November 4, 2003
Iraq
Reassessment: Due but Not Likely
by Alan Bock
The
deaths of 16 Americans in a Chinook helicopter might have an impact
on how ordinary Americans think about the ongoing conflict in Iraq,
although it seems to have had little or no impact on the imperial
capital just yet. Or did it? In a "profile in courage"
worthy of the next ghostwritten chronicle the Senate approved the
president's request for $87.5 billion for ongoing "war on terrorism"
foreign aid and welfare by a voice vote, which means none of the
brave Senators is on the record. Does that unwillingness to take
a stand suggest that some in the Senate are starting to wonder how
good an idea it is to be identified with what seems to be shaping
up as a disaster in the making in Iraq?
On
the other hand, even before he had made any public statements, it
was not hard to predict that President Bush would issue more of
his playground bully-like promises that "America will never
run," at least as long as the president doesn't face open mutiny
in the armed forces. This folly in Iraq seems to be to so central
to President Bush's own conception of his presidency that it seems
unlikely that almost anything will precipitate a serious reassessment
of U.S. policy there. In some ways that might be seen as admirable,
a case of a president determined not to cut and run because the
task is more difficult than at first believed.
But
this is a president who seems not to be closely in touch with reality
on the ground – certainly it is dissimilar to his own rather limited
military experience – and prone to believe what he wants to believe,
even to the point of preferring cooked intelligence to real intelligence,
once he has decided what he thinks he wants to do. If the various
reports are even close to true, that this president also believes
God asked him to run for president and God wants him to take out
the infidels, this country could be in for a rough time unless it
turns him out at the next election.
It
is unfortunately characteristic of some recent converts whose conversion
was more emotional than intellectual and therefore not especially
mature, that they see their relationship with God not as a way for
God to reprove them or admonish them to be better, but to affirm
that God approves of them and what they have already decided to
do in His name. I have no particular insight into President Bush's
spiritual journey, of course, and I've been reluctant for a long
time to conjecture even this much. I hope the conjecture is completely
incorrect, that the president goes to his knees in humility and
openness, even to the point of being open to the idea that he might
have understood his duty incorrectly and should change course. One
may hope.
PUT
IN HARM'S WAY
Those
who serve as volunteers in America's wars have reason to know they
might be put in harm's way, but that does not lessen our sadness
and regret when harm comes their way. It will be interesting, however,
to see what effect Bush II's excellent little adventure in Iraq
has on recruiting, especially in the National Guard.
I've
heard reports, including a fairly credible survey conducted by the
quasi-independent military newspaper Stars and Stripes, suggesting
that military morale is sagging in Iraq. Washington Monthly
even did an interesting piece suggesting that the Bush policy of
endless wars for less-than-concrete goals might even harm the inclination
of the professional military to identify with the GOP. But it has
been every soldier's birthright to gripe since the Peloponnesian
Wars and before. More interesting information will come when it's
time to sign up for another hitch. I suspect it will be harder for
the National Guard, but we'll just have to wait and see.
CAN
RUMMY DO ANYTHING? DOES HE WANT TO?
Beyond
the human response of regret, it seems appropriate to develop an
analytical response based on a no-nonsense assessment of what the
mission in Iraq is and what it will take to do it. Defense Secretary
Rumsfeld might have begun something like that process within the
administration with his notorious memo. But his performance on the
Sunday chat shows suggests that he is once again playing the good
bureaucrat and falling in line with the tendency to look on the
bright side and predict success. I'll believe he's really interested
in provoking an intelligent reassessment of U.S. policy – it's remotely
possible; his personal roots are those of an old-style Republican
rather than a typical disillusioned former leftist neoconservative
– when he fires Paul Wolfowitz (whose obvious personal fear after
the bombing of the hotel in Iraq where he happened to be staying,
I suggest, is unlikely to change his attitude that more young Americans
need to be called upon to sacrifice for the greater glory of the
neoconservative vision).
Whether
Rumsfeld does it, somebody on Congress does it, or the American
people finally communicate what seems to me (and most of the pollsters)
like growing disillusionment with the outcome so far in Iraq to
the politicos, some hard questions seem virtually inevitable. As
Ted Carpenter of the Cato Institute reminded me when I talked to
him last week – before the Chinook was shot down – in May and June
there were perhaps six or seven violent events a day in Iraq. By
September there were about a dozen. Lately there have been 30 to
35 a day. And even before the Chinook disaster the number of U.S.
casualties and fatalities was rising as well. To be blunt, there
haven't been enough Americans killed to have a serious impact on
the military mission (assuming there is one beyond improvising and
hoping for the best) in Iraq. But rising casualties should have
a political impact back home.
ACCENTUATING
THE NEGATIVE
President
Bush and other administration honchos have complained that the media
tend to focus on the negative in Iraq and have ignored the positive
aspects of the occupation, like schools opened, nascent quasi-democratic
institutions put in place, infrastructure repaired, markets opening
and daily life becoming more normal. There is probably some truth
to this, although it hasn't been all that hard to find positive
stories, and not just on Fox News. But until the violence starts
to wane rather than get worse, the Bushies had better get used to
stories about it and accept that fact as one of the realities with
which they will have to deal.
The
attacks simply cannot be ignored, nor can their importance be discounted.
The media naturally gravitate toward bad news anyway; in some ways
it's part of the definition of news. They carried stories about
the fires in California last week (pushing some of the bad news
in Iraq off the front pages), but they do not run a celebratory
story each day a fire does not break out (at least they won't after
a week of no new fires). Furthermore, the administration, despite
its hunger for feel-good news, has not offered anything more than
vague phrases about what would constitute progress and success in
Iraq.
What
is the target, for example, for hiring and training Iraqi policemen
and turning over day-to-day responsibility for certain kinds of
security to them? How much infrastructure repair constitutes progress?
How many people should be in the Iraq army in three weeks, three
months, six months, a year? Is there a target? How many functioning
local governments are expected to be in place in the next six weeks
or six months? Surely somebody in the administration has an idea
or a wish-list? Is there a target for oil production in the next
three months or six months?
Without
those kinds of benchmarks, it is virtually impossible to assess
progress except in vague or anecdotal terms. So properly functioning
media, even media inclined to want to tell positive stories about
Iraq, will have a hard time telling the story except in vague or
anecdotal terms. An administration that wants positive stories (assuming
attacks like the Chinook attack don't escalate, making this entire
discussion moot) has an obligation to define its goals in terms
more concrete than "more democratization" or "more
schools open."
NO
STRATEGY?
Unfortunately,
as Ted Carpenter suggested (and I have no reason based on the evidence
available to doubt it) "So far there seems to be no overall
strategy, no timeline for accomplishing certain goals. Even more
important, however, the security environment is central to the effort.
If you don't control violence and sabotage, any other achievements
can be transitory at best." That comports with what just about
everybody I have talked to with experience in the area has been
saying since about April. For a time it seemed almost too cold-blooded
to me – get the security aspect right first before you start rhapsodizing
about reconstruction and democratizing – but events have proven
the advice sound.
The
question is whether the administration or the military even knows
how to get the security aspect right. It's not all that easy, after
all, and it might not be what the U.S. military is trained to do
or especially good at.
A
fascinating document in this regard was discussed
at some length last week by Fred Kaplan on slate.com. The Center
for Army Lessons Learned in Ft. Leavenworth put out a 30-page unclassified
report on military intelligence in Iraq. The report noted that with
69 tactical human intelligence teams in Iraq, commanders had expected
about 120 "information intelligence reports" a day, but were
getting about 30. The reason was, according to the report, "not
because of lack of activity but because of the lack of guidance
and focus" from their superiors. The superiors turned out to
be junior officers who "did not appear to be prepared for tactical
assignments." Furthermore most of them "lacked advanced
analytical capabilities."
Among
the phrases that appear repeatedly in the report are "very
little to no analytical skills," "junior officers who
had no formal training, " information overflow," "no
internal analysis capability," "lack of competent interpreters"
and so on. HUMINT databases were stored on separate computer systems,
many loaded with incompatible software, with no capacity to share
data among different intelligence operating units. Furthermore,
intelligence personnel were often ordered to take part in operations
that kick down doors and raid buildings. As the Lessons Learned
report dryly puts it, "THTs [tactical HUMINT teams] rely on
the rapport they generate with the local population and their ability
to collect information. Putting them on a door-kicker team ruins
that rapport."
LITTLE
TASTE FOR NATION-BUILDING
Ivan
Eland, director of the Center
for Liberty and Peace at the Independent
Institute in Oakland, suggested to me that much of this is not
surprising. The U.S. military has little taste for nation-building
and the kinds of tasks involved therein, including intelligence
and counter-insurgency. Our military is built to be a high-tech
attack weapon, and as the initial war demonstrated, it's quite good
at it. Furthermore, attack operations and procurement are the way
to get ahead in today's "army of one."
What
the military really needs now are more effective ways of dealing
with guerrillas. At least a number of military leaders on the ground
have acknowledged that U.S. forces are now in a guerrilla war. Our
political leaders seem reluctant to do the same, preferring to focus
on those pesky "foreign" terrorists and demanding that
Syria and Iran get a lot better control of their borders than the
United States has of its. But is the U.S. military, even having
acknowledged that this has deteriorated into a guerrilla war, capable
of waging an effective counter-guerrilla campaign?
To
ask the question is in no way to disparage the courage or willingness
of the troops we do have on the ground. But counter-guerrilla activities
are fairly specialized and few military people in the world are
really very good at them. If you haven't been trained to do counter-insurgency
(or even routine police work, which is what much of occupation resembles)
or been led to expect to be in other countries for long periods
of time (as the British military was at the height of the British
empire) it isn't realistic to expect to be able to pick it up on
the fly.
FEW
ATTRACTIVE OPTIONS
At
this point, as Ivan Eland pointed out to me, few of the options
in Iraq are attractive. Leaving in the wake of even so horrendous
a disaster could create an impression of weakness and irresolution.
The administration has staked a great deal on a successful outcome
in Iraq and the promises are coming home to roost. However, "this
attack is almost surely a harbinger of more ambitious attacks to
come," Mr. Eland said.
Sending
more troops would be politically difficult, in that it could look
like an admission that the previous policy was a mistake, and more
troops would be more targets. In that light, Delaware Democratic
Sen. Joe Biden's suggestion that Congress might be willing to go
along with more troops might be seen as a political trap for the
administration, sort of a "please don't fling me into that
briar patch" ploy from a leading Democrat. If the administration
is going to fail, perhaps it would be better for it to fail on a
larger and more obvious scale, after the Democrats have cooperated
in giving them all the resources they said they needed.
More
foreign troops? Well. Leaders in other countries can read headlines
as well as Americans can. How many now will be more eager to send
troops to help save America's bacon and be sitting ducks? And how
many will send enough troops to matter while the U.S. has sole control
there? Turning over more of the control of the transition to democracy
to the UN might lead to more foreign troops being authorized (although
in most countries this will be more popular with politicians who
want to participate in the eventual political/commercial outcome
in Iraq than with the people generally. But as long as U.S. troops
are in Iraq guerrillas will keep attacking, and they will attack
troops from other countries too. They have already hit the UN and
the Red Cross.
At
some point – perhaps not immediately for face-saving purposes (proving
that "saving face" is at least as important in modern
American politics as in Asia or the Arab world, which Americans
tend to view as if they were making an anthropological study) –
the administration should consider declaring victory and bringing
the troops home. If that decision is made, however, the sooner the
better. The Campaign Eternal is already underway. It will look better
if the decision to cut our losses comes now, when hardly anybody
except the fawning media is paying attention to criticism from the
other party, and looks like a decision based on realistic assessment
rather than one forced by political exigencies.
–
Alan Bock
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