Iraq and Afghanistan

Everyone wants to "get out of Iraq", but no one has a clue as to how to do it. The situation is very different from that Eisenhower faced when he promised to bring peace to Korea were he elected (incidentally we are still living with the fallout from his "success"). The Korean War had a definite front: behind it we had few enemies, beyond it all were potential enemies. But in Iraq today, the only definite fronts are around the green zone and behind the Peshmerga lines that protect Kurdistan. The rest of the country is divided up into a series of blotches of varying shades of grey, from the darkest that we control only immediately after a military operation to those that are relatively safe most of the time due to our forces or those of forces that for the time being do not pick fights with foreigners (for example, in Najaf).

Even in Vietnam we had more of a front. In the South the South Vietnamese army and the Americans had firm control in many places. Unlike Baghdad, Saigon was a relatively safe place. In the city and its environs people did not move about in fear. Other areas deeper in the interior were definitely under the control of the North Vietnamese army and its southern allies (Viet Cong). The Tet Offensive was a failed attempt by the North to change this situation by establishing a permanent presence in cities such as Hue and Saigon. Our enemies in Iraq would not need to have such an offensive, for to some degree they are nearly everywhere already.

Leaving Iraq is said to require a political and a military solution.

We must to some extent negotiate our way out of Iraq. But with whom and for what?

Sunni militias include al-Qaeda in Iraq and several groups linked together in the Mujahedeen Council. Some of these groups regard Shiites as heretics, targets almost as acceptable as the foreigners. Others may not. The Ansar al Islam is a Sunni extremist group that is generally considered separately from the other Sunni religious militias. The nationalists formed from the former security forces of Saddam Hussein fight not for Islam but for Iraq and a Baathist ideology that has historically been hostile to religion. Although referred to as Sunni, there are Shi'a and probably Kurds among them. One critical Shi'a militia is the Mahdi Army under the more or less effective leadership of Moqtada al-Sadr. In contrast with the Sunni forces, the Mahdi Army is more inclined to occupy and control areas in the open, such as Sadr City within Baghdad. Some of the few pitched battles reminiscent of more conventional warfare have been fought between American forces and this group. Al-Sadr sees the Americans as an occupying force and from time to time has attacked them. Recently, it has seemed more intent on revenge attacks against Sunnis. The other primary Shi'a militia is the Badr Brigade, the military arm of SCIRI, a long established organization that clandestinely fought Hussein and received Iranian training and equipment both before and after our invasion. All militias have to some extent infiltrated the security forces, but the Badr brigade is particularly entrenched in them, particularly the police because of their control of the Interior Ministry. Much of their fighting has been against Sunni civilians. But the leaders of the Badr Brigade and the Mahdi Army have generations of antagonistic history behind them. In the Basra area the two groups are struggling for control. In addition to these groups, there are many smaller militias. Some are connected to religious leaders. Others are self-defense or neighborhood forces connected to none of the national militias. Others are essentially criminal organizations acting with relative impunity in an "open society". Much of the rampant kidnapping has been ascribed to such groups.

Few of these groups show any inclination to seriously negotiate with the foreigners, and the foreigners are likely to feel they would have little to give the militias in a negotiation if it came to that.

The temptation, then, will be to try to negotiate with the Iraqi government a means of honorable withdrawal. Its leaders are faced with the problem that while they know their forces cannot really control the militias mentioned above, they have to establish their national credentials by seeming to demand the exit of the foreigners. Many critics of the present strategy believe that we must tell the Iraqis that it is time for them to take on the burden of their own defense. The problem with this argument is that there is no reason to believe that their security forces are failing to be as helpful as we would like because individuals in the Iraqi government aren't making a sufficient effort. One suspects that Iraqi government forces are neither very effective nor inclined to follow the orders of their nominal leaders. And the leaders know it.

Let us consider some of the alternative military strategies and the political strategies that might accompany them. They might be loosely grouped into the following:

(1) Modified Cut and Run
(2) More of the Same
(3) More of the Same Plus
(4) Refocusing on CAPs and Infrastructure

(1) Cut and Run. This strategy that many advocates, including Congressman Murtha (the probable new chairman of the Subcommittee on Defense of the House Appropriations Committee), would be modified before it was actually carried out. One modification would have two aspects. First, we would ask Kurdish leaders to request that the United States station a small force, say 25,000 troops with good air bases for quick resupply, for the indefinite future in their enclave. Initially, these forces would not do anything. But they would be there to assist the Peshmerga should other Iraqi actors make an effort to overrun the heart of Kurdistan. The U.S. forces would also warn Turkey and Iran off in case they became concerned that Kurdistan was becoming an independent state. It should be made clear to the Kurds that the United States would not take an active part in Kurdish disputes in the Kirkuk or Mosul areas. Secondly, we would tell the Iraqi government that we were leaving in six to ten months. In the interim we would defend the green zone as we do now. We would maintain our principal bases. After six months we would begin to close our bases. Most of our forces would be stationed along the main road to Basra during this evacuation period. At about ten months out, the last troops would leave Baghdad, taking with them those persons or groups that it had been agreed in the interim we would help evacuate.

(2) More of the Same. This is essentially what we are most likely to do. The armed forces will try in the next few months to make greater use of "lessons learned" so far in the war. But what can be expected is that the advocates of offensive action and defensive action would play as large a part as ever in the war councils. We would again end up making offensive sweeps through "enemy territory" and then draw back to repeat the effort someplace else. It may be, of course, that the insurgency is running down, running out of willing recruits and money. It may be that the Iraqi security forces are improving so much that a real difference will soon be observable. If intelligence shows either of these possibilities to be real, many will opt for this solution. I doubt the existence of the preconditions for success with this alternative.

(3) More of the Same Plus. Some have suggested that 50,000 more troops might be brought in for at least a year. It is certainly true that out forces are undermanned: they do not have enough soldiers in the field to both take and hold the real estate that counts in the minds of the people. We have not given the Iraqis security in their daily activities; we have not given them dependable power or sanitation services. More troops would plug some of these holes. But there are many problems with this approach. If we had started our occupation with the larger force, we could have prevented much of the looting that went on initially, especially the looting of weapons stores. With a larger force we could have prevented many of the early victories of the insurgency. But at this point, 50,000 more will be too little and too late. The force we needed initially was twice what we have. Congress and the American people are not going to stand for or pay for such a force. It would require instituting a draft, and selective service in the present situation would be very unpopular. 50,000 more Americans will also not be popular with many Iraqis. The more soldiers we send in now, the more incidents, the more killing of Iraqis by Americans, the more hatred of the foreigner. There are many Iraqi leaders, especially Shi'a like al-Sadr, who would denounce force increase as proof that we were an occupying force and intended to stay forever. The Iranians would both play this note before the world and use it to justify a wider intervention on their part.

(4) Refocusing on CAPs and Infrastructure. There are many other possibilities. One that has been mentioned by the Marines is the reestablishment of the CAPs (Combined Action Platoons) that were used successfully in Vietnam. There are many discussions of this effort on the Internet, for example here. CAPs were a means of protecting peasants by inserting a platoon of Marines in selected hamlets to work with local self-defense forces. Most places these units did remarkably well; it is significant that a high percentage of the Marines involved volunteered to reenlist for the work. They earned the trust of the people by staying for many months in one place and getting to know one another. The CAPs often worked like quasi-insurgents, laying ambushes every night for the Viet Cong. The drain on the main American forces was minimal, with only a few thousand at any one time working in the CAPs. Of course, CAPs would not work on a regular battlefield against massed armies, but insurgent units are small in Iraq. (Remember that the success or failure of village defense had nothing to do with the final end of the war after the Marines were long gone. The North Vietnamese took the country with a massed tank attack that broke through South Vietnamese lines in the Central Highlands and reached Saigon in a few days.) In Baghdad the approach could be adapted to small neighborhoods, starting of course with those that claimed to want this assistance. The second arm of this alternative would be for larger American units to concentrate on defending infrastructure — power plants, electrical transmission lines, sanitation facilities, water supplies, petroleum refineries and distribution lines etc. This approach would turn the securing of most public areas over to the Iraqi forces, thereby reducing the dependence of Iraq on our forces and reducing the popular feeling that we were an occupying army. The defense of infrastructure is a critical task and one the Iraqis have not done well. Improvement in quality of life is impossible until it succeeds.

I am sure all these alternatives have flaws. There will not be a flawless answer. There may be no answer, but we cannot simply throw up our hands. We are responsible for too much tragedy to simply drift away.