Drivers of US policy on Iraq

When I was in the Middle East in February, many of the people I talked to– smart people in Arab countries who realize that the fate of their region depends to a worrying degree on decisions made in distant Washington– were speculating as to whether Condi Rice is up or down, whether Cheney is up or down, etc. It struck me these observers were looking largely at the wrong thing. To me, by far the most interesting rising driver of US policy in Iraq is the uniformed military itself, and in particular the generals in the US Army and Marines.
We have been getting increasingly strong signals from these generals in recent months that they are extremely worried about the effects that George Bush’s imperial over-stretch in Iraq is having on the institutions that they head and from which they gain their own social stature and their lives, their meaning.
Ann Scott Tyson, who covers the uniformed military for the Wapo, has another intriguing piece in today’s paper, that starts out like this:

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the high and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, senior U.S. military and government officials acknowledge.
More troubling, the officials say, is that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a “death spiral,” in which the ever more rapid pace of war-zone rotations has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand.
The risk to the nation is serious and deepening, senior officers warn, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, whether the internal collapse of Pakistan, a conflict with Iran or an outbreak of war on the Korean Peninsula. Air and naval power can only go so far in compensating for infantry, artillery and other land forces, they said.

There are a lot of other interesting details in the article; but the bottom line is that the generals (a) are extremely worried about the US’s level of military readiness, including both its readiness to respond in what they judge an adequate way to any new challenges that may arise in any one of the dozens of spots around the world where they say they would like to ready; (b) want to get this concern onto the public record; so that (c) when– as they may well by now already judge to be nearly inevitable, the US has to draw down its forces in Iraq on unfavorable terms– they will be quite ready to say “We warned you this would not work.”
Of course, you could say that it would have been more helpful all round, for both Americans and Iraqis, if their predecessors in the Joint Chief’s of Staff’s famous ‘Tank’ had actually been a little more forceful about laying out the military realities regarding Iraq invasion scenarios back in 2002, rather than now, five years later…
But better later than never, perhaps??
Anyway, alert JWN readers will no doubt recall that back on March 9 I wrote a little about my earlier conversation with the Crisis Group’s Joost Hiltermann, including his bon mot that though the US and Iran both agree, regarding Iraq, that it should remain united and ruled by majority rule, they disagree on the question of the US troop presence in Iraq– “Because the US basically now wants to be able to withdraw those troops, and Iran wants them to stay!”
I also wrote, “For my part, I am slightly less convinced than [Hiltermann] is that the decisionmakers in the Bush administration at this point are clear that they want the US troops out of Iraq… But I think they are headed toward that conclusion, and that the developments in the region will certainly continue to push them that way.”
A few days later, Joost wrote me to say (and I quote this with his permission):

On one point I think we are much closer than you suggest. Perhaps I did not express myself sufficiently clearly.
I, too, think US troops will stay in Iraq. They will have to. But I also think a signficant drawdown from populated areas will take place because the administration does not want to become embroiled in a civil war.
At this point, US troops still hold together whatever remains of Iraq’s government and security forces. Once they decide to get out from the thick of things, these will fall apart and Iraq will become a failed state. The challenge then will be to contain the civil war within Iraq, and for this the US will need to keep forces in the large camps (for special forces operations against Al-Qaeda and air support) and deploy them along Iraq’s borders.

Actually, when he spells it out this way I find myself obliged to say that I don’t agree with his prognosis completely. Mainly because I don’t think the US will stay in Iraq for very long… And the principal driver behind the decision for a fairly rapid drawdown (or even, perhaps increasingly likely, a complete troop withdrawal) will be precisely that increasingly strong feeling amongst the military brass that the Iraq deployment is threatening to bring infamy, chaos, and ruin to the military institutions that they hold dear. This is a factor to which Joost– a very serious and experienced analyst of matters Middle Eastern– seems in my judgment not to have given adequate weight.
Indeed, it’s worth going back to Ann Scott Tyson’s piece, just to read the concluding paragraph:

“Boots on the ground matter,” [Army vice chief of staff Gen. Richard A. Cody] said. “If they are tied down, your ability to terminate a conflict on your terms, earlier, may not be there.”

Also worth reading in the article: the description of how Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, defines the geographic reach of the mission of the US military. Tyson recalls that he told a House committee last month:

“You take a lap around the globe — you could start any place: Afghanistan, Iran, Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Yemen, Somalia, Sudan, Venezuela, Colombia, Philippines, Malaysia, Indonesia, North Korea, back around to Pakistan, and I probably missed a few. There’s no dearth of challenges out there for our armed forces.”

At one level, you could say these guys are, quite simply, stark raving bonkers. The idea that the United States, a country that boasts less than 5 percent of the world’s population, should feel that it has some kind of a “responsibility” to respond to “challenges” (or whatever) right around whole world does have a certain noticeable zaniness to it.
At another level, I find this a deeply, deeply, scary thought.
And at another level still, I do think the world community as a whole– that is, the concerned citizens of all the countries around the world– needs to come together to start thinking about different, more effective structures to help ensure everyone’s security– structures that (1) certainly don’t allow one steroid-fueled hegemon to race around the world acting unilaterally just as and whenever it pleases, while (2) ensuring that vital lines of communication remain open, with their security assured through accountable, multinational mechanisms.
… But back to Iraq. I take seriously the proposition that the leaders of the US military really are very worried about the state and the status of the forces under their command — in addition to whatever political butt-covering they might currently be engaged in. Moreover, at this point they are most likely joined in their Powell-esque embrace of military planners’ realism by that dark-horse political actor, Defense Secretary Robert Gates. So my judgment is that it is this increasingly weighty coalition within the US decisionmaking class that will increasingly be driving policy in the weeks and months ahead… Already, as we can see, they are all working hard to build good links with the leading realist forces in Congress, from both political parties, in what is increasingly looking like a determined political end-run around Dick Cheney…
The consequences for Iraq of a primarily ‘Tank’-driven US withdrawal from the country need to be thought through a whole lot more…
And meanwhile, Bush’s ideological hard-right crony from Texas, Attorney-General Alberto Gonzales, is also running into increasing trouble over the apparently politically motivated firings of eight federal prosecutors.
Very interesting times…