Poor Little Bunnies

Iraq's parliament has relaxed de-Baathification restrictions that excluded many Baathists from government jobs:

It is also designed to reinstate thousands of Baathists dismissed from government jobs after the 2003 U.S. invasion — a decision that deepened sectarian tensions between Iraq's majority Shiites and the once-dominant Sunni Arabs, who believed the firings targeted their community.

The strict implementation of so-called de-Baathification rules also meant that many senior bureaucrats who knew how to run ministries, university departments and state companies ended up unemployed in a country where 35 years of Baath party rule and extensive government involvement in the economy had left tens of thousands of party members in key positions.

That, coupled with the disbanding of the Iraqi army, threw tens of thousands of people out of work at a critical time in Iraq's history and fueled the burgeoning Sunni insurgency.

The Bush administration initially promoted de-Baathification but later claimed that Iraqi authorities went beyond even what the Americans had contemplated to keep Saddam's supporters out of important jobs. ...

The legislation can become law only when approved by Iraq's presidential council. The council, comprised of Iraq's president and two vice presidents, is expected to ratify the measure.

The draft law approved Saturday is not a blanket approval for all former Baathists to take government jobs.

The law will allow low-ranking Baathists not involved in past crimes against Iraqis to go back to their jobs. High-ranking Baathists will be sent to compulsory retirement and those involved in crimes will stand trial, though their families will still have the right to pension.

The Baathists who were members in Saddam's security agencies must retire — except for members of Fidayeen Saddam, a feared militia formed by Saddam's eldest son, Oday. They will be entitled to nothing.

This is good. But the myths perpetuated by the story cannot go unchallenged though I've vowed (and then failed)not to blog on the subject again.

We did not "disband" the Iraqi army except in the most technical sense.

Second, while we certainly did not recall the Iraqi army, we did accept eagerly the enlistment of veterans of the old Iraqi army for the new Iraqi security forces. Indeed (and this is something "new" that I rediscovered while searching my old posts), it was not possible to recall the old Iraqi army.

Third, even if we could have kept or recalled the old Iraqi army, it would have been a bad idea.

And fourth, stop treating the old Baathists as poor exploited minorities who need protection from the Shia meanies through affirmative action.

Let's go through this again, shall we? I searched my old archives to get closer to the event. I've blogged on this in recent years on this site using more recent finds but I figured going back would be valuable. My first comments on the old site were based on my memories, and then finally the always valuable Strategypage came to my rescue in fall 2003 to assure me that my memory was not faulty.

The Iraqi army self-disbanded during the initial invasion. Our "disbanding" of the army was a pure technical move to eliminate on paper what no longer existed in the field. I noted (you'll need to scroll down since this was pre-anchor days) in "Thank you" (Posted October 30, 2003) this November 3, 2003 Strategypage post (I had to search Strategypage to get a good link after all this time:

One of the more interesting lessons of the Iraq war was the nearly complete collapse of the Iraqi army. This was largely forgotten until recent media criticism along the lines of, "why wasn't the Iraqi army kept together for peacekeeping duty." The reason was simple; the Iraqi army simply melted away before Baghdad fell. The troops and officers just up and went home. Once the troops had left their bases, looters quickly moved in and stole everything, nailed down or not. Plumbing and even portions of buildings in army bases were looted. Many records of who was in the Iraqi army disappeared as well. So recalling the Iraqi army was moot. There were no facilities to station the troops in, and no way to sort out which officers and troops were pro-Saddam and which weren't. Moreover, Iraqi officers were selected largely on the basis of their loyalty to Saddam, not their leadership or military skills. Worse yet, many of those arrested since then for attacking coalition troops have been former army officers.

Not only didn't we "disband" the Iraqi army, but even recalling it--as some critics who admit the Iraqi army was gone still insist should have been done--wasn't possible either. And we can see the problem of trusting Baathist officers brought up here. This is a point I've grought up many times. Can you imagine what might have happened in spring 2004 during the Sadr-al Qaeda counter-offensive? Iraqi units that dissolved would likely have joined our enemies in significant numbers under the command of "former" Baathist officers used to terrorizing their Shia soldiers into obeying. These officers were not innocent guys we pushed over the edge to fight us by our cold-heartedness. They were Baathists loyalists a threat from day one.

The next month I again addressed the issue, in “The Mythical Iraqi Army” (Posted November 5, 2003). This time I quoted a November 4, 2003 Washington Post article (the link is no longer good, of course) that argued that it was no mistake to disband the Iraqi army:

All this does not mean we should spurn the many individual Iraqi veterans willing to serve the new Iraq. On the contrary, they have been welcomed and even actively recruited. About 60 percent of the privates in the New Iraqi Army, and virtually all the officers and NCOs, have military experience. Other new security forces, such as the Iraqi Civil Defense Corps and the Facilities Protection Service, have taken in many thousands of former soldiers. Only those who served in Hussein's inner circles of security and control forces, or who reached the top four ranks of the Baath Party (about 8,000 out of nearly a quarter-million officers and NCOs in the old army) are ineligible to join the New Iraqi Army and other security forces. Although we have not so far recruited officers whose former rank was above lieutenant colonel, that is because we have not yet needed more senior ranks. As the army (and other security forces) grow, higher-ranking officers with clean records will be considered, along with potential promotions from the new organizations.

This takes the danger of bringing in the Baathists a little further and explains as I have repeatedly reminded readers, that we did in fact recruit for the new Iraqi security forces from the former security forces. What we didn't do is call up the higher ranking officers we clearly could not trust and in fact did not need since we weren't organizing higher level units yet.

The Post article also notes that at first our de-Baathification policy was precisely what I'd urged--rule out anyone at the rank of colonel or above (unless they can prove loyalty) and allow those the rank of lieutenant colonel or below in the new military (unless it can be shown they've committed crimes or were particularly loyal Baathists). The recent law in Iraq heading for approval seems to be restoring de-Baathification to his concept. If the Iraqi Shias and Kurds were too worried about the risk before, with the Iraqi government in a far stronger security position relative to the Sunni Arabs, the risk of bringing in former Baathists who might still be Baathists is much lower. Having Saddam and his devil spawn dead reduces the risk as well since who could rally these officers?

And finally, the original article still seems to insist on thinking of Sunni Arabs as poor exploited babies. Remember the last four years of terrorism directed at Shias aided or tolerated by most Sunni Arabs. Remember the three decades of Baathist rule before that during which Shias were sent to die in large numbers in a war against Iran, were slaughtered in huge numbers after the Persian Gulf War, and during which Kurds were shot and gassed in huge numbers. And then there was the quiet everyday murder of Iraqi Shias and Kurds and the torture, rape, and oppression that went with it. Oh, and don't forget the several centuries of Sunni rule before even Saddam that made Shias and Kurds second-class citizens at best.

While we must bring the Sunni Arabs into the new Iraq, don't forget that the other Iraqis have reason to resist this generosity. Sunni Arabs have turned on the jihadis to fight a common enemy, but the Sunnis still have much to prove in the years ahead.

Let's stop feeling sorry for the Sunni Arabs even as we urge them to abandon their dreams of running Iraq again and settle for a role in a free Iraq protected by rule of law and not terror.

And really, stop arguing that we disbanded the Iraqi army no matter how many times you read a newspaper article stating this is a fact.

So About That Iraqi Army We "Disbanded"

I've long complained that we did not disband the Iraqi army after we captured Baghdad and deposed the Baathist regime. Further, even if the army existed, it should have been disbanded since we could not trust it. I shudder to think of what could have happened in spring 2004 during the twin jihadi and Sadr uprisings if Baathist-dominated Iraqi army units had been around. We could have had a real Sepoy Mutiny and would have faced Iraqi army units defecting to the enemy. We would have wished that the Iraq army had disintegrated as they did in fact.

So while going through a pile of old magazines this morning (I've been working the last half year to reduce my pile of old military journals that have piled up over the last three or four years), I ran across an article in the January 2004 issue of Army. Written by General Edward Atkeson (who I met, actually, about ten years ago), the relevant portion (pg. 27) states:

What happened to the Iraqi army last April? Did it stand and fight? Not really. For the most part it sought small engagements of American supply trains in which it could inflict casualties and disrupt the momentum of the U.S. assault to some extent. And then what? The Iraqi army evaporated. There were no large pockets of prisoners to round up, as in the 1991 war. Most of the Iraqis simply went home, taking their individual weapons with them.

The general goes on to speculate that this means that the insurgency was planned. Information since that time clearly shows that the Iraqis didn't plan an insurgency on the assumption they'd be defeated. Saddam assumed he'd hold at Baghdad at worst if we invaded, and that jihadis and Baathists would harass our rear until we withdrew under pressure from France and Russia (bribed by Oil-for-Food). Scattered arms depots were to counter our air power and make sure weapons were available to reconquer the Shia south. This was in reaction to Saddam's lessons of 1991 when he had trouble reasserting control of the south. Reconquering the south would need to be done even if Iraq faced only a Desert Fox II air-only attack.

The important thing is that the author recounts that there were no Iraqi army units sitting around in their barracks wondering if they could work for the new management. They went home.

Sure, you can argue that we should have reconstituted the Iraqi army as it was organized and led, but then you have to answer my second objection that keeping that army would have been a huge error.

And you have to remember that we recruited new soldiers and civil defense units (which eventually were rolled into the army) from the ranks of the old army because they had some training. So we did in fact employ some of those soldiers.

The fact is that a hard core of Baathists were determined to regain power and no stipends would have deterred them from trying to bomb their way back into the palaces. They were determined not to be the generation of Sunni Arabs to lose to the hated and despised Shias after four centuries of ruling them as God clearly intended.

So there. We did not disband the army. With this basic situation being questioned now as a so-called error, it is difficult for me to argue against it since it has been internalized for so long that I don't even remember where I originally got that information. So an article written not long after the campaign is useful to see what was assumed. I really should delve into this more thoroughly, but until I do, an article I chanced to come across will have to do.

About Saddam's Army

Did we or did we not disband Iraq's army after we knocked off Saddam's regime? And was this a mistake? The conventional wisdom is that we let a perfectly good army walk away and this contributed to the insurgency we are fighting today.

Lieutenant General Dempsey answers the question this way:

I have reflected on that often, and I found myself -- not to dodge the question, but I find myself seeing some benefits and some disadvantages in either course we may have followed.

Had we not disbanded them, we probably would have had the opportunity to handpick what we wanted a bit better because they wouldn't have dissipated. Perhaps the weapons storage facilities, the ammunition storage facilities would not have been subject to looting, perhaps the bases in which they lived would not have been subject to looting, all of which we've had to go back and reconstruct.

On the other hand, you know, as the Shi'a majority began to gain its political power, as it sees as somewhat of an entitlement now after several centuries of being the dominated majority, I think that it would have been almost impossible to leave that army in place because it was clearly seen as a -- not only a vestige of the past, but would have been seen as a threat to the government.

And so -- you know, I think that probably the disbandment was appropriate. It may have done -- we could have done it better, but I think at the end of the day it probably had to be done. That's where I am on it now.

So how does this answer answer those questions?

First, saying we disbanded the Iraqi army still doesn't directly address the first question. Yes, we disbanded the Iraqi army, but it was a formality. It wasn't there. That's my memory of the war. Recall that we urged the Iraqi army to go home during the war so we wouldn't be tied down taking their surrender.

I'd really love to have the question asked as "was it a mistake to send home the Iraqi army units sitting around after we defeated the Iraqi regime?" In Tommy Franks' book, he relates how Washington was nervous about map symbols of Iraqi divisions near the Iran border near the end of major combat operations. We sent out units to those spots, found nothing, and so deleted the map notations of enemy units, thus making Washington less nervous.

General Atkenson (USA, Ret.) answered this question back in January 2004 in a manner that bolsters my memory of events (I actually ran across this article four months ago while cleaning out some old journals):

What happened to the Iraqi army last April? Did it stand and fight? Not really. For the most part it sought small engagements of American supply trains in which it could inflict casualties and disrupt the momentum of the U.S. assault to some extent. And then what? The Iraqi army evaporated. There were no large pockets of prisoners to round up, as in the 1991 war. Most of the Iraqis simply went home, taking their individual weapons with them.

But Dempsey didn't get asked the question I want asked. But he does address the far more important question of whether we should have kept the Baathist military (regardless of whether we could have). On this, Dempsey backs up my judgment. As I've argued:

I shudder to think of what could have happened in spring 2004 during the twin jihadi and Sadr uprisings if Baathist-dominated Iraqi army units had been around. We could have had a real Sepoy Mutiny and would have faced Iraqi army units defecting to the enemy. We would have wished that the Iraq army had disintegrated as they did in fact.

Dempsey sees some potential advantages if those "disbanded" soldiers had not looted armories and bases. And maybe we'd have been able to recruit (selectively) from these people and gotten higher quality recruits for the new army.

But the drawbacks of maintaining the former Saddam army could have crippled our war effort. And there is no guarantee that the soldiers we wouldn't have selected for the new army wouldn't have gone on to loot bases and steal weapons anyway.

Saddam's army ran away. And thank Goodness for that.

Disband the Cops?

The Jones' commission on the Iraqi security forces paints a mixed picture:

According to the study, the panel agreed with U.S. and Iraqi officials that the Iraqi army is capable of taking over an increasing amount of day-to-day combat responsibilities but that the military and police force would still be unable to take control and operate independently in such a short time frame.

"They are gaining size and strength, and will increasingly be capable of assuming greater responsibility for Iraq's security," the report states, adding that special forces in particular are "highly capable and extremely effective."

The report is much more pessimistic about Baghdad's police units. It describes these units as fragile, ill-equipped and infiltrated by militia forces. And they are led by the Interior Ministry, which is "a ministry in name only" that is "widely regarded as being dysfunctional and sectarian, and suffers from ineffective leadership."

Accordingly, the study recommends disbanding the national police and starting over.

Nothing surprising here. The army is shaping up and their are pockets of excellence. But the Iraqi military will rely on us for more than 18 months before they have the logistics, administrative, and other supporting functions to operate without our help. This is part of the plan. We trained light infantry first to fight insurgents while we supply logisitics, firepower, medical support, and other combat support until the Iraqis built their capacity.

What I am amazed about is the recommendation that we disband the national police.

Recognizing the problem, we are screening the force and retraining them. And we are looking at leadership which is key to keeping the units loyal to the government.

And there is something about the solution being offered that seems oddly familiar.

Disband the national police? Wasn't that a widely agreed mistake that we made in 2003 in regard to the Iraqi army? Not that I agree with that assessment of the need for keeping the Iraqi army in place. I'm just saying that Congressional leaders who condemn the elimination of the already self-disbanded Iraqi army shouldn't be so eager to disband the national police. Won't that just put thugs on the streets who will join Shia death squads?

And remember, the idea that we could have kept the Iraqi army in place focused on the Sunni Arab leaders as people we should have employed rather than put out on the street. Given the importance of leadership to a unit's loyalty, as the Jones' report notes, would it really have been wise to have "ex" Baathist leaders controlling Iraqi military units?

Look, we could probably get away with disbanding the national police and starting over. It is fairly small. But its small size also means we have a better shot at sifting the force and rebluing it.

So nothing surprising in this report if you've paid attention all along.

UPDATE: Frederick Kagan writes that the press has highlighted the negative. He highlights the positive parts of the report.

Kagan also addresses an issue that is fairly ignorant for critics of the war to emphasize:

The issue of their "independent" operations is and always has been a red herring.

I noted this in the original post and I've expanded on this theme in the past. Let me recap.

Independent operations means that Iraq can raise, train, and support troops in the field without outside help. This means they supply themselves, evacuate their casualties, establish communications, call in their own fire support, conduct their own reconaissance and intelligence missions, plan their own operations, and pull the triggers in close battle with the enemy.

We have focused on the last part and are succeeding. The rest will take far longer to achieve. And honestly, few of our allies are capable of independent operations. They rely on us for logistics support and other supporting functions. Heck, our Marine Corps relies on the Army for logistics support for operations inland. During the invasion in 2003, tens of thousands of Army support troops were attached to the Marine Expeditionary Force.

Our press still seems determined to lose this war. Instead of focusing on who, what, when, where, and why, they've focused on what should be according to them.

Once More into the Preach, Dear Friends

Ok, one more post on "disbanding" the Iraqi army despite my hope.

But this is really about whether we should have wanted the regime army if it hadn't self-disbanded.

First, I ran across an older piece (that I should have read at the time but may have forgotten or overlooked) that reinforces my argument that the Iraqi army self-destructed and we did not disband any existing units:

The Iraqi army melted away in April of 2003, but it was eager to regroup in order to gain pay, jobs, and prestige. Indeed, the American battalion commanders paying the Iraqi officers and soldiers a pittance for their years of service reported that they could easily reconstitute trained battalions. Central Command and the JCS, however, did not object to Bremer's swift decision to abolish the army. With no Iraqi security force, the U.S. Military forces moved alone into the Sunni cities.

The imams promptly proclaimed it was the duty of true Muslims to oppose the infidel occupiers. The imams seized the power vacuum left when the army melted away. Sunni officers and Baathist officials went to ground, unsure what fate awaited them. The mosques emerged as the center of information, rumor, and gradual resistance.

See? Iraqi army gone. The point being made, however, is that we should have reformed the regime's dissolved army. If only those soldiers had been employed, the insurgency would not have gotten rolling. Here I disagree heartily and point to an earlier point made in the article:

The essential confusion about Iraq stems from a lack of candor by leaders in acknowledging that democracy stripped the Sunnis of their power. Were it not for the occupation of the areas north and west of Iraq [Note: I think this should read Baghdad], the fragile Shiite-based democracy stood no chance of taking root. Most viewed as illegitimate the presence of the American troops, whom they call "occupiers," which by definition they are.

Accustomed to dominating and oppressing the Kurds and Shiites, the Sunni population sympathized with, and were intimidated by, the insurgents who freely mixed with them in the marketplaces.

How would reforming the Iraqi army have convinced the Sunni Arabs who felt they were deprived of their god-given right to rule to go along with a Shia-run government? Four centuries of ruling their inferiors was to be abandoned for a soldier's paycheck?

In 2003, the Sunni Arabs could not be convinced that they hadn't been robbed of their birthright. That insurgency was going to get going regardless of whether we had Iraqis from the former regime military around. We would not have brought in the Baathist killers and these are the ones who got the ball rolling.

Plus, how would we have earned the trust of the Shias who we abandoned in 1991 during the uprising we encouraged if we had put even the better "former" Baathist oppressors back in uniform?

And remember, we did recruit Iraqis. We soon had Iraqi Civil Defense forces (later National Guard and later absorbed into the army) and police as well as plans for a 40,000-strong Iraqi army.

These Iraqi forces may have fallen apart in spring 2004, but I imagine that Baathist officer-led units of the former regime would have defected instead of dissolving, making our bad year of 2004 much worse. We could have lost the war right then if the Iraqi security forces had turned on us.

Okay, now I'm done.

The Great Disbanding Debate

Strategypage lays out the positions on the wisdom of disbanding the Iraqi army in May 2003.

The article says that one position is that it was a grave mistake to disband the army and allow 5 weeks to pass before announcing that the discharged soldiers would get a stipend.

I find it hard to believe that those 5 weeks were the difference between Sunni Baathists fighting us or accepting rule by Shias and Kurds. We know that the Saddam regime planned irregular warfare in our rear areas with intelligence personnel, Baath Pary loyalists, and imported jihadis (the Fedayeen), assuming we'd be stalled at the gates of Baghdad and fail to finish off the Saddam regime. We know the Baathists despised the Shias.

There is no way that these people were all set to reconcile to rule by the hated Shias and then, after noticing they'd gotten no checks from the Americans, that this was the final insult and by Allah they'd car bomb their way to revenge. These Sunni Arab leaders and fanatics were determined to fight us from day one. The lower rank enlisted were barely trained to pray and spray and simply were not a threat to us, in my opinion.

I've addressed this many times and hoped to end my participation in this debate. Let me set forth my view of the Iraqi army issue:

The Special Republican Guards and Republican Guards had to go. Period.

The regular army had to go as an institution, but it should have been stripped for parts. It was led by Sunni Baathists for the most part despite having large numbers of Shia soldiers. Nobody in the regular army above the rank of major should have been kept unless they could prove their innocence. Majors and below would be kept unless there was evidence of crimes. I assumed before the war that we would get some Iraqi units to defect to us, based on reports that we were attempting email contacts with them. With screened officers, I assumed we could set up light infantry forces for local security, with no unit above battalion strength and shadowed/advised by our special forces types.

As it turns out, the Iraqi army simply collapsed during the invasion. And the bases were looted. So the army was gone. "Disbanding" the army was a pure legal formality that would have been necessary even if we could have kept the units around and stripped them for parts. And we did eventually provide stipends and we did recruit amongst these former soldiers for the new army and the new civil defense force.

Finally, recall that half the Iraqi ground forces dissolved during the spring 2004 Sadr--jihadi revolts. Can you imagine what would have happened if we had kept the Saddam-era Iraqi army intact? Units would have switched sides and not just dissolved. Think about that nightmare.

In the end, even conceding that disbanding the army caused all sorts of problems (and I don't concede that), we got through that difficult period and we have a better Iraqi army today for having started from scratch.

As long as we win the war, I'm fine with endless debate on the disbanding issue. I don't get worked up over the D-Day in 1943 debate or the Italy versus Balkans debate concerning World War II.

Phantom Army

I respect Austin Bay a great deal and his point about our ability to stay the course because of our home front politics is on the mark. We are winning in Iraq and only the shaky support at home raises the question of whether we will win this war. I think we will retain the will to win long enough to win but it should not have been allowed to reach this point where we question our will to win. In a long and relatively wide-ranging article, Bay makes many very good points. You should read it all, as the saying goes.

But I am not addressing this broad point. What I question is Bay's repeating of the charge that we made a mistake "disbanding" the Iraqi army after the major combat operations were over:

Yes, Iraqis and Americans are still paying for the biggest mistake we made in this war: disbanding the Iraqi Army.

Hogwash. Sometimes I think this criticism is the right's politically acceptable mistake they are allowed to point out in order to maintain street cred.

Let me say this again. There was no Iraqi army to disband in the summer of 2003. It was gone. Disbanding it was a legalistic action only. A mere formality. Indeed, prior to the invasion we tried to get Iraqi army units to defect. That was the point of our email contacts prior to the war. It didn't work. The Iraqi army just went home during the war. Or we destroyed units that got in our way.

And what if we did manage to keep it? It was--how shall I put this delicately--pure crap. That's why a single American heavy division--3rd ID--spearheaded the drive to Baghdad on the left flank in record time. The senior officers were Baathists and the conscripts were worthless, barely able to fire their Kalashnikovs. So retaining the regulars even if they hadn't disbanded would have kept a force only able to police in a very benign environment. Or were we to retain the militarily more capable Republican Guards?

And remember that in April 2004, the new Iraqi units we had set up folded and dissolved when attacked in strength by the Baathist insurgents. If we had kept the army intact, I could easily see the units defecting to the other side under officers of the old regime. That would have been infinitely worse.

We did make some mistakes in assuming no insurgency and planning for a mini-army of Iraqis able to oppose an Iranian invasion rather than building Iraqi light infantry units to fight the Baathists and terrorists. We are doing that now, but keeping the old regime army intact would not have solved the problems we faced over the last year.

That is, if we could even have retained a non-existent army. That basic fact really makes the whole discussion moot. Why it survives to be trotted out on occasion is beyond me.

Not a Mistake But a Good Call

Many opponents of the war--and some supporters--are insistent on admitting mistakes. What amazes me are so-called mistakes that I think are not mistakes but decisions that will help us defeat the Iraq insurgency.

There are three mistakes that some say we have made in Iraq that hinder our chances of victory. That we have too few troops to win; that we should partition Iraq into independent Sunni, Kurdish, and Shia states; and that we made a mistake of disbanding the Iraqi army.

We have enough troops and the problems caused by too many troops far outweigh any theoretical advantage; and I don't think we can trust the Sunnis in a state of their own. I've addressed these issues many times and won't go into them here.

The third one though, I want to hit again if only because Strategypage has my six on this one and I want to quote them:

There is still much support for terrorists among the Sunni Arab population, and many Sunni Arabs believe that, if the Coalition troops can be forced to leave, the Sunni Arab tribes can somehow subdue the Kurds and Shia Arabs, and regain control of the country. But the best opportunity for this was lost when the Sunni Arab dominated army and civil service was disbanded after the 2003 invasion. The army and civil service are now thoroughly Kurdish and Shia Arab, and this annoys the Sunni Arabs a great deal. But the Sunni Arabs have been in charge for so long (centuries, even under three centuries of Turkish domination), that they see it as their right to rule. Many other Sunni Arabs in the region, and many Europeans as well, agree.

First of all, let me repeat myself: there was no army to disband except in the most formal legalistic sense. The Iraqi army self-disbanded during the major combat operations. Disbanding was a formality. But the key is even if the Iraqi army existed at the time of disbanding, we would have needed to effectively disband it. We would have had to start from scratch, de-Baathify the ranks, cashier the high-ranking officers that committed no crimes; retrain the lower ranking officers; and try the guilty ones for crimes. Otherwise, the new army would have been a fragile instrument upon which to rely.

Can you imagine the April 2004 Fallujah uprising and the Sadr revolt if we had retained Baathist-era troops without sifting them? Instead of Iraqi units disintegrating, we could have had units defecting to the enemy. We could have witnessed government departments and entities declaring themselves for the insurgents. Had that happened we would have had a real Sepoy Mutiny crisis. The Sunnis believed then and continue to believe that they should rule Iraq. If given the chance they would have tried to reclaim what they believe is their God-given right to rule Iraq. And they would have expected and received support from the wider Sunni world. Instead, the Iraqi government stayed loyal and we coped with the enemy offensive with our units and the few remaining loyal and effective Iraqi units to beat back the offensive.

Now, the former victims of the Baathists are in charge of the government and security apparatus, and are gaining numbers, training, and experience every day. Even if we left, the Shias and Kurds would beat the Sunnis and foreign jihadis (though in a far more brutal fashion than we'd tolerate as long as we remain).

So end this talk of the so-called mistake of disbanding the Iraqi army and de-Baathifying the ranks of the government. That mistake, in fact, may have saved us from defeat. Not every Baathist needed to go, but a heavy hand was preferable to a light hand. Because the Baathists were largely gone from the government's ranks by spring 2004, we did not face a major defeat that we could not recover from when the April 2004 enemy offensive took place. So I am completely amazed that this "error" talk keeps cropping up.

And drop the US troop strength and partition talk as well. Because I swear to God I'll blog on them again if I must.

Saddam's Army

One of the debates on mistakes in our conduct of the Iraq War goes back to our decision to "disband" the Iraqi army. This decision put people out of work who then went to work for the Baathist insurgency instead of employing them for security duties, this argument goes.

First, as I've said, the decision was purely formal since the army self-disbanded. I had hoped our efforts to get Iraqi units to defect intact would work to provide a core for a new security force. Strategypage notes that Iraq is now asking officers up to the rank of major to return to duty. This is the rank I figured we should keep as a rule except where there is demonstrable question of loyalty. Ranks above major should be excluded except for proven loyalty to the new Iraq. But the army went home so this wasn't possible anyway.

Second, some advocates of keeping the army intact even if we could, note (as Strategypage states) that we kept German and Japanese forces intact until we could gain control so why shouldn't we have done the same with Iraqis? My response is that the Germans and Japanese formally surrendered and so their officers obeyed their leaders' orders to cooperate. By contrast there was not only no formal Baathist surrender but a Baathist plan to launch an insurgency after the major combat operations were lost. So employing existing units (if we could have recalled them from their capitulation and flight to their homes) would have put people in our pay and who would have probably worked for the insurgency.

Third, once it was clear that the Shias were grateful but suspicioius of us, anything short of thorough de-Baathification would sow too many doubts and hinder the goal of getting Shias to back us enthusiastically. The Shias are with us so it is safer to bring in former regime officers. The "major" threshold is probably still wise.

Strategypage summarizes the dilemma:

Nearly all the key officers in the Iraqi armed forces were Sunni Arabs, and selected mainly for their loyalty to Saddam Hussein and the Baath Party. Thus Bremer and his staff had to make a quick decision. Do they allow several hundred thousand organized troops, led by minority, and much hated, Sunni Arabs, remain in their jobs, and risk having these troops becoming the basis for warlord forces, led by men who had long supported dictatorship? Or do you disband the army, and start over? Either way, there are risks. What would you have done?

At least they acknowledge a debatable point. Disbanding the army was not a clear mistake.

What would I have done? I would have disbanded the Iraqi army and started over, with the "major" rule in force. In hindsight, I would have focused on light infantry instead of a conventional army as we did in the first year when we assumed no major insurgency. I couldn't know that, however, so I probably would have focused on a conventional force just as we did.

So don't call disbanding the Iraqi army a mistake. We are winning after this so-called "bad" decision, and advocates of the mistake argument can't demonstrate that the bad things that could have happened from their preferred course wouldn't have happened.

They Keep Pulling Me Back In!

I'd hoped that my defense of "disbanding" a non-existent Iraqi army and the wisdom of getting rid of that nest of Baathist thugs who dreamed of restoring themselves to power was at an end. (And these were only the latest posts of mine on the subject).

But Paul Bremmer steps into the breach (tip to Real Clear Politics). I hate breaking my Times DeSelect Policy, but I feel I have little choice but to suspend it for this article.

Wrote Bremmer:

IT has become conventional wisdom that the decision to disband Saddam Hussein’s army was a mistake, was contrary to American prewar planning and was a decision I made on my own. In fact the policy was carefully considered by top civilian and military members of the American government. And it was the right decision.

By the time Baghdad fell on April 9, 2003, the Iraqi Army had simply dissolved. On April 17 Gen. John Abizaid, the deputy commander of the Army’s Central Command, reported in a video briefing to officials in Washington that “there are no organized Iraqi military units left.” The disappearance of Saddam Hussein’s old army rendered irrelevant any prewar plans to use that army. So the question was whether the Coalition Provisional Authority should try to recall it or to build a new one open to both vetted members of the old army and new recruits. General Abizaid favored the second approach.

In the weeks after General Abizaid’s recommendation, the coalition’s national security adviser, Walter Slocombe, discussed options with top officials in the Pentagon, including Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz. They recognized that to recall the former army was a practical impossibility because postwar looting had destroyed all the bases.

Moreover, the largely Shiite draftees of the army were not going to respond to a recall plea from their former commanders, who were primarily Sunnis. It was also agreed that recalling the army would be a political disaster because to the vast majority of Iraqis it was a symbol of the old Baathist-led Sunni ascendancy. ...

Walter Slocombe’s consultations with Americans officials in Washington and Baghdad showed that they understood that the only viable course was to build a new, professional force open to screened members of the old army.

Look, I have no interest in defending or attacking Bremmer over his tenure in Iraq. But this corresponds with my memory of the events at the time, including the lack of controversy over the decision.

One, before the war, we intended to use at least parts of the Saddam-era army. We would weed out Saddam loyalists but keep enough for security in what was assumed would be a fairly benign security environment (remember that even critics of the war assumed that Saddam was so hated that we wouldn't need to invade to overthrow him).

Two, as it turns out, the army self-disbanded.

Three, it would have been difficult to recall the army due to looting at army bases that made them unfit for use.

Four, with the Shia enlisted personnel scattered, having Sunni officers call them back was unlikely to succeed.

Five, the symbolism of calling back these units might have made the already suspicious Shias believe we just wanted to play musical chairs with Sunni rulers and not liberate them.

And six, we immediately planned to recruit a new army from those Shia enlisted personnel who had scattered.

Our major mistake was in initially trying to build a conventional military of 3 divisions capable of independent operations which would serve as a core to expand in a benign security environment. Instead, we should have been looking at a larger force geared to internal security as we are building now.

But it was not an unreasonable assumption to make at the time. Who suspected that Syria and Iran would support proxies in Iraq at that point? Who believed that a enough Sunnis would pine for Saddam to support the Baathists? Who believed Saddam had so much money after a decade of sanctions to pay for resistance? And who suspected that arms were buried all over the place to be used by Saddam loyalists?

And who believes that if we had retained or recalled an army riddled with Saddam loyalists as officers would have fought hard for the fledgling Iraqi government rather than defect against such resistance and resources?

Honestly, I keep trying to get out of the disbanding debate. But every time I do ...

Well, Then. They're Screwed

God help the Syrian rebels. The Obama administration thinks it knows the lessons of Iraq, and wants to bless the rebels with that knowledge.

Let's explore, shall we?

"I can say that in this transition we think it's essential to make sure that the state's institutions stay intact and that we send very clear expectations about avoiding sectarian warfare," [Press secretary Jay Carney ] said.

After the March 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Coalition Provisional Authority administrator L. Paul "Jerry" Bremer banned members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party from holding influential government posts and disbanded Iraq's military—a pair of decisions widely blamed for fueling what became a bloody insurgency.

Asked whether that example had shaped the message to Syria's rebels, Carney replied: "That precedent is useful to look at."

On the sectarian warfare, the problem in Iraq wasn't religious hatred as much as it was Iraqi Baathists desperately trying to regain power while Syria funneled Sunni murderers into Iraq and Iran funneled Shia killers in. Funny enough, with enough well-armed and well-supported Shia killers and Sunni killers running around, they killed each others coreligionists.

We might not have that problem in Syria, huh?

Let's move on.

Let me say this yet again: de-Baathification in Iraq was a necessary task. Are you really going to tell me that the Shias and Kurds would have been fine with their jailers, torturers, and killers being left in positions of power?

I want to know who in the State Department gets to explain to the Syrian rebels that their grievances are real and deep--and their sacrifices to overthrow the Baathist Alawite minority government are truly worthy of praise--but they should just run along back to their little farms and villages, and leave the surviving Alawites at their desk jobs in the Ministry of Public Lighting. For the greater good, of course.

One can argue about how deep de-Baathification should have gone in Iraq, but to claim the program was a mistake is insane.

As for the idea that disbanding the Iraqi army was a mistake, guess again. I addressed this time and again during the war, every time new articles came out on it. So I'll say this again: the Iraqi army self-disbanded during the war. Indeed, it was our policy to urge it to just go home so we wouldn't be slowed down trying to capture, guard, feed, and house tens of thousands of POWs as we drove on Baghdad. The post-major combat operations order to "disband" the Iraqi army was a legal document only, eliminating the paper organization of the old Iraqi army--not the order for men in barracks to take off their uniforms, get the Hell out, and go home.

And I'll ask how the Shias and Kurds would have felt with the instrument of their oppression being led by former killers who ordered the deaths of their family members for the past generation?

And how would that twin al Qaeda and Sadrist uprising of spring 2004 have looked if fledgling Iraqi army units had been led by "former" Baathist officers? As it was, half the Iraqi army dissolved. With "former" Baathists in charge, how many of those green Iraqi units would have defected to the enemy and fought our troops instead of simply self-disbanding--again?

God almighty, if these are what our White House thinks are the lessons of the Iraq War, they aren't qualified to play Risk on the weekends, let alone give strategic advice to the Syrian rebels fighting and dying to defeat their oppressors.

I'd worry more about the outcome in Syria if I thought there was even a remote chance the Syrian rebels would actually take any of this White House advice. They'll have enough problems without shooting themselves in the foot right off the bat.

UPDATE: Thanks to Pseudo-Polymath for the link.

We Must Fight With the Iraqis We Have

When Opinion Journal reports negative opinions of a sergeant, in a human intelligence collection unit serving in Iraq, he deserves to be heard. I disagree with much of what he writes, but his opinion should be addressed with the respect it deserves. Especially since he writes about how to win and not how to retreat without admitting we are retreating.

The sergeant writes about Iraqi security forces:

The Iraqi Security Forces (ISF)--a joint term referring to Iraqi army and Iraqi police--are so rife with corruption, insurgent sympathies and Shia militia members that they have zero effectiveness. Two Iraqi police brigades in Baghdad have been disbanded recently, and the general sentiment in our field is "Why stop there?" I can't tell you how many roadside bombs have been detonated against American forces within sight of ISF checkpoints. Faith in the Iraqi army is only slightly more justified than faith in the police--but even there, the problems of tribal loyalties, desertion, insufficient training, low morale and a failure to properly indoctrinate their soldiers results in a substandard, ineffective military. A lot of the problems are directly related to Arab culture, which traditionally doesn't see nepotism and graft as serious sins. Changing that is going to require a lot more than "benchmarks."

He also writes about how to fix this problem:

We need to backtrack. We need to publicly admit we're backtracking. This is the opening battle of the ideological struggle of the 21st century. We cannot afford to lose it because of political inconveniences. Reassert direct administration, put 400,000 to 500,000 American troops on the ground, disband most of the current Iraqi police and retrain and reindoctrinate the Iraqi army until it becomes a military that's fighting for a nation, not simply some sect or faction. Reassure the Iraqi people that we're going to provide them security and then follow through. Disarm the nation: Sunnis, Shias, militia groups, everyone. Issue national ID cards to everyone and control the movement of the population.

He also writes that problems aren't being reported up the chain of command:

Tell your American commanders that it's OK to pass up bad news--because part of the problem is that these issues are not reaching above the battalion or brigade level due to the can-do, make-it-happen culture indoctrinated into our U.S. officers. While the attitude is admirable, it also creates barriers to recognizing and dealing with on-the-ground realities.

These are serious problems he describes. One, the culture of Iraq is preventing the Iraqi security forces from fighting effectively. Two, we need to totally revamp our strategy and take over security until we can overcome the effects of local Arab culture on the Iraqi security forces. And third, American commanders don't report problems to senior commanders.

So what about this soldier's complaints and solutions?

Let's start with his solutions. Reimpose direct rule; put in up to half a million American troops; disband most of the Iraqi security forces and start over, instilling a sense of nationalism in the forces; reassure the Iraqis we will provide security and then do it; disarm all Iraqis of all weapons; register all people and control all movement in the country.

These are just ridiculous. Direct rule? So after promoting democracy we take it back? That will go over well. Just how do we instill nationalism in the Iraqis without inspiring nationalism to eject us as occupiers? Sure, it would be nice if we could recruit police and soldiers who felt more Iraqi than Shia, Sunni, or Kurd, but we might as well wish for a pony. When our people won't have the street sense to police Iraq, just how will we provide that security? I'm really fascinated to see how we will confiscate every weapon that Iraqis have--even those allowed for self defense. The terrorists and insurgents will have weapons but the people of Iraq won't be able to defend themselves when our troops aren't around to protect them? That will go over well, too, I dare say. And shutting down movement of people won't instill resentment! No way! This is an ideological struggle, the sergeant says, and yet we are to clamp down with direct rule and an American military campaign, and abolish the steps we've taken toward democracy.

Oh, and where do we get the 500,000 troops to occupy Iraq? And then rotate new troops in? For years?

As for the culture that is interfering with producing troops that are as effective as we'd like, the same culture produces soldiers and police all over the region that manage to police their people and suppress insurgencies. Saddam managed with an even worse culture to draw his troops from. And just what culture is the enemy drawing their terrorists and gunmen from? Vermont? The enemy has the same problem with the local culture as we do. This culture is just a fact of life to adapt to, and we can't just wish it away as something we can fix easily. The Iraqi army will never be as good as ours. Police will never be as effective as ours. But they are better than the enemy and so will win. That is the proper comparison--not comparing them to our troops.

I do worry that the sergeant's complaint that bad news doesn't reach the top. But is this true? I certainly have seen problems discussed up the wazoo in our press. How are these issues leaking out? Are our leaders truly ignorant of the problems even if middle level officers don't pass them up? Don't they see the news? Don't they ask questions?

Perhaps this is truly a problem. I hope not, since we must be able to adjust to bad news in order to win. But I'm not convinced this is actually the problem the sergeant says it is. His views on how to solve the problems we face are so unrealistic that I have difficulty taking this plausible complaint seriously.

I appreciate the sergeant's sacrifice of serving in Iraq to protect us. And I'm glad he wants to win. But I seriously disagree with his assessment of the problems and his proposed solutions.

We have to fight with the Iraqis we have and not the Iraqis we wish we had.

Iraq: Executive Summary

If we're to reopen the 2002-2011 debate about Iraq, let's at least try to get back up to speed on what happened over the last 34 years.

Saddam Hussein lit the Persian Gulf on fire with his ambitions for conquest, first with Iran in 1980 and then by conquering Kuwait in 1990 until we ejected his army in 1991.

Saddam used chemical weapons against both the Iranians during that 1980s war and against his own Kurdish population.

During the ceasefire following Desert Storm in 1991, Saddam refused to live up to the terms of the ceasefire, leading to years of low-level conflict with Saddam over the no-fly zones designed to make him obey the ceasefire.

During the Clinton administration, it was the official policy of the United States to overthrow the Saddam regime and replace it with a democracy. Many reasons for set forth to implement this policy.

In 1998, we even launched a 4-day air campaign to degrade Saddam's WMD and missile capabilities.

So don't forget that prior to the Iraq War, Democrats considered Saddam's Iraq to be a threat:



In 2002, in a bipartisan vote reflecting the common view that Iraq was a threat, we declared war on Iraq, adding new reasons to the Clinton-era law justifications.

I set forth my reasons for going to war with Saddam's Iraq in two posts (here and here), neither of which relied on charging Saddam assisted in 9/11. Although anti-war notions that Saddam was at least a secular thug are incorrect. Saddam relied on Islamist nutballs long before al Qaeda entered Iraq to fight with the Baathists to defeat us there.

Yes, despite the war being a bipartisan effort at the start, during the war most Democrats recanted their support and in the Senate even tried to lose the war by defunding it, eager to damage Bush. And recently, many Republicans have done the same, seemingly eager to damage Obama by tying him to his failure to defend stability in Iraq.

Even war supporters speak of failures fighting the war. No war is fought perfectly. But I think it is wrong to see the war as a string of blunders that we miraculously salvaged in the Surge offensive of 2007. The fact is, we faced an evolving series of different wars in Iraq that we defeated in sequence. Broadly speaking, we had the right strategy to win.

The Surge and Awakening built on the past campaigns. People forget that we saw Baghdad as crucial earlier and that we surged forces into Baghdad in summer 2006 but they did not work. Timing mattered for the Surge that worked.

One decision that gets a lot of traction as a so-called failure is that we erred in disbanding the Iraqi army. I strongly disagree. The Saddam army disintegrated on its own, so our order was a pure formality. And if it hadn't evaporated, we would have had to disband it to prevent the victims of Saddam from thinking we were betraying them again, as we had in 1991 when we watched Saddam kill the Shias who rose up in southern Iraq in 1991.

"Disbanding" the Iraqi army did not cause the Baathist resistance or the Syrian and Iranian "invasions," nor did it prevent the Sunni Arabs from switching to our side in the Awakening that began in earnest at the end of 2006.

When the insurgencies and terrorist fights continued, war opponents wrongly charged that the Bush administration had lied about Iraqi WMD, neglecting that every country's intelligence agencies believed Saddam had them, as did Clinton-era officials and members of Congress familiar with the intelligence.

They neglect that if Saddam did not have them when we invaded--and I'm not convinced that he didn't dispose of them in our long-telegraphed approach to war--Saddam was bluffing to hold off the Iranian threat and would have made good on his bluff to get those chemical weapons just as soon as the collapsing sanctions eroded enough. Can you really doubt that Saddam would have rebuilt his chemical arsenal had we not invaded?

Remember, our deal with Syria to remove their declared chemical weapons capability included classes of precursor chemicals needed to make poison gas that were all over Iraq after the war.

So by the standards of the Obama administration success in Syria, Iraq had chemical weapons capabilities when we invaded.

Now, Iraq's Shia-dominated government has alienated many Sunni Arabs and weakened the Kurds's allegiance to Iraq.

I'm astounded that Iraqi Prime Minister Maliki is the fall guy for left and right to abandon Iraq. He may not be who we want now. But he had potential and without us there to push him to being who we need rather that what he needed to survive, we bear some responsibility for how he has turned out.

President Obama promised to get out of Iraq and in 2011 he did. I cannot believe that he tried as hard as he could to get the opposite of what he loudly claimed he wanted--a continued American military presence in Iraq.

Indeed, the Obama administration boasted of the success in Iraq. Which is no shock since we won the war.

This despite the fact that a 3-year SOFA was as good as outgoing Bush could get and that it was obvious a follow-on agreement would be necessary. Face it, we left Iraq way too early.

I really am discouraged by the anti-war side's inability to analyze the effect of the war.

But don't forget what we could have chosen had we left Saddam in power.

We won the Iraq War. But then we blew it. But it is not too late to reverse the enemy advances and regain our lost ground in replacing the Saddam regime with a democracy as we pledged to achieve in 1998.

Yes, part of the Iraqi army collapsed. Who should be shocked given the track record going back decades? Kasserine Pass was not exactly a moment of glory for us, you know.

But at least the Iraqi army rallied to fight back. With our support, they can win the war that was not responsibly ended in 2011.

[UPDATE: As a late addition, Eric at Learning Curve has done a lot of work on laying the groundwork for the legal basis of the war and other issues. Tip to Eric.]

The war never ended, obviously, no matter how much our president pretended it had. As I argued since 2011, we could only end our role in the war that continued to be fought at a low level but then snowballed into the crisis we face today.

We can re-win the Iraq War.

The Washington and Baghdad Clocks

Sadr and Iran are losing in Iraq. Austin Bay again writes of our press getting Round Three wrong and notes (as I did) the failure of our press to learn about military matters despite 6 years at war.

On Washington time, Sadr issues his scary talk by threatening to unleash his militia:

The statement came from his office hours before the top two U.S. officials in Iraq — Gen. David Petraeus and Ambassador Ryan Crocker — planned to brief Congress on the situation in Iraq and prospects for drawing down American troops.

"I call on the Iraqi government, if it exists, to work for the protection of the Iraqi people, stop the bloodshed and the abuse of its honor," al-Sadr said. "If the public interest dictates the lifting of the freeze to achieve our goals, beliefs, religion, principles and patriotism we shall do that later."

Sadr still has hopes that the Frightened-American community (Americans of Fright? I'm so bad at this sensitivity thing.) that controls Congress and our news organizations can be persuaded to save his hopes for victory in Iraq.

On Baghdad time where he faces American and Iraqi troops who don't wet their pants when Sadr issues a scary press release, Sadr sounds less bellicose:

Iraq’s largest and most dangerous militia will voluntarily disband if Shia scholars advise its leader to do so, officials said yesterday — a dramatic move that could quell much of the fighting in the war-torn country.

Aides to Hojatoleslam Moqtada al-Sadr said that he would send delegations to Ayatollah Ali al-Sistani, a moderate religious leader in Najaf, and to senior clerics in Iran to consult on whether he should stand down his 60,000-strong al-Mahdi Army.

The sudden announcement — the first time that the rebellious cleric had offered to disband his forces — came as US and Iraqi troops were poised for a key offensive into his Baghdad stronghold of Sadr City.

On the ground in Iraq, with US and Iraqi forces focused on his Potemkin Militia (There is no way he has 60,000 people he can put in the field. This is just one of those numbers that gets credibility from being repeated from one article to the next.), Sadr is seeking a way to retreat that doesn't look like retreat. But the alternative to a disguised retreat, or even an obvious retreat at this point, will be another defeat in battle with hundreds more of his minions dead, wounded, or jailed.

So the question is does the Iraqi government clean Sadr's clock before our Congress can clock out of the war?

Sadr may hope our press will portray him as victorious no matter how badly he loses in the field and in politics. Yet a glimmer of hope is there for those of us who would like a better press corps--National Public Radio this morning called Round Three a "stalemate." Which is an improvement over their previous Iraqi defeat narrative. (And they have the nerve to ask me for money during their pledge week. Never reinforce failure, I say...)

UPDATE: Sadr plays to the two clocks by issuing a scary statement for Washington and weaseling out of the million-man idiot march he threatened prior to the Petraeus-Crocker reports:

Shiite Muslim cleric Muqtada Sadr threatened Tuesday to formally end an already tattered cease-fire he had ordered his Mahdi Army militia to obey. The radical cleric also canceled plans for a massive protest march against the Iraqi government and its U.S. allies scheduled for today, after complaining about harassment from the authorities.

The "victorious" Mahdi Army cancelled a march in Baghdad because the "defeated" Iraqi government "harassed" them? This is lame even by Sadr's low standards. Sadr couldn't even scrape up enough people to pretend he had a million on the streets. I'm sure our media will explain how this is all a sign of Sadr's imminent victory.

Good Enough for Anti-ISIL Work?

Iraq War 2.0 (Hope and Change Edition) continues. Iraq is still weak. But is it strong enough to finally have a go at breaking ISIL?

Iraq's army still isn't rebuilt, apparently. And the militias beholden to Iran at least in part are too strong:

Abadi's resources remain limited. Iraq's regular military has not recovered from last year's defeat by Islamic State. Most young Shi'ite Iraqi men now prefer to join the paramilitary groups, which are seen as braver and less corrupt. ...

"If they are not paid by the prime minister," this official said, "they can do what they want."

Iran pays some of those 100,000 militias. How many, I don't know, but we say the amount is significant. But all are a real problem since they don't follow orders unless they want to.

The militias were probably necessary in the dark days of summer and fall 2014. But Iraq should have used the militia to buy time to rebuild the army and then disband the militias or bring them under tight government control.

But that is going slowly:

[United States Army Lieutenant General Mick Bednarek] estimates the army has only five functioning divisions – roughly 50,000 men, whose fighting readiness ranges between 60 and 65 percent.

Some of the best military and police – more than 80,000 men – are now based in Baghdad, Bednarek said, because Abadi wants to make sure the capital does not fall to Islamic State.

There are accusations that one army division is heavily influenced if not controlled by the militias; and the Interior Ministry (only here is that a parks thing rather than a security institution) is allegedly penetrated by militias.

I'm still wondering why it is taking so long--despite the appearance of Iraq finally being ready to strike a more decisive blow.

That's the bad news. The good news is that saying that Iraq has only 5 functioning divisions doesn't mean the army doesn't have more manpower. There are others that can sit and provide security if they aren't challenged too much in quieter areas. And this force reflects the troops we initially saw as decent and which we and our allies have worked with to train and equip. So they are okay.

And ISIL is smaller. What? 30,000 across Iraq and Syria? Iraq has enough.

So let's look at the good from Strategypage's lengthy situation report:

After nearly a year of stalemate near the oil refinery at Baiji (on the Tigris River between Baghdad and Mosul 200 kilometers north of Baghdad) has been broken as government forces made major progress in October.

The Iraqis themselves have provided a lot of air support for the fight. And ISIL had stopped sending many troops to fight there, meaning their forces dwindled over time.

With Baiji in Iraqi hands, an offensive north against Mosul is in theory possible.

Meanwhile security forces have been making progress in retaking Ramadi. In the last month more American and Iraqi troops have been sent to Anbar. The Americans are there to train and advise Iraqi soldiers, police and pro-government tribal militias. Most of the several thousand U.S. troops were at al Asad airbase (in eastern Anbar) but more are being sent west, closer to ISIL occupied Ramadi and the main ISIL forces. Iraqis handle security for these bases but American troops take part in the fighting when needed. More American troops are being seen out in the countryside with Iraqi troops. There are about 5,000 ISIL gunmen in Anbar and that number appears to be declining.

Strategypage also baits me, given my frequent statements that I assume a Jordanian offensive from the west will be part of an offensive into Anbar to break ISIL there:

Jordan has doubled its troop strength on its Iraqi border, which is near Ramadi and what Jordan expects will soon be a major battle with ISIL.

So Iraqi forces are grinding forward toward Ramadi and Mosul. Jordan to the rear of Ramadi has massed troops. And in the north we helped the Kurds--who we'd like to threaten ISIL in Mosul from the northeast--rescue their people from ISIL in Iraq.

And we promise a more energetic campaign:

The U.S. military will intensify air strikes and may carry out more direct ground attacks as it steps up efforts against Islamic State militants following a failed bid to train Syrian rebels, Defense Secretary Ash Carter told lawmakers on Tuesday.

More of our careful bombing and more special forces raids are not a plan to defeat ISIL.

Unless we plan to take ground from ISIL in Iraq and really push them back, intensifying this activity is just motion for the sake of looking like we are doing more.

I retain hope. The military knows better. It depends on whether they are allowed to plan and fight a military campaign or must pretend to wage war.

UPDATE: The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wants to exploit the situation based on the gnawing success around Baiji and Ramadi:

Dunford told the committee that the coalition must reduce ISIL’s territorial control, destroy its warfighting capability, “and undermine its brand and aura of invincibility.” ISIL’s main attraction is its claim to be the new caliphate.

The two main efforts against the terror group are the air campaign and the train, advise and assist campaign. Airstrikes are intended to kill key leadership and fighters, interdict ISIL’s lines of communication and disrupt their sources of revenue -- primarily oil, the chairman said.

“The second critical element in the military campaign is to develop and support effective partners on the ground, to seize and secure ISIL-held terrain,” he said.

Why yes. Kill them. Push them back. And defeat them. And find a ground partner to do all this, since air strikes and training Iraqis apparently isn't enough.

And while I think Syria must take a back seat, I don't think that the war there has shifted to Assad's side, despite the temporary boost provided by Russia's intervention alongside Iran.

Strategypage has more on this:

The Russian supported government forces went on the offensive in October and for a week or so seemed to make some progress. The Russian air strikes, guided by Syrian ground controllers, were accurate and allowed the Syrian/Lebanese/Iranian forces to advance. But by mid-October the advance had stalled.

And keep in mind that a successful intervention at best keeps Assad in control of an arc of territory in western Syria running from the Turkish border to the Israeli and Jordanian borders--territory I said in early 2012 that Assad had to retreat to in order to survive.

I don't think Assad has the ground power after grueling attrition to hold that maximum realm. I have doubts about whether Assad can hold Damascus.

And what about his supporters in the remaining enclaves away from the core? I think operations around Aleppo are about rescuing them and not pushing the perimeter of the core area north. Even if successful, what about other outposts further east? Are they--and their defenders--to be written off?

Oops, He Did It Again

Ah, Fareed Zakaria weighs in on Iraq. God bless him. But the man couldn't find his own buttocks with both hands and a GPS signal. But let's look anyway, shall we?

You are never going to guess who Zakaria blames for the current Iraq crisis. Go on. Guess!

Okay, sure, he puts in Prime Minister Maliki. The man who is in charge when the crisis explodes is surely a likely suspect, no?

Zakaria blames Maliki for the failure to get a status of forces agreement to keep American troops in Iraq after 2011, when any sentient being with a half-functioning brain stem (and you'd think this would include Zakaria, but apparently not) knows that President Obama had no interest at all in finding a way to get to "yes."

We could have gotten an executive agreement but we insisted on parliament passing the agreement; and we pledged so few troops that Maliki could not afford to alienate Iran just to attempt to get a mere 5,000 American troops that the Obama administration offered to keep in Iraq. (I wanted 25,000 including 3 training brigades plus special forces and air power to help finish off al Qaeda and keep Iraqis from abandoning politics for violence to resolve differences.) The benefit-cost ratio was just too low for Maliki to risk defeat trying to keep us in Iraq.

Obama let the discussions languish and then when 2011 neared its end, said "We tried. So sorry." President Obama got exactly what he wanted. Don't try to pretend otherwise now.

But you'd be wrong if you thought Zakaria included President Obama as the other man in charge of a relevant country when the crisis explodes.

No, Zakaria blames George W. Bush. Yes, more than five years after the shadow of cowboyism lifted from the Oval Office and the world, Zakaria blames Bush.

Behold, puny mortals, the prodigious output of Zakaria's ginormous brain!

[The Bush administration] quickly decided to destroy Iraq’s Sunni ruling establishment and empower the hard-line Shiite religious parties that had opposed Saddam Hussein. This meant that a structure of Sunni power that had been in the area for centuries collapsed. These moves — to disband the army, dismantle the bureaucracy and purge Sunnis in general — might have been more consequential than the invasion itself.

One, we did not disband the Iraqi army. It collapsed and went home. There was nothing to disband.

Two, if Saddam's army hadn't collapsed we'd have had to disband it. In what world would the Kurds and Shias have sided with us if we had simply played musical chairs with minority-Sunni Arab (10-15%) domination of Iraq?

It was also absolutely necessary to purge the bureaucracy of higher ranking Sunnis and promote Shias (and Kurds) in the rebuilt security forces to keep the overthrow of Saddam from looking like new ruler same as the old ruler.

Having betrayed the Shias once in 1991 when they rose up against Saddam and we watched Saddam slaughter them into passivity, could we really have screwed the Shias a second time and not expected them to rise up against us?

Three, we actually fought the hard-line Shia religious parties. Remember Moqtada al Sadr, that breathing piece of garbage who we fought in two separate campaigns in 2004? And then again we fought the Shia hardliners in Sadr City during the surge offensive of 2007? Remember that? Zakaria, apparently, does not.

We had to put the Shias in the dominant position. Had to. Anything else would have led to a national uprising against us that had us fighting Sunni Arabs (Baathists and al Qaeda) and Iranian-backed Shias (while the Kurds hunkered down in the north).

If you must Blame Bush for allowing the disastrous Maliki into office, also remember that in spring 2008, Maliki showed he'd take on the Iranian-backed Shias (including Sadr) by mounting an offensive against them in Basra (the Charge of the Knights offensive). That Maliki stopped looking beyond sectarian divisions after we left in 2011 can't really be blamed on the Bush-era Maliki, now can it?

What might we have done had we stayed after 2011 to keep Maliki in line?

However, if you must include Maliki in the blame game while blaming Bush ultimately for Maliki, let's not forget the Obama administration's role in perpetuating Maliki's rule. In 2010, the Obama administration sided with Maliki cobbling together a parliamentary majority even though he did not win the most votes in that year's election. So the Obama administration ratified the so-called horrible Bush-era elevation of Maliki.

I almost always regret reading Zakaria. The man truly thinks he can get a government position in the foreign policy establishment in this administration. I shudder in horror that the wise and level-headed Susan Rice or that master of diplomatic nuance John Kerry might be replaced by Zakaria.

Without Zakaria, President Obama has managed to pull the spectre of defeat in Iraq from the jaws of Bush-engineered victory. We have enough problems in Iraq without letting Zakaria have any type of influence at all over what we do.

We Really Did Win the Iraq War

I just don't see all the failures that so many analysts claim for the Iraq War initiated 15 years ago.

So "some" Iraqi officials said the sanctions were being felt and would have led to Iraqi compliance with American demands?

But by early 2001 the sanctions were clearly weakening as Saddam exploited fake "dead baby parades" (see my quotes of the same article noted there but now offline in the undead archive of pre-Blogger TDR--behold the primitiveness! Scroll down to "This Just Sickens Me" (Posted June 19, 2003)) to convince Westerners that post-1991 war sanctions were killing Iraqis.

Basing analysis on Saddam officials' statements seems a problem to me given contrary evidence of the oil-for-food corruption and the rising clamor to lift sanctions. Remember that our government was speaking of "smart sanctions" to cope with erosion of support for sanctions by replacing them with more focused sanctions to escape the growing outrage.

We had no substantive plan for Iraq after the war? But the New York Times said that we had extensive plans (called "the most ambitious American effort to administer a country since the occupations of Japan and Germany at the end of World War II").

And if your template for what we should have done is post-World War II, have you looked at the chaotic mess that Europe was after the war for years? We extensively planned that horror show?

I think post-war Iraq went reasonably well considering the Shia victims of Saddam had no experience governing. Just who inside Iraq could have taken over without problems? Seriously, we followed COIN 101 even in the face of heavily supported opposition.

Also, given that the war really continued to evolve after the fall of Saddam's regime, the war didn't really end until 2008, by which time Bush 43 put in place a plan for long-term engagement.

Why didn't the Obama administration formulate a plan during the three years it had to use it's big-brained nuanced foreign policy team to make a post-war plan before walking away from Iraq?

And I absolutely reject the idea that it was a mistake to disband Iraqi security forces. That was as necessary as de-Nazifying Germany was. Further, at least for the army, disbanding it was a legal formality--it was gone.

Do you really believe that disbanding those entities caused Baathist resistance? You may have missed decades of Baathist Sunni Arab minority rule on top of centuries of Sunni minority rule of the Shias. Good Lord, believing we caused Sunni Arab resistance by not essentially reversing the military victory over them is nonsense. Indeed, in the uprising of early 2004 by pro-Iran Shias and the Sunni Islamists, can you imagine what our forces would have faced if the surviving Iraqi security forces had been staffed with Baathists?

If it is true that the destruction of Saddam's government helped Iran gain influence in Iraq, it is also true that the destruction of the Nazis helped Soviet-backed communists gain influence in post-World War II Western Europe as well as full control of Eastern Europe.

And check this out. Defeating Japan opened the way to Mao winning the civil war in China. Do we blame our current problem with modernizing China on the decision to wage war on Japan the morning of December 7, 1941 rather than letting the Japanese occupy large parts of China to keep Maos's communists suppressed?

Are we having "blowback" fun yet?

Solving one problem--aggressive, brutal, WMD-pursuing Saddam--does not solve all problems. Work the Goddamn problems.

And blaming the Iraq War for Iran's influence in Iraq requires you to neglect that Saddam's brutal minority rule over the Shias was the reason Iran had influence within Iraq in the first place. Recall that Iraq invaded Iran in 1980 in part to reverse the influence revolutionary Iran had on Iraq's restive Shias. Saddam wasn't sure he could even count on his Shia soldiers to remain loyal without inflicting a humiliating defeat on Iran.

The idea that ISIS arose from the Iraq War ignores the terror group's origin in the pre-Iraq War al Qaeda, the role of the Syrian revolution in creating a sanctuary for jihadis in eastern Syria, the role of Syria in the Iraq War terrorist campaign that made Syria a haven for Iraqi Baathists who joined with the jihadis, and the failure of America to remain in Iraq after 2011 to keep the Iraqi government and security forces on track and to keep our foot on the gas to pursue the beaten jihadis inside Iraq rather than let them regenerate.

The charge that what we achieved was a failure is nonsense, and Iraq War 2.0 that President Obama initiated in 2014 indicates that even he--who won the presidency on his absolute opposition to the war--thought we needed to salvage what we achieved in the Iraq War rather than walk away from the "mistake."

Iraq is an imperfect democracy that is not brutal to minorities, is not a threat to neighbors, and is not a threat to gain and use WMD. Iraq doesn't train and import terrorists but kills them in large numbers at our side.

And following the ending of the ISIL caliphate in Iraq, with more American support along with increasing foreign Sunni Arab states' support, Iraq will be able to resist and reverse Iranian influence among the Shias of Iraq (and even in that community, only a minority back Iran).

We won the Iraq War. It didn't become Vermont immediately after the war, it is true. But it took a long time to make Europe--West and East--the secure friendly bloc it is today after the victory in 1945. And South Korea did not become the free prosperous democracy it is today without decades of effort following the Korean War.

Have a little damn patience and work the problems that inevitably arise in any endeavor.

God almighty,



I'll skip the rest of the article, although the remainder have a bit more balanced views. The consensus is failure. I don't agree with that consensus, although leaving in 2011 made the success harder than it needed to be.

Don't forget that the consensus during the war was that our military was flailing in a "fiasco." Until somehow we won on the battlefield.  So I reject the consensus now that says "Sure our military performed well. But the outcome is a disaster (with it commonly claimed the Iraq War was possibly one of the greatest American errors in all of our history!)."

That is nonsense. And I'd be remiss not to (again) note Learning Curve on assessing the Iraq War.

And I don't rule out that the Arab Spring could yet be seen as one sign post on the way to opening the Arab Moslem world to democracy and rule of law as an alternative to the traditional forms of their government of either an autocracy (that itself spawns Islamist resistance) or an Islamist regime. The Great West Hope of autocrats who suppress jihadi ideology doesn't work and encourages Islamist growth.

I've argued that repeatedly. Autocrats may support "tame Islamists" but they simply encourage the "wild" Islamists who become more extreme as opposition; and which attract even non-Islamists to the only game in town for opposing the regime.

But I (sort of) digress.

I really am weary of fighting against the impossibly high standards so many Westerners insist America--and America alone--most meet to call a war victorious.

Here's my 10-year piece on the war as well as some frustration with others' thoughts on the so-called disaster of the war, for what they're worth.

We won the Iraq War. Get over it.

UPDATE: Honestly, can you see no value to having one of the Axis of Evil states helping us fight jihadis and not being a threat given the immense problems that the surviving two-thirds of the Axis of Evil (North Korea and Iran) pose to us and our allies?

Root Cause?

This writer (I rarely think he is even close to being right on anything regarding foreign policy) thinks it is a mistake to believe that American force is the solution to the Islamic State in Iraq (and Syria), which might help Moslems defeat their own jihadis in their societies in time:

There are several problems with this analysis. For starters, it glosses over the fact that military power in the form of the 2003 Anglo-American invasion created the opening for the jihadists in the first place. Where there had been stability, US and British forces sowed the seeds of anarchy. The so-called ‘Islamic State’ whose forces in recent weeks have spread havoc across Iraq represents the most recent manifestation of this phenomenon. In short, as far as violent Islamic radicalism was concerned, the putative American solution has exacerbated rather than reduced the problem.

When he ascended to the presidency, Barack Obama seemed to get that. Yet even as he fulfilled his promise to withdraw US forces from Iraq, his efforts to devise a policy toward the Islamic world based on something other than invasion and occupation came up short.

Without going into the author's apparent dismissal of helping Moslems defeat their own jihadis in order to encourage a post-Islamist society, let me just say that he must be fine with just living with that ideology and the violence that erupts from that thinking. I disagree on the wisdom of that acceptance.

But the notion that our invasion of Iraq created an opening for jihadists to enter Iraq ignores that long before we invaded Iraq, Saddam has imported jihadis and supported them abroad. Saddam even looked the other way when jihadis showed up prior to the September 11, 2001 attacks in remote areas of Iraq at the fringe of Kurdish territory along the Iranian border.

The history of jihadis in Iraq does not rest on American exacerbation.

And the post-liberation violence that began in 2003 was enabled by Syrian and Iranian efforts to push jihadis into Iraq to create chaos and foment a civil war. Without their aggression, Iraq would have settled down much more quickly.

And recall that the author is arguing that the brutal repression and external aggression of Saddam Hussein's Iraq represented "stability." Must I really set forth arguments against that judgment? When that horrific record made regime change in Iraq our official policy as passed by Congress and signed by President Clinton?

Also remember that we did in fact defeat the jihadis in Iraq and even enlisted as allies in the Awakening the very people we had ejected from power in 2003--the Sunni Arabs of Iraq. Yeah, we are so awful that even our enemies in less than 4 years saw us as an ally to fight their so-called jihadi allies.

Finally, in what alternate world of reality can you say that President Obama has not refrained from a policy of invasion and occupation?

President Obama pulled out of Iraq.

He bombed Libya in support of rebels but did not invade or occupy it.

He refused to invade or bomb (even incredibly small amounts) Syria--or even support rebels in any significant way.

And where he did fight, in Afghanistan, he escalated half-heartedly and ended the fight and plans to end our presence before the Taliban jihadis have been ground down to anywhere near the same degree that we did in Iraq.

Face it, the only place where jihadis were beaten is where we fought them pre-2011 until we beat them. In Iraq.

In the end, the root cause of jihadis is not American resistance to that violence and our help to non-jihadis within the Moslem world to defeat the jihadis. The root cause is the unacceptably high level of support for Islamism and jihad within the Moslem world.

It's a long war. It will be longer because of the confusion that authors like this bring to the debate.

UPDATE: Related thoughts on regrets or not for overthrowing Saddam. My regret remains that we did not defend our battlefield victory.

And I will again (as I did during the war) strongly dispute the idea that it was a key mistake to "disband" the Iraqi army after we defeated Saddam's army and government.

One, "disbanding" the army was a formality given that the army had dissolved on impact either being destroyed by Coalition forces or from scattering and going home to avoid that destruction.

Two, if the army hadn't dissolved, we should have disbanded it as a tool of the Baath Party which was loyal to Saddam.

Good grief, Baathists joined the Islamic State in the June offensive/uprising in Mosul and the north! I say again, try imagining the spring 2004 enemy offensives in Iraq had the Iraqi security forces been staffed and led by "former" Baathist officers.

Getting Out of the Way

The "cease-fire" between the Sadrists and the Iraqi government just lasts four days. But it looks more like the Sadrists have just agreed to get out of the way while the mission of the government and US forces continues to grip Sadr City:

We have signed the agreement today," said Khalid al-Attiyah, the deputy parliamentary speaker from the main Shiite political bloc, United Iraqi Alliance.

Al-Attiyah said the cease-fire went into effect on Sunday and Iraqi forces will be allowed to enter the area as early as Wednesday and "take over the security there."

The statement said "the government will decide on the number of Iraqi forces to be deployed in Sadr City to achieve security, in order to refrain from asking help from foreign forces," a reference to the U.S. military.

"Any attack against residential areas, government offices and the Green Zone are prohibited from Sadr City or from another area," the agreement said.

The cease-fire stipulates that Iraqi forces have the right to "impose the law and to pursue illegal situations."

"No one and no side has the right to interfere in the work of these forces," it said, adding that the government retained the right to pursue "those who carried out armed attacks against the government."

Yet don't confuse getting out of the way with surrendering. The Sadrists are still there:

Sheik Salah al-Obeidi, an aide to al-Sadr, stressed that the Sadrists rejected conditions set by Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to disband the Mahdi Army and hand over their weapons.

"We have agreed on cease-fire and to end displaying arms in public," al-Obeidi said. "But we did not agree on disbanding the Mahdi Army to hand over its weapons.

Short-term ceasefires that get the Sadrists out of the way while we continue the mission are no problem as long as we don't forget that in the end the Sadrists must be broken up.

Or do we want this in Iraq?

Heavy fighting broke out Monday between government supporters and opponents in Lebanon's second-largest city, where the two sides battled with rocket-propelled grenades, heavy machine guns and mortars, security officials and residents said.

Hizbollah, backed by Iran and Syria, is threatening the Lebanese state. It wasn't supposed to be this way, of course:

After the civil war ended in 1990, all of Lebanon's various militias surrendered their weapons and transformed into political parties, keeping only small arms. Only Hezbollah was allowed to keep its arms because it was considered a resistance movement battling Israel.

Yes, indeed. Who could disagree with "resisting" the Jews back then? And now Hizbollah seems to be more eager to fight Lebanese than Jews.

Do not let Sadr keep his militia. He may want to "resist" the Americans but in the end, backed by Iran, he will fight Iraqis.

Keep the mission in mind--defeat the pro-Iranian militias inside Iraq.