Category: Iraq-2007-Q1

Maj.-Gen. (Retd.) Robert H. Scales is a former commander of the US Army War College– and also, according to Col. Pat Lang, a former ‘counsellor’ to D. Rumsfeld. So we should all take it very seriously that Scales writes, as he did yesterday,

the current political catfight over withdrawal dates is made moot by the above facts. We’re running out of soldiers faster than we’re running out of warfighting missions. The troops will be coming home soon. There simply are too few to sustain the surge for very much longer.

(Hat-tip to Pat Lang for that, anyway. Also, for the very similar message reportedly coming from Gen. Barry McCaffrey.)
Scales starts his article, which was published in the rightwing Washington Times, thus:

If you haven’t heard the news, I’m afraid your Army is broken, a victim of too many missions for too few soldiers for too long…

He also writes,

The Army’s collapse after Vietnam was presaged by a desertion of mid-grade officers (captains) and non-commissioned officers. Many were killed or wounded. Most left because they and their families were tired and didn’t want to serve in units unprepared for war.
If we lose our sergeants and captains, the Army breaks again. It’s just that simple. That’s why these soldiers are still the canaries in the readiness coal-mine. And, again, if you look closely, you will see that these canaries are fleeing their cages in frightening numbers.
The lesson from this sad story is simple: When you fight a long war with a long-service professional Army, the force you begin with will not get any larger or better over the duration of the conflict. For that reason, today’s conditions are pretty much irreversible. There’s not much that money, goodwill or professed support for the troops can do…

I could add to this, perhaps, that the Bush administration’s deliberate decision of having as much of this war as possible outsourced to private contractors has hugely accelerated the rate at which sergeants and captains have been leaving the nation’s military…
But anyway, the Scales piece is just the latest piece of evidence that– as I have been writing for a while now, including here— the main driving force pushing the US towards a fairly rapid withdrawal from Iraq currently comes from within the military establishment itself.
Scales also makes clear that however much money Bush and the Congress want to try to throw at the Iraq problem, and however much they want to try to increase the size of the military, it is now quite simply too late to “save” the situation in Iraq.
(Lang also notes this: “MG Robert Scales has been a military analyst for Fox News, and was a counselor to Rumsfeld. He helped create the situation that he complains of now. He should go and hide somewhere and not walk abroad among the living.”)
So now, I guess the US will be pulling out of Iraq with the Army it has, rather than the Army it might wish it had?
We do all still need to figure out what the politics– domestically and globally– of a ‘Tank’-led US withdrawal from Iraq will look like.
We also need– all of us in the world community, not just people who are US citizens– to work together to figure out what kind of a military establishment the US might actually need as it comes out of this terrible, terrible misadventure in Iraq.

Here is my latest CSM column on the views that Arab analysts have of the situation in Iraq. (Also, here.)
Sometimes, as on this occasion, I find writing in the CSM-column format hugely challenging… primarily because of the intense constraints on word-length. My experience is that it is far more intellectually challenging to write a short piece– especially when I have so very much great material to be working with– than it is to write something much longer. (Such as I frequently write here on the blog.) Or to put it another way– when I write “composed” pieces, there are always numerous intellectual, organizational, and conceptual challenges involved… and generally, these don’t seem any easier to deal with when writing a short piece than when writing a long, long piece like some of my great long things in Boston Review. But what you end up with in a CSM column is just 850 tightly-considered words. It might not seem very substantial, but I can tell you it represents a huge amount of work.
This column was written about ten days ago, and has undergone various edits since then. I’m not as happy with the shape of it as I was with the “Four trends” one that preceded it. Moreover, this one raises many more queries than it actually answers.
For example, I report there (with, as you may imagine, my own implied approval) the judgment of my Iraqi friend that there’s a possibility that a fairly speedy US withdrawal from his country “would concentrate the minds of his countrymen on the need to find a workable reconciliation”… but “if the Americans stay, we can expect the situation to remain bad.” But I also note later on– with my own explicit endorsement, the judgment of another longtime friend and colleague, Hussein Agha, that, “for now, all of Iraq’s neighbors prefer that US troops stay tied down inside Iraq, rather than withdraw.” In addition, I express my own clear judgment that, “the broad deployment of US troops in Iraq has been transformed from an American asset in the region into a liability that erodes US power and standing.”
How, therefore, can all these widely varying interests in the remaining or leaving of the US troop presence in Iraq be reconciled? This is, clearly, a tricky diplomatic/strategic conundrum. (One regarding which, imho, the UN is the only body capable of orchestrating the search for a solution. And I approach that question in the full knowledge that the UN we have is the UN we have, if you get my meaning.)
Basically, what I come out of this whole analysis with is the conclusion that,

(a) The Arab governments are all quite serious in their argument that US needs to find a way to deal straightforwardly and in a constructive way with Iran, rather than continuing to pursue destabilizing agendas of regime change or other forms of confrontation and escalation against Iran;
(b) They are also quite serious about the need for real progress to be made on Arab-Israeli peacemaking; and
(c) Regarding US-Iran relations, they do have a fear that the US and Iran might conclude a ‘grand bargain’ covering Iraq and various other issues without any input from them and in a way that might infringe seriously on their own interests.

Anyway, the regional dynamics in the Middle East right now are extremely interesting. One big additional factor that I didn’t adequately reflect in the column is that the US troop ‘surge’ is being notably unsuccessful… I conclude that this means that what I have called a ‘Tank’-driven US withdrawal from Iraq– that is, one that is driven on the US side primarily by the need of the military establishment to avoid complete logistical/organizational breakdown due to the overstretch in Iraq– will become more urgent than ever within the coming weeks…

Round table at Electronic Iraq on the fourth anniversary of the war. Yours truly participating.

Commenter Bernard Chazelle suggested we watch this very moving short video from Guardian films. It’s about some kids in an Iraqi orphanage.
And there’s a link there to this other short video, which is a powerful testimony from and about Kadhem Jabouri, the one-time Iraqi weightlifting champion who achieved a brief measure of fame when he heartily swung a hammer against the base of the Saddam statue in Firdaus Square on that day in early April 2003 when the statue was brought down.
Today, Kadhem says he wished he’d never done it. He says the four years of occupation have been worse than Saddam’s dictatorship. He says, “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know.” He takes the cameraperson on a sad tour of his neighborhood, ending up at the echoingly empty expanses of Firdaus Square.
So when– as no doubt will happen– in the early days of April the (increasingly depleted) ranks of the war supporters in the US and UK once again replay that footage of the (partly orchestrated, partly ‘spontaneous’) assault on the Saddam statue, and the statue’s final toppling… in their attempt to reconvince themselves and perhaps some others that their war venture in Iraq really was “worthwhile” because it resulted in a toppling of that dictator and his artistic representation there in the square… in an exuberant outpouring of the Iraqi people’s “popular will”…
When you see those film clips replaying again, go back to the one of Kadhem Jabouri, and listen carefully to what he says.
You can note also that though he did swing that hammer with great verve and gusto, actually as the statue-toppling scene progresses it was not the efforts of Kadhem and his friends that brought it down. (They only succeeded in inflicting a few broad pock marks on the statue’s plinth.)
What brought it down was the US armored vehicle that was later brought into the task.
Anyway, watch both those great video clips… Kadhem, and the children… No matter how idealistic the intentions of some of those who planned and undertook the 2003 invasion of Iraq, they surely need to understand the terrible effects that that invasion had on the lives of millions of actual Iraqis.
(Thanks for the link, Bernard!)

Our esteemed friend Reidar has a solidly argued new piece on his website that roundly criticizes some of the myths about Iraq being disseminated by US politicians– primarily but not exclusively Democratic pols– in preparation for the pursuit of a policy of “cut and blame” in Iraq.
He writes,

to dismiss Iraq’s civil strife as “chronic”, as Democratic commentators increasingly do, requires blind ignorance of centuries of Iraqi coexistence – as seen for instance during the monarchy (1921–1958), during Ottoman rule in the nineteenth century (when Shiites and Sunnis coexisted in the two mixed provinces of Basra and Baghdad), and during the reign of the Baghdad-based Georgian mamluks, who ruled from Mosul to the Gulf between 1747 and 1831. And to diagnose a state of “irreconcilable sectarian conflict” in contemporary Iraq would be to overlook the fact that it is the post-2003 Iraqi elites of returned exiles, rather than the Iraqi population at large, that are behind many of today’s most outrageous sectarian maximalist demands. In historical perspective, it is the current heightened sectarian tension – particularly acute since 2006 – that is the “artificial” aspect of the Iraq situation, and it should be an American responsibility to try to reverse this situation as part of a withdrawal strategy.

Blaming Iraqis for being the backward kind of people who are locked in age-old sectarian hatreds etc is very analogous to some of the arguments made by westerners about other conflicts throughout the world, including former Yugoslavia, Africa, etc. In all such cases these arguments are used as a pretext to cover up the ineffectiveness of the various interventions made by the “international community” or to try to justify the inaction of the states of the rich western world.
Visser makes some excellent argument in this piece. I am concerned, however, that he still seems too easily to believe that there is some “optimal” mix of US sticks and carrots that, if correctly brought to bear, can produce a better-than-otherwise outcome in Iraq. For my part, I still hold that

(1) it is none of the Americans’ damn’ business at this point how the Iraqi people choose to rule themselves,
(2) the track record of the US’s attempt to build a workable political order in post-Saddam Iraq has been abysmal, since the level of killings and major conflict there has increased with every year the US forces have remained there,
(3) therefore the first demand of the US government should be to pull all of its troops out of Iraq, without engaging in any further political maneuvering inside the Iraqi system, whatsoever, and
(4) the very fact of an imminent, rapid, and complete withdrawal of US troops from the country may well serve to concentrate the minds of Iraqis on finding their own form of political entente to produce a functioning national administration after the departure of the US troops and the end of all the harmful interference their presence has caused.

For more details of my thinking on these matters see any of the ‘withdrawal plans for Iraq’ that I provide links to near the top of the sidebar on the main page of this blog.

The Iraqi ‘High Court’– the special war-crimes court that was supposed Exhibit A in the US occupation forces’ attempt to bring accountability and the rule of law to Iraq– has become the scene of some ugly and very open political tussling between the US ‘advisors’ who have been the eminence grise behind the whole court from the very beginning and the Iraqi judge who thought he was supposed to be running it.
This report from AP’s Qassem Abdul-Zahra tells us that,

A session of the war crimes trial of six former officials in Saddam Hussein’s government was canceled Sunday after a defense attorney who had been ejected last week made an unexpected appearance, court officials said.
Judge Mohammed Oreibi al-Khalifa asked bailiffs why Badie Arif Ezzat was back in his courtroom, and was told the attorney was there on the order of U.S. officials attached to the court in an advisory capacity, said the officials, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to release the information.
“So, does my decision mean nothing?” an angry al-Khalifa responded, referring to his decision to eject and hold Ezzat in contempt last week. The two had a heated exchange over comments Ezzat made in a television interview. The judge said the remarks were an insult to the court.
Al-Khalifa adjourned the trial until March 26.

Abdul-Zahra added that the court officials said,

that negotiations between the two sides would continue until a mutually satisfactory settlement is reached.
They said the U.S. officials took custody of Ezzat from Iraqi authorities over the weekend, keeping him under protection in a residence located inside the Green Zone, the heavily fortified Baghdad region that houses the U.S. Embassy and offices of the Iraqi government and parliament.
U.S. Embassy spokesman Lou Fintor said he was checking on the report but could not immediately offer comment.

In the past, at least one attorney providing services to the defense side in the court has been killed, and it is quite possible that Ezzat has entertained some strong and not unreasonable fears for his life in recent weeks.
Many people in the international legal and human rights communities held out the hope for a long time that criminal trials for past atrocities, such as have been attempted by this Iraqi ‘High’ Court, can somehow be insulated from political considerations and in a generalized, ex-cathedra sort of way somehow magically help in strengthening the rule of law in multiply stressed and traumatized societies.
They can’t. Indeed, in societies in which political power is still hotly contested, conducting a criminal trial of major political figures will always exacerbate existing social and political cleavages and make far harder the attainment of the kind of social-political calm in which the rule-of-law protections can start to have real effect.
Let’s hope this whole series of debacles in this US-run political court in Iraq will cause more people in the international human -rights movement to understand the strict limitations on the applicability of war-crimes trials in politically fragile situations that have recently experienced deep inter-group violence or that– as in Iraq, Rwanda, Uganda, or elsewhere– are still actually living under the rights-abusing yoke of such conflict.
(For more of my recent thinking on this check out this recent JWN post or more of the writings on the Transitional Justice Forum blog.)

Our esteemed friend Reidar Visser has another great writing now available on the question of the thorny relationship between the people of the Shiite-dominated ‘Deep South’ of Iraq and their co-religionists in the more central Shiite heartland, especially over the issue of oil.
Visser’s excellent training as a historian– and a historian of southern Iraq, in particular– stands him in good stead there as he teases apart and analyzes the recent and current political trends at work in the Iraqi Deep South… which just happens to be the part of the country in which the vast bulk of the country’s proven oil reserves are located.
In regard to questions of oil location and potential versions of decentralization vs. centralism in Iraq, I just note that at a session on Iraq that I attended last Friday at Chatham House here in London, the point was underlined that with or without Kirkuk, the Kurdish-dominated north of the country still has far, far less oil in its land than the south (especially the Deep South)… And that therefore there are some Kurds who quite credibly argue that from the economic point of view their people would do better to count on having a population-proportionate amount of revenue from the oil resources of a still centralized Iraqi state than by getting the revenue only from “their own” oil resources up there in the north.
Interesting…
Anyway, here is the bottom line in Reidar’s piece:

[E]ven with [the] strong pressures in the direction of territorial sectarianism, signs of local resistance remain. Exhausted by experimentation with regional schemes, many Shi‘i citizens of Basra today simply favor the restoration of a central Baghdad government that can deliver security and services. Others still cling to the “southern region” project, despite a potentially fateful lack of progress in recruiting support among the secularists, Sunnis and Christians of Basra. Even the wild pan-Islamism of Ahmad al-Hasan survives. In the long run, these alternative visions may not derail the sectarian scheme and its powerful sponsors, but they will certainly delay it. In fact, they might prompt experienced actors like Iran, which probably takes a more nuanced view of the Iraqi scene than do many Western analysts, to distribute their bets more evenly, on a wider range of players on the Iraqi scene. In spite of extreme pressures from an increasingly violent political environment, projects like these will carry on an intellectual heritage that discourages many Shi‘a from thinking about their religious community in terms of crescents, rectangles or, indeed, any kind of cartographical projection.

Do go read the whole text. You can post comments and probably engage Reidar in discussion on it here.