[ppi] [ppiindia] Let's talk about war

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**http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Middle_East/GG22Ak01.html
Jul 22, 2005 
  

Let's talk about war
By Daniel Smith 

Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus) 

General John Abizaid, who heads US Central Command, is all for full dialogue 
about American policy on Iraq. In testimony before the Senate Armed Services 
Committee on June 23, he said: "Maybe it's something we're not doing right in 
the field. But I can tell you that when my soldiers ... ask me the question 
whether or not they've got support from the American people, that worries me. 
And they're starting to do that. So I would say we better have a frank 
discussion with ourselves. I am not against the debate." 

Combined with Abizaid's acknowledgement that the insurgent and resistance 
fighters in Iraq are as strong as they were six months ago, this statement is a 
remarkably candid warning to US politicians that the present course of American 
policy in Iraq is in trouble. 

I would expect nothing less than absolute candor from Abizaid -and the public 
should accept nothing less from everyone in the Bush administration. 
Unfortunately, Abizaid and the public received no real discussion, no direction 
other than "stay the course" from President George W Bush on June 28. Thus - 
being equally candid - if there is to be meaningful dialogue, it will have to 
be with the public and in public. Such would be a rare but most apropos 
development. After all, the people are the ultimate authority and hold ultimate 
power in a democracy. And while I do not claim to represent the US body 
politic, someone has to be willing to start the conversation with Abizaid. 

Battlefield performance 
Perhaps the first point is to reassure soldiers that overall, their battlefield 
performance reflects well their technical training and their adaptability to 
changes in the tactics of their opponents. 

But while US firepower can always carry the day, it is not carrying the Iraqi 
population or, increasingly, the American population. What is painfully clear, 
more than 27 months after the US-led coalition invaded Iraq, is that there are 
not enough security forces to hold Iraqi towns and villages and even some 
sections of Baghdad once an operation ends. This flies in the face of every 
modern counterinsurgency experience; it is documented in official reports and 
accounts of sotto voce comments by villagers talking to reporters. The people 
know from experience that without a steady presence of coalition or trained and 
equipped government security units, once an operation ends, it will not be long 
before insurgents resurface. 

Moreover, the lack of sufficient numbers of security forces leads to heavy 
reliance on "search and destroy" operations which, in addition to the physical 
havoc caused, are hardly conducive to winning the hearts and minds of ordinary 
Iraqis. If it is true that the Iraqi population does not support the terror, 
then coalition forces and political leaders are not focused on the decisive 
"center of gravity" of their armed opposition when conducting these punitive 
sweeps. For the locals, the extent of cooperation with either side becomes a 
life and death decision - especially if government forces are seen to be as 
ruthless as the resistance. 

When a population is beset by armed groups trying to intimidate and turn the 
people against their government, the government must ensure that any military 
response it undertakes scrupulously observes human rights and international 
agreements protecting noncombatants and combatants alike. 

The next two points are related to the first. 

More troops? 
In response to calls to send more US troops to Iraq, the Pentagon and the White 
House fall back on the excuse that the field generals have not called for more 
troops. But what never is spelled out convincingly is the reason(s) for not 
asking for more when the intuitive reaction would be an increase in troop 
strength on the ground. 

You can say that the Iraqis are the ones who need to respond and field a larger 
security force - a process underway. You can say that more US troops would 
simply provide more targets for the resistance. As valid as these points may 
be, and as real as are those Iraqis who do stand against the terror strikes, 
all of this is discounted when the US public reads that Iraqi police, 
ill-equipped and outgunned by insurgents, leave their posts (or never get 
there) at the first indication of an attack. 

What response is there to those who ask, "If Iraqis will not stay and fight for 
their country's future, why should foreign forces fight and die?" 

Then there is the suspicion that CENTCOM has been told that the personnel well 
is dry. That is to say, there are no more active, reserve and National Guard 
units of the type needed (infantry, transportation, military police, civil 
affairs, aviation) that can be rotated into Iraq without subverting policies on 
intervals between combat tours. And while surges in troop strength will happen 
in anticipation of milestones (elections) or in reaction to events, changing 
the policy is not an option because, among other considerations, it would 
depress further the steep decline in new enlistments for the army. (June's 
achievement, after falling short four months in a row, may be an anomaly.) In 
this context, the active duty army's reorganization to 43 from 33 brigades 
appears more like simply rearranging the pawns on the chessboard than a real 
change. 

Recruiting shortfalls have led to speculation about and calls for resuming the 
draft, either on its own or as part of a larger mandatory national service 
program. In this regard, the illegal activities of a few recruiters, such as 
making false promises to potential candidates, the quota pressures on them, the 
large monetary bonuses - as much as $70,000 - for joining the military, and the 
imposition of "stop-loss", extended tours, and mobilization of thousands of 
soldiers in the Individual Ready Reserve suggest that in Iraq, as in Vietnam, 
something important is being concealed from the public. Add in administration 
actions that amount to data-mining on the 16-25 year-old population for the 
purpose of increased targeted recruiting, and the public has more reason to 
suspect that the truth is being concealed - just as the very existence of the 
data-mining operation was not reported, as required by law, for more than three 
years. 

Assaults on the truth 
In a phrase, truth once again has become a casualty in this war. Whether it is 
a fatality or "only" wounded depends, unfortunately for the military, on how 
candid the administration will be over the next half year. 

You will recall that at the end of the Paris talks in the early 1970s about US 
disengagement from Vietnam, an American colonel observed that the North 
Vietnamese had never won on the battlefield - to which a North Vietnamese 
officer replied that this was immaterial in that the US was leaving, not the 
North Vietnamese. In Vietnam neither the various Saigon regimes nor US troops 
ever won the psychological war. This failure set the stage for the collapse of 
the entire effort as the public rebelled against the whole enterprise. 

The same possibility exists in Iraq, as evidenced by the Iraqi who lamented: 
"We have transformed from a dictatorship into something far worse. We have lost 
our country." ( Los Angeles Times, June 24) Living conditions are far worse 
today than before the invasion; billions of dollars have disappeared, 
regime-induced violence, targeted against regime opponents, has given way to 
massive, unpredictable violence, which is much more stressful and is compounded 
by sometimes heavy-handed reaction by Iraqi authorities or coalition forces. 

If Vietnam was a quagmire, Iraq is a black hole that is sucking lives and 
treasure and talent into its maw. And as already noted, as in Vietnam, it is 
tearing at the public's trust in the government and the veracity of 
administration officials. Richard Nixon had a secret plan to end the Vietnam 
War; many today believe Bush has no plan other than to "stay the course" for as 
long as one terrorist remains alive and free. As far as the US public ever 
knew, Nixon's plan - if it existed at all - was to bomb North Vietnam back to 
the Stone Age (or some approximation thereof), if necessary, to force Hanoi to 
come to the negotiating table on US terms. In Iraq, "staying the course" is 
nothing more than "Iraqization", replacing coalition forces and coalition 
(especially US) casualties with Iraqis. 

Iraqis, having endured decades of oppression under Saddam Hussein's military, 
now face a new fear: that the lessons being taught the new Iraqi army reflect 
not the psychology of defense of the state from external powers but the 
psychology of occupation. That is, the new army is absorbing the mindset of 
those doing its training - of an alien force in an alien land where the entire 
indigenous population is suspect and untrustworthy. The result is predictable: 
The "new" army is becoming alienated from the people it is supposed to protect, 
making it little better than Saddam's elite units. 

Another assault on truth is the "happy news" syndrome that manifests itself in 
congressional pronouncements and administration announcements. The daily news 
briefings in Saigon at 5:00 pm were so transparently a farce they were 
nicknamed the " five o'clock follies". The nearest equivalents today are the 
Pentagon news briefings, but these are not held every day. Nonetheless, 
Vietnam's false assurance of a "light at the end of the tunnel" is matched by 
"we've turned the corner", or "we've broken the back of the insurgency", or the 
insurgents are "dead-enders about to reach the end of the line", or the 
"insurgency is in its last throes". All are serious misjudgments at best, 
intentional obfuscation at worst. 

Yet again, the worst case seems the operational one. Every reason propounded by 
those favoring the war has been confounded by careful investigation by the 
US-led Iraq Survey Group, interrogations, or other means. Among the latter is a 
series of nine pre-March 19, 2003 British cabinet-level memos addressing 
London's view of the Bush administration's evolving policy to go to war with 
Saddam. By June 2002, the British were convinced that Bush would go to war. 
Significantly, they also noted that intelligence would be molded to fit policy. 

Politically, it is true that the Iraqis have been in charge of running their 
country for a year (beginning January 28, 2004). But with foreign military 
forces still numbering 160,000, with the transitional government taking three 
months to organize itself and elect constitutional drafters, with the 
government and national assembly having to work inside the highly defended 
"Green Zone" because physical security is so unpredictable, are the Iraqis 
really in charge of anything? Most observers would, I suspect, heavily qualify 
that assertion. 

Given the above, Abizaid's response to the litany of concerns, misjudgments, 
missteps, misanalyses, exaggerations, and at least a few lies, might well be 
similar to another part of his Senate testimony: "We that are fighting the war 
think it's a war worth fighting ... but we can't win the war ... without your 
support and without the support of our people." 

Undoubtedly, senior officers would agree, if for no other reason than to 
maintain troop morale. In principle, many others would agree; after all, who 
would oppose elections, freedom, liberty and the other accoutrements of a 
market democracy? 

Actually, there would be many, or many who would reject parts of this package 
or possibly wish to suspend certain features for a few years. For example, most 
Iraqis would reject attempts to separate Islam from the functioning of 
government. Islam is woven into the fabric of daily life in many countries, 
informing and directing the activities of believers. Without Islam, Arab 
culture atrophies - not news to Abizaid who is a scholar of all things Islamic 
and Arabian, but easily a revelation to key members in the US political 
hierarchy. 

In other words, other than to maintain unit spirit in a difficult situation, 
what is important is not what the US commanders and soldiers on the ground 
think about the war. What the Iraqi people think, what they hold as "worth it", 
ought to be the determining factor. It is their country; the US invaded and 
occupied it, has killed many thousands of Iraqis and injured many more 
thousands, all without showing any concrete intention of leaving (although 
showing quite a bit of concrete for permanent bases for US forces). 

Given sentiment in Iraq today, declaring a clear intention to withdraw all US 
troops and bases from Iraq could well be the key to really ameliorating armed 
opposition and separating the nationalist-inspired Iraqi resistance from 
hardcore perpetrators of terror and in winning the support of Congress and the 
US public for a policy under which foreign forces withdraw without foreign 
countries abandoning Iraq. 

Iraq's future
Iraq's ultimate future, like that of all nation-states, lies in the political 
realm, and insofar as its future poses political uncertainty, it must search 
for or devise a political path that can remove this uncertainty. But after 
nearly 25 years of continuous warfare, the Iraqi people expected to have seen 
much less war and more political progress as a result of regime change in 
Baghdad. This failure to meet a not unreasonable expectation may, in the end, 
be the catalyst that accelerates the departure of coalition forces, with the 
Iraqis finally resuming full sovereignty in their land. 

Three months after Iraq's January parliamentary election, forbearance is thin. 
As one Iraqi observed: "We sacrificed our soul and went out to vote. What did 
we get? Simply nothing." 

It's time to give them something. 

Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, a retired 
US Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends 
Committee on National Legislation. 

(Posted with permission from Foreign Policy in Focus)

[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]



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