Our Man in Iraq

October 20, 2016

Who sent Najim Jabouri, the Iraqi major general in charge of the campaign to retake Mosul? Chicagoans will know what I mean by that. Apparently, we sent him if this article at Fiscal Times is to be believed.

Whether you find that reassuring or dismaying may depend on what you think of our efforts in Iraq to date.

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    It appears Lt. General H. R. McMaster sent him, or at least was the person that was sent to send him. Given McMaster’s background, this seems odd. So, follow the money, or follow the romantic entanglements. Has Jabouri’s children married anyone of consequence, or even some mid-level person with a little pull? That’s how the Tsarnaev’s ended up in the US.

    There’s an alternate explanation for all of this mess in the Middle East, namely that the US is in fact trying to spread as much chaos as possible. In that case, we’re succeeding spectacularly. I don’t think that’s the strategy, though it’s impossible to rule it out.

    …

    It’s interesting to see how many of the people in charge of the military, and particularly of the Army, are people with reputations for having criticized the nation’s leadership during the Vietnam War. It makes me wonder if these guys aren’t fighting the last war so much as fighting the last war the way they think it ought to have been fought.

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    Yeesh, that article has so many juicy bits in it. For example, this paragraph:

    Jabouri explained in The New Yorker article that Bremer’s dissolution of the Iraqi Army implied that army leaders who did not offer support to the U.S. would be killed. He said, “Bremer gave the order that whole families die. I decided that if my children died, I would pick up my gun in revenge. I thought before that all Americans, like Bremer and the people we saw on TV, were killers and turned guns on Iraqis.” Despite admitting he would have rather joined the insurgents than ally with the U.S., Jabouri was chosen as the commander of the most important battle against ISIS.

    Yikes! How much of this is bad work by the editor & reporter and how much is just bad? Apparently Jabouri would have joined the insurgents IF THE AMERICANS HAD KILLED HIS CHILDREN! That’s a distinction worth making. As the reporter and editor leave it, it sounds like Jabouri just kind of flipped a coin, as though deciding on which pair of shoes to wear to work that day.

    From the following it appears that the Americans believe they are employing “next level strategy”:

    Jabouri’s press office did answer a question regarding his weak performance. “Mosul in not Tikrit nor Ramadi. …We don’t want to liberate Mosul the way other areas were liberated.”

    When I asked David Lamm, deputy director of NESA about Jabouri’s performance since he was named the commander of the Ninevah region’s operations, Lamm avoided answering the question directly. But he mentioned two points: “He has ties in the U.S. obviously, and he can talk to military commanders. He has a lot of credibility on the American side.”

    It is important to Americans that he also is seen to be legitimate to Iraqis. The Jabouri tribe is one of the largest in Iraq, with one-half Sunni living in the Mosul area and the other half Shiite, located to the south of Baghdad. In fact, many of Iraq’s tribes have both Sunni and Shiite branches, making the political landscape very complicated. While Jabouri is Sunni, his wife is Shiite, which allows Jabouri, according to Lamm, to bridge the gap between Sunnis and Shiites in Iraq to accomplish his mission.

    At my chess club we call any bad move that doesn’t result in immediate mate, such as dropping a piece or falling for a simple tactic, a “next level strategy”. (Getting mated immediately is VERY or EXTREMELY Next Level.) It’s advanced, beyond Nimzovitch, Botvinnik, or even Kasparov, especially when the opponent then manages to screw up and lose badly. It is, of course, mere rationalization for justifying extremely poor play, even by the standards of speed chess at the club, which is of no consequence at all.

    But how bad is it that the most charitable explanation for Jabouri’s career is that the US has fucked up so incredibly badly in Iraq that the only thing we can hope for is a next level strategy that an incompetent puppet will suddenly morph into some combination of brilliant people (choose to suit: George Washington & Attaturk; Mahatma Gandhi & Alexander the Great; Lennon & McCartney) to become the new Father of His Country?

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