and are exposed to frothing hatred and ignorance they whipped up never entered the neocon mind.
The training of Iraqi security forces has suffered a big "setback" in the last six months, with the army and other forces being increasingly used to settle scores and make other political gains, Iraqi Vice President Ghazi al-Yawer said Monday.
Al-Yawer disputed contentions by U.S. officials, including President Bush, that the training of security forces was gathering speed, resulting in more professional troops.
Although IAEA officials have said it would take at least two years for Natanz to become fully operational, Mr ElBaradei believes that once the facility is up and running, the Iranians could be "a few months" away from a nuclear weapon.Natanz is the underground enrichment plant essential for production of weapons-grade material. Israeli media - the J Post in particular - misquoted ElBaradei by leaving out the "two years" part of his quote. Seems you're doing the same thing.
mk1gti: ... The Revolt of the Generals. ....Ah, see, there's a finer point of kablam's presentation that you might not be getting: S/he's a neocon. Hard-core, died-in-the-wool, "Project for a New American Century" neocon.
Yes, pot smoking liberal hippies all . . .
Try reading chapter 33 of Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
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posted by y2karl at 11:19 AM on December 5, 2005