Trying to decipher the administration's signals on troop withdrawals from Iraq is as complicated as trying to unravel the plot lines on Alias. In the case of the TV series, the consequences aren't so serious. As long as they get Mia Maestro back in action soon, I don't care what kind of plot lines they run. And they've already announced it's the last season anyway.
The Iraq War is a much grimmer puzzle to unravel.
Two recent pieces give me a framework that seems more realistic. One reminds us that the US has been trying to reduce the troops' exposure to hostile action in recent weeks (see Juan Cole, below). The other is Seymour Hersh's new report that at least some in the administration (I'm guessing Rummy and Cheney in particular) want to substitute air power for troops, that being a key element of Rummy's version of military "transformation" anyway.
The war in Iraq is a counterinsurgency war. Unfortunately, that's not a truism, because much of the discussion on the war doesn't take that into account in more than a rhetorical sense.
But the US military is not trained or organized for counterinsurgency. Their focus is conventional warfare. And Rummy wants to keep it that way. The misfit can be seen in the urban battles that are reported. When two conventional armies are clashing and an Army unit takes fire from an enemy unit, it's pretty safe to assume that if the Army blasts back with artillery or air support drops a 500-lb. bomb on the enemy position, mostly enemy combatants have been killed and wounded.
But in an urban setting, if an American patrol takes fire from an apartment building, and they respond by having tanks pummel the building, there's a good chance that a lot of civilian noncombatants will be hurt. And if the enemy position is a residential home in a town or village where "terrorists" are presumed to be hiding and it's taken out with a 500-lb. bomb, it's likely that someone other than active combatants will be hurt or killed.
If the US had triple the number of troops on the ground, and the Iraqi government had fully staffed army, paramilitary and police functions, and the intelligence was reasonably good as a rule, then a counterinsurgency effort by joint American-Iraqi efforts would be far more feasible. Long, bloody and brutalizing, but feasible.
Juan Cole points to the repositioning of US troops to reduce hostile encounters (Rubaie: US will Withdraw Completely from Some Areas: Muqtada offers National Pact Informed Content blog 11/27/05) :
It is little noted in the US press that US troops have already withdrawn from the cities of Najaf and Karbala [both important holy cities in Shi'a Islam]. American forces are also withdrawing from military bases in favor of Iraqis. The somewhat ill-fated US hand-over of Saddam's palace complex in Tikrit to the Iraqi government last week was part of this series of withdrawals (the ceremony took mortar fire).
Coalition forces are likely to withdraw from some 15 other Iraqi cities fairly soon. They appear to initially pull back to a garrison outside the city. But if things stay quiet, it is apparently envisaged by al-Rubaie and other Iraqi government figures that they will depart entire provinces. This process is probably problematic only in about 7 or 8 of Iraq's 18 provinces, where an American withdrawal might well result in a takeover by the neo-Baath and the Salafis, or in a civil war among Sunnis and Shiites. What to do about that in the absence of a well-trained, functioning Iraqi army, none of us really knows.
This approach can reduce American casualties. But it's the opposite of what an agressive counterinsurgency effort would involve, i.e., actively seeking out the guerrillas. English-speaking American troops restricted to bases are just not going to be able to conduct a counterinsurgency war in Iraq. In other words, it may reduce casualities, but it won't beat the insurgents.
When it comes to the idea of substituting air power for troops, this is a long-standing practice. There are a lot of reasons for this. But the Pentagon has generally assumed that the American public generally has a very low tolerance for American casualties. (I think the idea is flawed in several ways, but I'll leave that aside for now.) And so, if air power can be substituted for infantry in warfare, the American casualties can be minimized. Air power enthusiasts saw both the 1991 Gulf War and the Kosovo War as evidence for their faith.
Air power also played a major role in the Vietnam War. The air power true believers are still convinced that more and earlier bombing would have given the US and South Vietnam victory. Examination of the actual results, like Jeffrey Record's in The Wrong War: Why We Lost in Vietnam (1998), don't support that argument. Now, according to the new article by Sy Hersh (Up in the Air Where is the Iraq war headed next? by Seymour Hersh 12/05/05 issue; posted 11/28/05), something like that is being considered, perhaps already being implemented, in the Iraq War. Hersh writes:
A key element of the drawdown plans, not mentioned in the President's public statements, is that the departing American troops will be replaced by American airpower. Quick, deadly strikes by U.S. warplanes are seen as a way to improve dramatically the combat capability of even the weakest Iraqi combat units. The danger, military experts have told me, is that, while the number of American casualties would decrease as ground troops are withdrawn, the over-all level of violence and the number of Iraqi fatalities would increase unless there are stringent controls over who bombs what.
"We're not planning to diminish the war, "Patrick Clawson, the deputy director of the Washington Institute for Near East Policy, told me. Clawson's views often mirror the thinking of the men and women around Vice-President Dick Cheney and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. "We just want to change the mix of the forces doing the fighting - Iraqi infantry with American support and greater use of airpower. The rule now is to commit Iraqi forces into combat only in places where they are sure to win. The pace of commitment, and withdrawal, depends on their success in the battlefield."
He continued, "We want to draw down our forces, but the President is prepared to tough this one out. There is a very deep feeling on his part that the issue of Iraq was settled by the American people at the polling places in 2004."The war against the insurgency "may end up being a nasty and murderous civil war in Iraq, but we and our allies would still win," he said. "As long as the Kurds and the Shiites stay on our side, we're set to go. There's no sense that the world is caving in. We're in the middle of a seven-year slog in Iraq, and eighty per cent of the Iraqis are receptive to our message."
It's worth keeping in mind that a war is a war. As long as American forces are involved, America will be a belligerent power in the conflict, with all the risks that involves, including the possibility that more ground forces would have to be reintroduced. A unilaterial "Iraqization" absent any peace agreement with the major insurgent groups is not necessarily possible.
As I've mentioned before, a large part of the pressure to reduce US troop levels in Iraq is the strain that the war has placed on the Army. Hersh writes:
There are grave concerns within the military about the capability of the U.S. Army to sustain two or three more years of combat in Iraq. Michael O'Hanlon, a specialist on military issues at the Brookings Institution, told me, "The people in the institutional Army feel they don't have the luxury of deciding troop levels, or even participating in the debate. They're planning on staying the course until 2009. I can't believe the Army thinks that it will happen, because there's no sustained drive to increase the size of the regular Army." Hanlon noted that "if the President decides to stay the present course in Iraq some troops would be compelled to serve fourth and fifth tours of combat by 2007 and 2008, which could have serious consequences for morale and competency levels."
As Sidney Blumenthal noted last week with particular reference to Cheney, the Nixon administration was a powerful formative experience for both Cheney and Rummy (The long march of Dick Cheney Salon 11/24/05).
In the Vietnam War, Nixon's strategy of "Vietnamization" was aimed at substituting Vietnamese forces for Americans in that war. To use today's catch-phrase, as the Vietnamese forces "stood up", the Americans could "stand down".
This policy allowed Nixon to diffuse some of the public concernover the Vietnam War, although it hardly made it more popular. He was able to bring American troops home and end the draft. Along with the major diplomatic initiatives he took with China and the Soviet Union in his first term, it gave much of the public that at least things were headed in the right direction, i.e., getting the USout of Vietnam.
Actually, Nixon and Kissinger didn't intend to get the US out of Vietnam. The South Vietnamese forces were trained by American forces in the same kind of conventional warfare in which the Americans specialized, and in a particular style which required heavy weapons and air power. Nixon calculated that the combination of South Vietnamese military efforts and American air support and bombing would still secure the goal of preserving an independent, non-Communist South Vietnam.
The strategy wasn't entirely unrealistic. The 1968 Tet offensive left much of the organizational infrastruture of the NLF (the Vietcong) badly damaged, and casualties were high. After 1968, the Communists relied more on conventional warfare. And the use of American air power to support South Vietnamese troops during the North's 1972 conventional offenses was militarily effective.
Yet there were many reasons that no amount of air support and bombing could have saved the South Vietnamese regime. The military weakness of the air power strategy showed itself dramatically in the 1972 "Christmas bombing" of Hanoi. It failed in its original aims and, among other things, produced a serious loss of US aircraft. The Nixon administration demonstrated its capacity for imagination by claiming it succeeded in getting the racalcitrant Communists to make the agreement that was concluded in early 1973. It extremely probable that the agreement could have been concluded in 1972. Or even 1969, for that matter.
What Hersh describes sounds like Nixon's Vietnamization idea grafted onto a very different situation. Weak and unpopular as the South Vietnamese government was, it had a large army and the paramilitary and police forces that theoretically could have served a more effective and popular regime to survive. The Iraqi government has only a few thousand reliable troops, the last believable account I heard. And during Nixon's Vietnamization, the enemy was not using exclusively guerrilla tactics by that time. But what good will carpet-bombing an area do against IED's on the roadsides, or suicide bombers in Baghdad?
The Pentagon also seems determined to repeat the mistake of training Iraqi forces to fight the American brand of war, when they don't have the necessary level of skill or a reliable supply of equipment to do that. There were plenty of infiltrators in the South Vietnamese security forces, but nothing like the level we see in Iraq. As Juan Cole observes, "If the Americans weren't around, all those 77 Hungarian T-72 tanks that the new Iraqi military now has would be in guerrilla hands so fast it would make your head spin." (US Air Power to Replace Infantry in Iraq; Distant President Trapped in Utopianism Informed Comment blog 11/28/05) And a reliance on bombing or other heavy firepower will also play into the hands of the resistance.
This is part of the military's concern over the idea of trying to make up for insufficient troop levels with increased usage of air power while pulling out US ground troops:
Within the military, the prospect of using airpower as a substitute for American troops on the ground has caused great unease. For one thing, Air Force commanders, in particular, have deep-seated objections to the possibility that Iraqis eventually will be responsible for target selection. "Will the Iraqis call in air strikes in order to snuff rivals, or other warlords, or to snuff members of your own sect and blame someone else?" another senior military planner now on assignment in the Pentagon asked. "Will some Iraqis be targeting on behalf of Al Qaeda, or the insurgency, or the Iranians?"
"Its a serious business," retired Air Force General Charles Horner, who was in charge of allied bombing during the 1991 Gulf War, said. "The Air Force has always had concerns about people ordering air strikes who are not Air Force forward air controllers. We need people on active duty to think it out, and they will. There has to be training to be sure that somebody is not trying to get even with somebody else." (Asked for a comment, the Pentagon spokesman said there were plans in place for such training. He also noted that Iraq had no offensive airpower of its own, and thus would have to rely on the United States for some time.)
The American air war inside Iraq today is perhaps the most significant - and underreported - aspect of the fight against the insurgency. The military authorities in Baghdad and Washington do not provide the press with a daily accounting of missions that Air Force, Navy, and Marine units fly or of the tonnagethey drop, as was routinely done during the Vietnam War. One insight into the scope of the bombing in Iraq was supplied by the Marine Corps during the height of the siege of Falluja in the fall of 2004. "With a massive Marine air and ground offensive under way," a Marine press release said, "Marine close air support continues to put high-tech steel on target. . . . Flying missions day and night for weeks, the fixed wing aircraft of the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing are ensuring battlefield success on the front line." Since the beginning of the war, the press release said, the 3rd Marine Aircraft Wing alone had dropped more than five hundred thousand tons of ordnance. "This number is likely to be much higher by the end of operations," Major Mike Sexton said. In the battle for the city, more than seven hundred Americans were killed or wounded; U.S. officials did not release estimates of civilian dead, but press reports at the time told of women and children killed in the bombardments.
In recent months, the tempo of American bombing seems to have increased. Most of the targets appear to be in the hostile, predominantly Sunni provinces that surround Baghdad and along the Syrian border. As yet, neither Congress nor the public has engaged in a significant discussion or debate about the air war.
Hersh's article also paints a scary but believable picture of Bush:
Current and former military and intelligence officials have told me that the President remains convinced that it is his personal mission to bring democracy to Iraq, and that he is impervious to political pressure, even from fellow Republicans. They also say that he disparages any information that conflicts with his view of how the war is proceeding.
Bush's closest advisers have long been aware of the religious nature of his policy commitments. In recent interviews, one former senior official, who served in Bush's first term, spoke extensively about the connection between the President's religious faith and his view of the war in Iraq. After the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, the former official said, he was told that Bush felt that "God put me here" to deal with the war on terror. The President's belief was fortified by the Republican sweep in the 2002 congressional elections; Bush saw the victory as a purposeful message from God that "he's the man," the former official said. Publicly, Bush depicted his reelection as a referendum on the war; privately, he spoke of it as another manifestation of divine purpose. ...
"The President is more determined than ever to stay the course," the former defense official said. "He doesn't feel any pain. Bush is a believer in the adage "People may suffer and die, but the Church advances." He said that the President had become more detached, leaving more issues to Karl Rove and Vice-President Cheney. "They keep him in the gray world of religious idealism, where he wants to be anyway," the former defense official said. Bush's public appearances, for example, are generally scheduled in front of friendly audiences, most often at military bases. Four decades ago, President Lyndon Johnson, who was also confronted with an increasingly unpopular war, was limited to similar public forums. "Johnson knew he was a prisoner in the White House," the former official said, "but Bush has no idea."
I say it's believable. But believable doesn't always mean accurate. For a president in as much trouble as this one is, putting out various forms of a story blaming his closest advisers. In European monarchies, it was the normal form to criticize the King's ministers rather than the King himself. Same principle. But let's all hope Bush doesn't go back to boozing again.
This Daily Kos diary also includes quotes from a Sunday interview Hersh did with Wolf Blitzer.
Whatever the "exit strategy", or a "victory strategy" disguised as an exit strategy, the problem right now is what Joe Conason describes very well in An exit strategy Bush can't ignore WorkingforChange.com 11/28/05:
The quandary for Americans in Iraq, now that the old rosy scenarios have been discarded, is that both leaving and staying are likely to result in disaster.
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