More re “Iraqi” forces and Najaf

The inimitable Yankeedoodle today cites a great little bit of Knight-Ridder reporting from Iraq about the scale of desertions from the Iraqi front-line forces who were asked to join the US forces in storming downtown Najaf.
He was also kind enough to post a comment with the nub of that story onto my post here yesterday.
I went to that link, which was to a dateline-Sunday story by Hannah Allam, Tom Lasseter and Dogen Hannah from Baghdad. There were a couple of other great vignettes in there which give more texture to the picture of what’s happening at different levels of the “Iraqi” forces as they confront the possibility of having to strike against the Sadrists in Najaf.
First, this:

Sober-faced Iraqi colonels gathered inside the defense ministry command center, their cell phones ringing with continuous updates from the battlefield. American military advisers wandered in and out of the room, located at the end of a marble hallway in the massive, heavily guarded palace that serves as headquarters for U.S.-led forces and American civilian administrators.
“Aziz is trapped in the ancient fortress with two wounded men and two of his vehicles surrounded!” shouted one Iraqi officer.
The officers, most of them decorated veterans from the former regime, shook their heads at the thought of Iraqis battling Iraqis on sacred soil. Several said they would resign immediately if senior officers ordered them to serve in Najaf. They asked to withhold their names for fear of reprimand.
“I’m ready to fight for my country’s independence and for my country’s stability,” one lieutenant colonel said. “But I won’t fight my own people.”
“No way,” added another officer, who said his brother – a colonel – quit the same day he received orders to serve in the field. “These are my people. Why should I fight someone just because he has a difference in opinion about the future of the country?”

The story does also refer to, “an Iraqi military analyst inside the ministry [who] defended the assault, saying that crushing al-Sadr’s militia would finally bring stability to the volatile southern Shiite region and smooth the way to national elections.”
That guy apparently was not a serving military officer. (If he had been, presumably he’d have been referred to as such.) The KR report did not say how many people who were serving officers were in the group previously described. But the fact that they showed themselves so ready to express their opinions to, presumably, one of those three KR journalists, in a fairly public setting–and inside the defense ministry command center, no less–means that what we’re talking about inside Allawi’s new “army” is much, much more serious than just a few front-line units getting queasy.
… This certainly brings to mind what happened to the “new national army” that the US and its allies in Lebanon were trying to put together back during a certain portion of that country’s protracted civil war, in 1982-84…
In that army, too, a majority of the (conscripted) regular soldiers–and a fair number of their officers–were Shi-ites. And the Americans were trying to use their local allies and the recently re-formed national army to contain and beat back the newly emergent Shi-ite political power. (A politicial power that, there as in Iraq, had become hugely energized as the result of a humiliating recent foreign invasion and occupation…. In that instance, the original invasion was Israeli, but the occupation was sort of joint, Israeli-US… )
In this JWN post last November I referred back to the chapter of my 1985 book The Making of Modern Lebanon (pp.204-205) where I wrote about how, after the Lebanese army “loosed a heavy barrage of tank and artillery fire into heavily-peopled apartment buildings” in a mainly Shi-ite area of Beirut, the majority-Shi-ite units of the army simply defected en masse to the Shi-ite militia there…
Just three days after that happened, Reagan announced his decision to “redeploy offshore” all the US Marines who’d been in Beirut. In other words, withdraw.
Quite evidently, without the “cover” provided by a compliant “Lebanese” army, the US position was vastly over-exposed, and the Reaganites realized that. They had already, just the previous October, suffered the massive losses of the bombing of the Marines barracks there.
Can we expect a rapid and similar decision to withdraw to be taken now, with regard to Iraq? I think not, for a number of reasons…

Firstly, compared with the Reagan administration’s national-security decisionmakers the people running the Bush administration’s policy in Iraq look like a team of complete strategic idiots.
Secondly, “redeploying offshore” from Lebanon was relatively simple. All the Marines were in or near Beirut. There were only a couple thousand of them. And there was a vast flotilla of US Navy ships offshore. They had been part of the problem. Notably, the battleship New Jersey had been used to pound massive munitions into Druze and other neighborhoods around the capital… But at least, once the withdrawal decision had been made and announced, it was a relatively simple matter to ship the Marines out– and the New Jersey “covered” their extraction by continuing to fire against Lebanese villages…
Getting the 140,000 widely scattered US (and coalition) forces safely out of Iraq would, by contrast, be a truly massive logistical undertaking. Probably, just about as complex as getting them in there in the first place.
For the Bushies, the only politically viable way to do this would be if they could find a way of announcing a “victory” in Iraq, and then to negotiate a safe passage for all the troops out of the country along various routes….
I believe that that would be far and away the best outcome. Just let them leave, and leave completely! Then the Iraqi people can work out their own relationships with each other and their own form of governance for the future quite free of that disastrous, actively violent, and violence-provoking presence of the US military.
I don’t see that it’s about to happen. Not in an election year, and quite possibly not after the election, either.
I do think, however, that the people in Iraq who want to see the US forces leave should be giving active thought to the idea of offering and helping to ensure their safe passage out of the country. Yes, I’m sure there are a lot of Iraqis who would just like to continue to attack and kill American soldiers, who’ve been running a ruinous and destructive occupation of their country. But the best way to get them out quickly and decisively is to offer them safe passage… and to make this offer as credible as possible.
…Anyway, I just want to finish this post with the other little vignette I noted from yesterday’s KR story. It just underlines once again–if this should need doing–who’s been making all the important decisions for the members of the new (but now rapidly disintegrating) “Iraqi” national army:

At an Iraqi national guard base near the border of Sadr City, the vast Baghdad slum that serves as al-Sadr’s support base and recruiting ground, 1st Sgt. Khalid Ali described the death threats he and other Iraqi troops have received from the Mahdi Army. He drew distinctions between fighting fellow Iraqis and fighting militiamen, whom he holds responsible for the deaths of two of his relatives.
“There are concerns about what’s happening in Najaf because most of the people working here are Shiite and they are concerned about what happens to their sacred sites,” Ali said. “We do not fight our brothers, we fight against those people who are sabotaging our country. The Mahdi Army is not Shiite, they are saboteurs.”
But when Ali was asked about the number of guardsmen who have quit since al-Sadr’s latest uprising, U.S. Army 1st Lt. Vernon Sparkmon cut him off.
“Certain things, you can’t discuss,” Sparkmon told Ali. “If somebody asks that question, that’s, like, classified stuff.”