Be sure to check in at Belmont Club for Wretchard’s exegesis of Gen. Barry McCaffrey’s report on the state of affairs in Iraq. The official summary is here. We don’t have the full text available online at this point so we’ll have to rely on those (like Wretchard) who’ve seen it. As best as I can determine the summary version is along these lines:
- the U. S. military continues to be more than prepared for the challenges in Iraq
- the Iraqi army is coming along well
- the Iraqi national police force could stand improvement
- it’s likely that the Iraqis will succeed in setting up a more-or-less effective national unity government
- the effectiveness of foreign jihadists in Iraq has been greatly reduced
- the domestic political and institutional support for operations in Iraq is underwhelming
There’s an old rabbinic saying: “When a woman comes from a far country and tells you she’s divorced, believe herâ€. Gen. McCaffrey has been a critic of the war in Iraq and the administration’s conduct of it so I think his opinion is worthy of special consideration.
Do I think this will happen? Nah. Good news is no news.
Read the whole thing.
I don’t know how much weight one can attribute to this report. Not because I don’t trust him, or because I do not think that his being a critic lends his findings more weight. What troubles me is the sources he used. For example look at part of his sources:
2. SOURCES:
a. General George Casey, Commander, MNF-I – one-on-one discussions and Staff Briefings.
b. LTG JR Vines, Commander MNC-I – one-on-one discussions and Staff Briefings.
c. LTG Dave Petreaus, Commander, Multinational Security Transition Command – one-on-one
discussions/briefings.
d. LTG Robin Brims, (UK Army), Deputy Commanding General of MNF-I – one-on-one discussions.
e. Charge d’Affairs James Jeffrey – office call one-on-one with U.S. Embassy Iraq.
f. MG Tim Donovan (USMC), Chief of Staff, MNF-I – one-on-one discussions.
g. MG Steve Johnson (USMC), Acting Commanding General, II MEF – one-on-one discussion and staff briefing.
h. BG Peter Palmer and BG John Defreitas – MNF-I Operations and Intel Briefings.
i. MG Rusty Findley (USAF) and Colonel Bill Hix – MNF-I Campaign Action Plan Brief.
All of them are one on one discussions, or phone conferences of some sort of another. There are not enough field assesments to gauge the true extent of the military effort or whether our forces are being effective. I have never doubted that our military men and women were capable or more than ready to meet the challenges in Iraq, what did concern me was the fact that there were not enough of them for that to matter.
As Barnett says, Rummy was right that a small force could wip the republican guard and take over Iraq, but he was wrong on the level of troops we would need to actually occupy Iraq, regardless of how well prepared they were.
As far as the Iraqi army is concerned, given the problems we are having with regard to the infiltration of the police forces by various shiite militias, it is no doubt also infiltrated. I did a search through the summary you provided and given the importance of having an army loyal to the Iraqi government and not various militia groups I find it extremely disappointing that there is no mention of this in the summary. I’ll wait for the full report and we will see then.
Iraqi police can stand improvement, is a master stroke of understatement given the fact that the people fear them more than they fear insurgents or US forces. It has been well documented that these “police forces” have been infiltrated by various militias and are being used by them to wreak havoc on those who oppose the militias and the political groups they represent.
As for the rest, on their face alone they seem well enough, but I will have to read the whole thing before coming to any conclusions. These are only the first problems I sensed with the report. Mainly, his over reliance on one on one meetings with generals and people who are still in active duty and who have an interest in demonstrating an improving situation does not make me very confident that we are getting the whole picture. That said, I’ll wait till I read more of the report, before engaging in further conjecture.
nykrindc, it isn’t as important if the iraqi army is infiltrated by shia militias, or even if it’s mostly composed of shia militias.
We haven’t trained them to do their own logistics.
We haven’t trained them to do their own command structure.
We haven’t trained them to do their own artillery/airsupport.
So while they follow our orders it doesn’t matter what they think.
And if a few of them don’t follow our orders we can courtmartial them and shoot them.
And if a whole unit stops following orders we can cut off their supplies and then if they stay together we can hit them with artillery and airstrikes.
And if they take their training back to their militias, what good is it? We trained them to depend on our supplies and our artillery/airstrikes. Our training isn’t going to do them much good without our continuing support. This might be something of a problem if we leave, but in the short run it means that shia militias don’t do themselves much more good infiltrating the iraqi army than they would infiltrating iraqi jails.
But the police get to roam around and do things on their own initiative. It’s a lot harder to control them. They aren’t directly under US command anyway.
So while they follow our orders it doesn’t matter what they think.
What happens when we leave? Of course it matters, because if they retain their allegiance to their political, religious parties and militias, even if they follow our orders now, once we leave they will not. That means that in a few years time, we will likely have to return to Iraq to restore order once again, likely fighting against the same militia members we helped to train. Further, we may not be training them in logistics and such, but Iran is training a large chunk of them in that regards so your argument misses the point. I’m looking to the future of Iraq, because once we leave I don’t want another American to have to die because we refused to deal with reality and the situation as it stood on the ground. We are there, and we have to make it work, not only while we are there, but it must also work once we are gone. Otherwise, what we did, the sacrifices we have asked countless American families to make will be for nothing. If Iraq spirals into ethnic conflict at the hands of militias we helped to train, that will only invite further instability in the region with all the major players getting into the game, including al Qaeda. The end result in any such future makes us far less secure the more instability arises in our wake.
nykrindc, I’m sorry. Yes, it’s a great tragedy that our sacrifices in iraq are for nothing.
I wish I had a way to make it come out right. If we could just go back in time and change it around, avoid the stupidity.
But we’re stuck with what we’ve got, and at this point our best result is to cut our losses. Making more sacrifices hoping to get it right at this point is not going to work.
I’m sorry.
That’s not good enough. Pretending its a victory doesn’t make it so. This is not the last time we are going to be in this type of situation, our interventions, be they under a Republican or Democrat president, will only increase. So we either learn it right the first time around, or we prepare ourselves for the same sort of thing the next time around, not enough troops to keep the peace, not enough resources to get things done and at the end of the day all our sacrifices are for naught. So long as we are scared of confronting what went wrong in Iraq, we will be self-deterred from taking out equally vicious and crazy men like Hussein in other places, allowing much more human suffering, like in Rwanda, Somalia, Zimbabwe, Sudan, eventually Central Asia and it won’t get easier. So we either get it right now, or we suffer three, four times as much later on.
nykrindc, life is hard. We can’t get everything we want. We suffer now and we’ll suffer more later.
If you go to the casino and bet against the house, and you get some big wins but on average you lose fairly steadily … it’s stupid to say you have to keep playing until you learn to win against the house.
If you absolutely have to figure out how to do that, then do your learning with small bets.
Iraq is a big bet. We’re spending about $10,000,000,000 a month there. I’m not sure exactly how many employed citizens we have or how many taxpayers, but you heard that they’re talking about sending everybody a $100 check to help tide them over? They could send everybody in the workforce a $100 check every month for what we’re spending on the iraq gamble. And it isn’t working.
This is no way to figure it out. When it was Bush Senior doing it, he did it better. He wasn’t sure our military was really set up for a real fight, so first he invaded tiny grenada, where we couldn’t lose. The military identified some problems and fixed them. Then he made up a reason to invade panama, and we had a bigger test. We found more problems and fixed them. Then we were ready to start the Gulf War. If Bush One had won re-election we would have been ready for a bigger war still, but he didn’t.
We have no business using iraq and iran for our test cases. Too big, too much to lose. We ought to bring democracy to lebanon first. A little place that already has some tradition of democracy. Can’t really fail, test our methods and make improvements. After we win in lebanon then we can take over palestine. I’m sure the israelis would be glad to give us responsibility for the place, and it’s another reasonably small test case. Once we’ve established that we really do know how to democratise nations using airstrikes and automatic weapons, then we can try libya. Small population but more desert. Then maybe syria.
Start small, learn your lessons when they’re cheap. It’s senseless to make $10 billion/month mistakes when we could be making our mistakes at 1/10 of that or even 1/100.
And note that as each invasion is successful, as the world sees the good results, later indigenous people won’t fight as hard. They’ll be glad to be liberated. But iraq is no advertisement.
It failed. I’m sorry. We can waste ourselves trying to fix it, and still fail. We probably will. It’s only natural for people who’re losing at the casino to demonstrate resolve and keep playing. It just doesn’t work.
nykrindc, your comment above is misleading. The complete list of sources from the summary reflects roughly half interviews in the field. I don’t think that either you or I know the precise number of field interviews that would be required for Gen. McCaffrey to gain a complete picture of the situation in Iraq but in my assessment the sources cited appear to be a best effort attempt to do so.
Look, I’m not claiming that his report is dispositive—it’s not. But I do think that any attempt at characterizing this as anything but good news without a little more evidence than you’ve provided is spin.
The complete list of sources from the summary reflects roughly half interviews in the field. I don’t think that either you or I know the precise number of field interviews that would be required for Gen. McCaffrey to gain a complete picture of the situation in Iraq but in my assessment the sources cited appear to be a best effort attempt to do so.
June 2005.
He visited units in Tikrit and Fallujah. He visited a couple of elite iraqi units who put on dog-and-pony shows for him. He saw one group of company-grade officers, one group of NCOs and one group of enlisted men. There’s every reason to think none of these were representative — they’d naturally want to show him their best. But we have no particular reason to think there’s trouble among the troops. And no reason to think that junior officers knew what was going on better than the senior guys.
Look, I’m not claiming that his report is dispositive—it’s not. But I do think that any attempt at characterizing this as anything but good news without a little more evidence than you’ve provided is spin.
I don’t particularly see good news there. But it’s somewhat encouraging.
He says that January-September 2006 will be the peak of the insurgency. Implying it hasn’t peaked yet. We’ve been predicting that things are about to get better for a long time.
It’s encouraging that he predicts the Reserves and National Guard will only melt down over the next 25 months. That’s much slower than I’d thought.
He points out that the ISF needs at least 120 helicopters, 2000 uparmored Humvees, 500 ASVs, and 2000 uparmored M1 13A3’s. At this point they do none of their own maintenance or logistics, and they don’t have enough NCO or officer training. The insurgents have widely infiltrated them, but corruption is a bigger threat than the insurgents. Sound anything like vietnam? They needed helicopters and didn’t get them and couldn’t maintain the ones they had….
He lists 8 top vulnerabilities. I found only one them a big surprise — if for any reason we have problems with our bases in kuwait “then our posture in Iraq would be placed in immediate fatal peril.”. I had simply not thought about kuwait. The Emir’s secret police seem to be quite efficient and I hadn’t heard of any unrest. But he isn’t just concerned about “unrest”. He wants constant diplomatic attention to the Emir. It doesn’t make sense for the Emir to doublecross us, he wouldn’t last 2 years without our continuing support. But we’re utterly dependent on him too. He could hold us up for whatever he wants, and we have to cough up or leave iraq and kuwait to their fates.
He optimisticly says it will be a 5 year fight.
He claims as a positive that insurgents can “no longer” mass against coalition troops at greater than squad level because they get killed. I had thought this was true from the beginning, and we got to our current state while that was true. It doesn’t look particularly promising to me. Insurgents can’t effectively attack coalition forces by direct fire, 80% of attacks are standoff or suicide bombings. But weren’t they always?
He went to Fallujah and so he might put too much importance on it. “The City appears to be an angry disaster.” He wants military engineers to supervise rebuilding the city quickly. The place still looks like we destroyed it, and that looks bad. In objective terms I don’t see why Fallujah is more important than Tal Afar or Ramadi or any of the other cities we’ve destroyed, but it is the one that has the attention.
To my way of thinking, “success” for the whole operation depends on shia thinking of themselves as iraqis and not shia, so they can have an inclusive government instead of a civil war. But there are essentially no signs of that happening. If that fails, then all our successes turn into aid to one or two sides of the three-sided civil war. That’s of very little use to us. There’s no military action we can do to encourage them away from civil war. But there are covert actions we can do to encourage them toward it. We can make anonymous attacks on civilians and attribute them to insurgents. Presumed insurgent attacks on civilians have done a whole lot to make the insurgents unpopular. As McCaffrey points out, they are an asset for us and for the nascent iraqi government. With just the right number of anonymous attacks on civilians we get less opposition to us. But with too many of them, we get a civil war that might make the occupation considerably harder. And we don’t get to decide how many attacks there will be. The iraqis and foreign jihadists get a vote in that too. We can hire iraqis to attack civilians, but we can’t stop anybody else from doing it too.