B Troop
How do you "disband" an Army that has fled?
By streiff Posted in Military Roundtable — Comments (10) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
This week's installment is brought to you by docj.
Disbanding the Iraqi Regular Army (RA) after the toppling of the Ba'athist regime of Saddam Hussein has haunted us ever since. It made Iraq, already a very dangerous place, infinitely more dangerous. It's one of several major mistakes made by the coalition immediately after the fall of Saddam.
How many times over the last 2-plus years have we heard this little bit of Conventional Wisdom?
Read on.
Certainly, the decision to disband the Iraqi RA is one that is fairly classified as contentious. But when said decision is called, among other things, a blunder - and Anthony Zinni, of all people, should be very, very slow to spout such nonsense - this piece of CW then segues rather seamlessly into the realm of Talking Point™ and Pleasant Fiction™.
Oddly, the purveyors of this particular talking point cannot even seem to keep their facts straight. For example, the Post piece (November 20, 2003) states that it was L. Paul Bremmer who "ordered the demobilization of Iraq's entire army, including largely apolitical conscripts" in May 2003 (backed-up here). However, there are plenty of people who claimed that it was, among the culprits, and of course everyone's favorate go-to-for-blame-guy SecDef Rumsfeld and some of his appointees.
This line of "reasoning" of course continues in our current environment, whereby we are attempting to reconstruct an Army in Iraq, more or less, from scratch. In fact, there is no shortage of people who have written at exhaustive length detailing every possible, single thing that has, could have, may have gone wrong with the build-up of Iraq's Army after this disbanding.
As a treat, we're told in addition that this decision to disband the RA was in direct opposition to our principal coalition partner (note the part in this piece where Rummy is blamed for this - as late as April 2004 - a full 6-months after the WaPo laid it on Bremmer, an assertion that is backed-up by Joint Chief's Chairman Gen. Pace).
And of course, there are people who are saying, effectively - Meet the new Army, Same as the old Army. What we're finding out, however, is that is a feature, not a bug.
There are several problems with these analyses (and I'm being very, very generous in my description of some of these screeds as "analysis"). For one, they seem to utterly ignore the politics of the decision to officially disband an army that had, for all intents and purposes, disappeared as we rolled them up in March and April of 2003. The politics of this was made rather unambiguously clear by Bremmer in a piece summarized here - money quote:
Bremer noted that his recommendation to disband came from the Iraqi Interim government who did not want the old army operating in Iraq and not part of their political future. Its not really hard to understand why that was. For MG Eaton or anyone else to dismiss the reality of the Iraqi Army as it existed (or didn't) in relationship to some plan they would have preferred is wearing blinders. Or putting their hands over their eyes and their fingers in their ears yelling "lalalalalala" so it does not impact their view of reality.
Now, aside from pointing-out that "putting their hands over their eyes and their fingers in their ears yelling "lalalalalala" so it does not impact their view of reality" is precisely what the Administration's critics accuse the Administration of doing (though they could just be projecting, to be fair), this point has not (unsurprisingly) received nearly enough play - as it almost single handedly debunks this particular pleasant fiction. It is also ludicrously common sensical. The officer corps of the Iraqi regular army was filthy with political hacks - loyal to the Ba'ath Party of then-deposed dictator Saddam Hussein - in a country that was soon to be run by a long-oppressed ethnic majority. The Army was, in fact, principally an arm of the political leadership - the regime that had oppressed said majority for so long.
Given that reality, does keeping this Army standing make any sense at all?
And does not the entire house of cards upon which is built this little piece of conventional wisdom collapse rather spectacularly as a result?
There are plenty of people who argue, persuasively I might add, that we were If as Bremmer suggests the genesis of the notion to disband the RA came not from the dread neo-con conspiracy in Washington but rather with the Iraqis working within the Coalition Provisional Authority, we can probably take it on faith that they had a pretty fair reason to forward such a suggestion. Could it be that by disbanding the RA we postponed - and greatly mitigated and isolated - what could have been the nightmare of all nightmare scenarios? That being the rise of a Shi'a insurgency - discussed in this very forum here and here, among other places. How well would the Iraqi Shi'a take to the notion that the same Army that had brutalized them into marginalized status for decades would now be providing law-and-order services to the new boss in town? I'm guessing not very well at all.
I'm guessing, rather, that it would have caused a real civil war - an above ground, full-out, no-holds-barred donnybrook - between large segments of the (overwhelming majority, remember) ethnic Shi'a population and, well, probably just about everyone else - but certainly the Sunnis who made up the lion's share of the Ba'ath power structure. And this would have all precipitated probably within 12-months of Saddam being toppled - while he was still at-large, you may recall. This would further have been a wide-open invitation for the newly-liberated nation's eastern neighbor to go shopping for stooges - and the presence of unreformed Ba'athists supplying the muscle for the newly installed CPA could very well have led them to better prospects than for whom they in the end had to settle.
Had civil war been averted with the Shi'a, it's entirely possible that the Iraqi RA - likely still loyal to the former regime while on our payroll - could have formed their own insurgency. At this point, it's important to remember that they would have substantially outnumbered US and coalition troops in theatre at the time. Not a pleasant possibility, that.
Then, there's the specter of putting Ba'athists on the payroll in the first place. There's been more than a little carping from the "loyal opposition" over that approach in the past, no?
All of this gets into the realm of what Rummy might call unknown unknowns. We have precisely no idea what would have happened had we not disbanded the largely defunct Iraqi RA - and speculation that so doing would have prevented the insurgency and solved all the Ills of The Occupation™ start to sound like only so much Armchair Monday-Morning Quarterbackery after a while. While there remain plenty of people, both inside and outside the military, who will continue to assert that the disbanding of the Iraqi RA was a huge mistake, the facts that 1) this admittedly contentious idea originated with the Iraqis themselves and that 2) there wasn't much of an Army to keep on the payroll in the first place should give us all reason to ponder the possibility that perhaps it wasn't such a bad idea after all.
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B Troop 10 Comments (0 topical, 10 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
that we are largely in agreement and you are more eloquently saying "Amen" - or something that effect?
In other words, I'm assuming you're a witness for the defense (us) and not the prosecution (the moonbats). Right?
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"I don't know." -- Helen Thomas, when asked by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "Are we at war, Helen?"
I'm just emphasizing what Bremer said on his book tour. Most pundits seemed to ignore Bremer's case-closed explanation of why any "proactive disbanding" (of Saddam's Army) is a myth, not reality. Can't blame Bremer for disbanding the Iraq Army any more than you can blame humans for dinosaur extinction.
In terms of sheer practicality, why in the world would we want to keep intact a unit that, when it was absolutely needed and required for survival, didn't just fail miserably, it didn't even try? Who needs that kind of competence?
What this would have meant in practice would have been keeping the Iraqi army NCOs' and officers. Which would have meant a Sunni run army. Which would have meant, sooner or later, Iraq being run by another Sunni strongman.
There is an argument to be made that this would have been a good idea, but the most of the opponents of disbanding the Iraqi army are not in a position to make it, since they are the same people who called for full democratic elections ASAP.
Can't blame Bremer for disbanding the Iraq Army any more than you can blame humans for dinosaur extinction.
Dinosaurs? I blame Bush.
"Nothing works like freedom, Nothing succeeds like liberty"
Kyle
Theres a bunch of these. They follow a simple formula first make out that Iraq is the greatest disaster since the flood. Second, take anything that was done that didn't work out absolutely positively perfectly and label it a snafu. Third posit another course of action that seems plausible and then claim it would have solved everyones problems and possibly prevented hurrican katrina as well.
The way to deal with these canards is ask yourself what would have happened had anyone been so stupid as to implement them. Take for example the most common and recurring one, we needed many more soldies there. If you follow this through you realize yes we would be able to apply more force to win millitary engagements. Then you ask just how many engagements have we lost in Iraq ? If we are using that extra force it implies that there will be more targets for the terrorists and more chances for them to kill americans. So you wind up with us not winning more , maybe winning bigger (whats bigger than big ?) and having more casualties. Untill someone how having more Americans in uniform wandering around iraq is going to generate better intelligence I don't buy this.
The one we are talking about above is even easier. Just ask yourself how well did the Iraqi army of saddam hussein do against the coalition ? If you consider the terrorists a credible threat to the coalition forces, how well would the same bunch of escapees from F-troop do against the terrorists ? If you don't consider the terrorists a credible threat why are you upset ?
Funny how those two often seem to coincide, eh?
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"I don't know." -- Helen Thomas, when asked by White House spokesman Scott McClellan, "Are we at war, Helen?"
In a July 30th appearance on FoxNewsSunday with quest-host Brit Hume, Paul Bremer was asked to respond to those who contend, wrongly IMHO, that disbanding Iraq's Regular Army led to a "Fiasco" in Iraq.
HUME: Now, there's a whole other set of ideas about what went wrong in Iraq. A lot of it is set forth in a new book by Tom Ricks, the well known defense correspondent for the Washington Post, a book whose title kind of gives away what he ultimately thinks about it. "Fiasco" is the title. Nonetheless, it is a pretty extensive piece of work with a lot of reporting in it, a great many interviews and a lot of detail, pretty rich volume. And he comes down hard on you on a couple of key points.
One was the -- what he says was the dissolution of the Iraqi military, that that was a mistake because it alienated these people, and then you had, you know, thousands of armed disaffected men in the streets. What about it?
BREMER: It's not a new argument. In fact, I call this sort of a cat- like issue. It seems to have nine lives. And no matter how many times I answer with the facts, it still comes back.
But let's look at the facts. Let's take a minute. There was no Iraqi army to disband. The Iraqi army basically self-demobilized, as the Pentagon said. There wasn't a single unit standing anywhere in the country. So the question was should we recall the army. Now, let's think about what the army...
HUME: But there was a structure, and there were people who had uniforms and guns and...
BREMER: No, there was no structure. There was no unit left anywhere. There were no barracks anywhere. The army was made up of hundreds of thousands of Shia draftees who hated being in the army. They were brutalized by their Sunni officers. They went home.
There was no army to disband. It had to be recalled. Imagine what the impact of that was politically. This army had conducted a decade-long war of genocide against the Kurds. And I well remember one of my first trips to the Kurdish region.
Massoud Barzani, who's one of the leaders of the Kurdish region, took me for a drive through the area where, as he told me, the army killed 3,000 Barzanis, 3,000 of his tribesmen, during their campaign in the 1980s.
The army was responsible for the killing fields of the Shia -- you remember the Shia rose up against Saddam after the 1991 war -- and killed hundreds of thousands of Shia. These two groups, the Kurds and the Shia, were cooperating with the American forces.
If we had recalled the army, they would have taken matters into their own hand. Right now, if we think sectarian violence is bad now, imagine what it would have been if 80 percent of the Iraqi people had immediately concluded that we were not real in our desire to replace Saddam's dictatorship.
So the question of recalling the army, in my view, would have been a disastrous decision, and anybody who doubts that needs only look at what happened when the Marines recalled a single brigade, about 1,000 men, of the old army in April of 2004, and there was a political uproar throughout the country that almost threw us off the track of being able to hand sovereignty over in June.
So I'm very comfortable it was absolutely the right decision not to recall the army and to rebuild a new army.
It seems that "Known Facts"™ really do have more than "nine lives."
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"The trouble with our liberal friends is not that they're ignorant; it's just that they know so much that isn't so." - Ronald Reagan
Most of the Sunni Army leadership was not there on merit, and the Shi'a Army conscripts (the bottom ranks) were not there by choice. So the lower ranks happily ran--ran like they just got released from an Alabama chain gang. And the best, most experienced, Iraqi officers got most of their “experience” by acting as criminals and thugs. So, as Bremer pointed out many times on his book tour, it was not the base to build a new Iraqi Defense Force on. They had to start from scratch.