Redstate

only less so

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (14) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

The Washington Post presented a sketchy and superficial report yesterday on a meeting held by President Bush with a panel of academics and retired general officers. The only substance available in the story are the names of four of the five panelists (retired generals Barry McCaffrey, Wayne Downing, and Jack Keane and professor Eliot Cohen of Johns Hopkins) and the fact that they thought the Iraq Study Group report was total quatch (showing off one of the few bits of colloquial German that I still recall).

Today General McCaffrey pens an op-ed in the Washington Post which gives more insight into his, and presumably the panel’s, views on where to go in Iraq.

We’ve commented positively in the past upon the work of McCaffrey ( here | here). As usual, General McCaffrey doesn’t pull punches. There is much to agree with and some to disagree with in the report and after the dross we were subjected to last week it is a welcome change.

Read on.

The Goal

“A collapse of the Iraqi state would be catastrophic -- for the people of Iraq, for the Middle East and for America's strategic interests. We need a new political and military approach to head off this impending disaster -- one crafted with bipartisan congressional support. But Baker-Hamilton isn't it.

Our objective should be a large-scale U.S. military withdrawal within the next 36 months, leaving in place an Iraqi government in a stable and mostly peaceful country that does not threaten its six neighboring states and does not intend to possess weapons of mass destruction.”

Not much to disagree with here.

The Situation

But the situation in Iraq is perilous and growing worse. … The government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is largely dysfunctional. … Baghdad has become the central battlefield in this struggle, ... Shiite and Sunni Arabs overwhelmingly anticipate and endorse a U.S. strategic withdrawal and defeat.

Again, little to disagree with here. Al-Maliki has increasingly demonstrated the inherent weakness of a parliamentary system which rewards small parties with undue influence. Iraq is not alone in this regards, see Israel and Italy for other examples. It remains to be seen whether al-Maliki has the ability to actually gain control of the ministries which constitute his government.

McCaffrey Says “No” to a Full-Murtha

We could immediately and totally withdraw. In less than six months, our 150,000 troops could fight their way along strategic withdrawal corridors back to the sea and the safety provided by the Navy. Several million terrified refugees would follow, the route of our columns marked by the burning pyres of abandoned military supplies demolished by our rear guard. The resulting civil warfare would probably turn Iraq into a humanitarian disaster and might well draw in the Iranians and Syrians. It would also deeply threaten the safety and stability of our allies in neighboring countries.

Those who advocate a quick withdrawal should consider the imagery that accompanies McCaffrey’s description, a combination Dunkirk-Saigon/1975-Chosen Reservoir, and decide if that is what they really want.

The Proposal

• --Provide $10 billion a year in economic support to the Iraqis over the next five years.

This reflects a general consensus that Iraq needs some sort of Middle Eastern version of the WPA to bring the insurgency and sectarian violence under control. I don’t know that this makes sense philosophically or strategically. The private sector of the Iraq economy is beginning to make progress. All statistics aside, money is being generated somewhere to buy the sheer volume of automobiles and consumer goods pouring into that country.

A couple of things we should have learned by now are that large scale make work projects don’t do much to improve the economy, our own experience with the New Deal serves as a case in point that Keynesian stimulation rarely, if ever, produces long lasting positive outcomes. Then, of course, there is always the difficulty of unscrewing an directed economy and a work force which has developed in response to government distortion of the economy.

If it works it might be worth kicking the can of inevitable depression and economic instability down the road until physical instability is fixed. Then again maybe not.

• --Equip and increase the Iraqi armed forces on a crash basis over the next 24 months (but not the police or the Facilities Protection Service) to 250,000 troops to maintain internal order.

Again plusses and minuses. What this does is increase the number of Iraqi Army troops, which are the most reliable, at the expense of the Iraqi police and facilities protection services which in the former case is faction ridden and in the latter case a subsidiary of Sadr’s Jaish al-Mahdi and the day job for his death squads. That is the good news.

The bad news is that this is a short term fix for the problems facing the Iraqi police, the force that will ultimately have to control violence and terrorism. Itt creates an army perhaps an order of magnitude larger than Iraq needs. An army that will ultimately have to be reduced in size and creating a pool of trained, combat experienced, and unemployed men many of whom will bear a grudge against the government that took away their job. Does any of this sound familiar?

• --Draw down the U.S. military presence from 15 Brigade Combat Teams (BCTs), of 5,000 troops each, to 10 within 12 months. Within 24 months forces should further draw down to seven BCTs.

I think this kind of specificity is a lot less than helpful and I don’t know how this drawdown does anything for us other than drawdown troop strength. That, in the view of many, is a laudable goal in and of itself. I’m just not one of them. My view is that this recommendation is driven more my McCaffrey’s affiliation with the institutional Army (aka Big Green) than it is by any coherent strategic scheme. Tying a drawdown to a chronology and not to achievements seems to me to as dysfunctional when proposed by McCaffrey as it was when proposed by Murtha.

• --Withdraw from urban areas to isolated U.S. operating bases … provide oversight and intervention when required to rescue our embedded U.S. training teams, protect the population from violence or save the legal government.

Again a value judgment. Two facts are undeniable in this regards. The first is that US forces have the skill to kill efficiently and with considerable discrimination. When US forces are involved the risk to the enemy goes up exponentially and the risk to civilians goes down. The Iraqi Army, like most Third World armies, may very well never develop that skill because it just isn’t the way Third World armies and police forces do business.

The second fact is that Iraq is a tribal society and when killing takes place blood feuds are generated. In the long run it is much better that if killing needs to take place that it is done by Americans, who are leaving, rather than creating feuds between tribes and the government.

The Iraqis do have to take the lead in defeating the insurgency and expelling terrorists at some point. I just don’t think we are at that point yet.

• --Design and empower a regional diplomatic peace dialogue in which the Iraqis can take the lead, engaging their regional neighbors as well as their own alienated and fractured internal population.

Again, I don’t know where this gets us. While we could certainly get a conference going that would bring the Turks, Saudis, and Jordanians to the table along with the various Iraqi factions I don’t know why we’d want to bring in the Syrians or Iranians based on McCaffrey’s proposal any more than we would based on Baker’s proposal. I certainly don’t know how we would go about “empowering” such dialogue, if we had that much juice with the involved parties we wouldn’t be having this discussion.

In my view we should be devoting more energy than we are to making Syrian and Iranian meddling an expensive and painful exercise and legitimizing their meddling in Iraqi internal politics does little to aid us in achieving our goals or to help the Iraqi government to gain control of its territory.

Some Flailing About With a Cutoff Pool Cue

There is no doubt that this particular panel used its access to the president to settle some personal grudges. This from the Washington Post article previously linked:

The group suggested the president shake up his national security team. "All of us said they have failed, that you need a new team," said one participant. That recommendation is likely to fuel Pentagon rumors that Bush and his new defense secretary, Robert M. Gates, may decide to replace Marine Gen. Peter Pace as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.

General Downing left the National Security Council in 2002 reportedly because of conflicts with administration appointees on the NSC. Because of his very senior position, deputy national security adviser for counterterrorism, one has to suppose that the conflict was with Condoleezza Rice and/or Stephen Hadley. It’s hard to believe that anyone recommended that Rice be fired over this, so it looks like Hadley is the target of this particular statement.

I find in astonishing that anyone seriously thinks Peter Pace is going to be replaced. This would be an unprecedented act. We should keep an eye out for Pace being marginalized by Gates but it is hard to believe this is more than another of the rumors Pentagon staffers generate. "Today's wardroom joint is tomorrow's lower-deck stew.”

It is obvious that McCaffrey doesn’t like Rumsfeld. One only has to read between the lines to see that the dislike is deep and heartfelt. Some tidbits:

We are in a very difficult position created by a micromanaged Rumsfeld war team that has been incompetent, arrogant and in denial… Donald Rumsfeld's willful blindness… a result of Rumsfeld's disbanding the Iraqi army

There is little doubt that Jack Keane reinforced the anti-Rumsfeld animus of McCaffrey. Keane was the Army Vice Chief of Staff under Eric Shinseki, the Army Chief of Staff who was not fired for his perceived opposition to the Iraq War. In the summer of 2002, Rumsfeld announced Keane would succeed Shinseki as Chief of Staff some 14 months before Shinseki’s term expired. This must have created at rather gothic environment in the 3d Floor E-Ring offices of the Chief and Vice.

Blaming the situation in Iraq on one man or one policy is simply disingenuous. First, it presupposes the Iraqis actually had nothing to do with this. Second, it relies on the idea that John Abizaid and George Casey have been as willfully blind as Rumsfeld is alleged to have been. In short, it basically portrays the Iraqi government, al Qaeda, the insurgency, and the US military leadership as persons without agency, that is persons without the ability to act independently, and totally subservient to the whims of the SecDef. It is just silly and makes McCaffrey, a very serious man, look silly in the process.

I continue to hold the belief that disbanding the Iraqi Army was one of the few inarguably correct decisions made in the aftermath of the war. If McCaffrey faults the current Iraqi army for “an untrained and unreliable sectarian officer corps” it is hard to see how retaining Sunnis who achieved their rank by Ba’ath Party loyalty was going to win the trust of the Shi’a and Kurd majority or loyally work for a government run by the same.

No To More Advisors

Probably the only item McCaffrey mentions that approaches controversial is his opposition to more advisors.

Let me add a note of caution regarding a deceptive and unwise option that springs from the work of the Iraq Study Group. We must not entertain the shallow, partisan notion of rapidly withdrawing most organized Marine and Army fighting units by early 2008 and substituting for them a much larger number of U.S. advisers -- a 400 percent increase -- as a way to avoid a difficult debate for both parties in the New Hampshire primaries.

This would leave some 40,000 U.S. logistics and adviser troops spread out and vulnerable, all over Iraq. It would decrease our leverage with Iraq's neighbors. It would not get at the problem of a continuing civil war. In fact, significantly increasing the number of U.S. advisers in each company and battalion of the Iraqi army and police -- to act as role models -- is itself a bad idea. We are foreigners. They want us gone.

[…]

We need fewer advisers, not more -- selected from elite, active military units and with at least 90 days of immersion training in Arabic. Iraqi troops will not fight because of iron discipline enforced by U.S. sergeants and officers. That is a self-serving domestic political concept that would put us at risk of a national military humiliation.

There is as much a cri de coeur from the institutional Army as it is a rigorous military analysis.

True, infusing the Iraqi Army with US advisors is not a silver bullet. McCaffrey is right that scattering US troops about the countryside in pennypackets greatly increases their vulnerability and they don’t get the respect and attention of Syria and Iran like fifteen combat brigades with associated artillery and air support.

The truth of the matter is that the Army just does not want to do advisory duty and because it doesn’t want to, it doesn’t do advisory duty all that well. The soldiers needed as advisors, seasoned non-commissioned officers and proven company grade and field grade officers, are also desperately needed in troop units. Recognition of service as an advisor simply doesn’t carry the career “oomph” of serving in combat with a tactical unit. We saw the same phenomenon in Vietnam.

McCaffery has made a point of saying, back in December 2005

We hope to withdraw a third of the US combat forces by next fall before the wheels come off the US Army and Marine Corps.

Well, the wheels haven’t come off and all indications are that the wheels aren’t going to come off. If anything, Iraq’s effect on the Army is best summed up in the old slogan, “if it doesn’t kill you it makes you stronger.” But the Army doesn’t like providing advisors, which reduces the readiness levels in the units from which they are drafted and because a large number of Army officers don’t believe counterinsurgency is important:

Training time for active-duty Army and Marine combat units is only half what it should be because they are spending about the same amount of time in war zones as at home -- in contrast to the desired ratio of spending twice as much time at home as on deployment. And the training tends to focus on counterinsurgency skills for Iraq and Afghanistan, causing an erosion in conventional land-warfare capabilities, which could be required for North Korea or Iran, officials say.

His Conclusion

All of this may not work. We have very few options left. In my judgment, taking down the Saddam Hussein regime was a huge gift to the Iraqi people. Done right, it might have left the region and the United States safer for years to come. But the American people have withdrawn their support for the war, although they remain intensely committed to and protective of our armed forces. We have run out of time. Our troops and their families will remain bitter for a generation if we abandon the Iraqis, just as another generation did after we abandoned the South Vietnamese for whom Americans had fought and died. We owe them and our own national interest this one last effort. If we cannot generate the political will to take this action, it is time to pull out and search for those we will hold responsible in Congress and the administration.

I have to admit this is one of the strangest conclusions I’ve come across.

There is really no reason for McCaffrey to believe that the American people have withdrawn their support for the war but still support the American military. As a Vietnam veteran, General McCaffrey should know that the Armed Forces, not politicians, will be held to account for a loss in Iraq. Why, they will be asked, didn’t you resist? Why did you go along? Why didn’t you use this or that tactic? The politicians McCaffrey hopes to hold responsible will hold the hearings where they will ask these questions.

And has time really run out? I think not. If there is a consensus that a loss in Iraq is a bad thing, and I must say I don’t see the Democrat party as being part of such a consensus, then we can and will persist and prevail. It is when our elites begin to hint darkly that losing may be preferable to winning because it is easier, quicker, and a sure thing where victory is none of these, that we lose heart.

And Mine

So while this report is candid, it is really equal parts of 1) what we’re doing now, 2) Rumsfeld hatred, and 3) a desire to extricate the Army from Iraq leaving behind token units and Special Forces all rolled up in a tortilla of impending doom. Perhaps General McCaffrey believes such dire language will slap aside petty partisanship in Washington and unite the nation to win in Iraq. I just don’t think that is the case.

Unfortunately, General McCaffrey doesn’t offer any clear direction that improves our chances of success over the current course of action and relies entirely too much on the deus ex machina of “bipartisan” political support for success.

In its own way, this belief in bipartisanship is both sad (in the sense of dealing with a pleasant but not very bright colleague or subordinate) and charming (in the sense of dealing with a curious 5 year old).

When I was an action officer on the Army staff the Soviet Union abruptly went belly up and the Army suddenly became a “peace dividend” on the hoof. The mantra among the general officer corps was that the nation appreciated the service performed by the Army and would treat the Army “fairly” in the aftermath of the Cold War. “Fairly” meaning there wouldn’t be a large scale reduction in force and casing of division colors. Long story short, in 1989 the Army had 769,000 troops by 1996 it was under 500,000. Fair, indeed.

McCaffrey went through the trauma and drama that was the post-Vietnam military and he has served as a senior government official. He of all people should know what fate will befall the military, especially the Army, if Iraq is viewed as a loss and he should know that bipartisanship is seen as rarely as unicorns is Washington. He should be fighting with ever fiber of his being to ensure the Army and the nation doesn’t go through that again and he certainly shouldn’t be relying upon bipartisanship to get us there.