The Joint Chiefs Report
or so we're led to believe
By streiff Posted in War — Comments (3) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »
Yesterday the Joint Chiefs of Staff delivered their report on the strategic options in Iraq. According to the Washington Post headline Joint Chiefs Advise Change In War Strategy:
The nation's top uniformed leaders are recommending that the United States change its main military mission in Iraq from combating insurgents to supporting Iraqi troops and hunting terrorists, said sources familiar with the White House's ongoing Iraq policy review.
Read on.
I give up.
I read this story and I don’t find anything anyone who’s been watching Iraq doesn’t already know. If there is a “change in war strategy” advised here I can’t find it.
The chiefs do not favor adding significant numbers of troops to Iraq, said sources familiar with their thinking, but see strengthening the Iraqi army as pivotal to achieving some degree of stability. They also are pressing for a much greater U.S. effort on economic reconstruction and political reconciliation.
Not only do we know little about what they propose, some parts of what is reported are either poorly reported or obviously wrong. For instance,
Under the plan developed by Chiarelli's staff, the military would shift about half of its 15 combat brigades away from battling insurgents and sectarian violence and into training Iraqi security forces as soon as the spring of 2007, military and defense officials said.
As this is written it simply doesn’t make sense. Nineteen and twenty year old privates aren’t used as advisors. Perhaps actual units are being embedded with Iraqi units, like embedding a complete US company within an Iraqi brigade. Or perhaps designated combat brigades will be tasked to provide senior noncommissioned officers and officers as advisors. But the idea that seven or eight combat brigades are going to become advisors, as the term is commonly understood, is nonsense.
The chiefs also want to see a new push on political and economic issues, especially employment programs, reconstruction and political reconciliation, to help quell the problems that have fueled both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite-Sunni sectarian strife, say defense officials and U.S. military officers in Iraq. A new jobs program is considered key to pulling young men from the burgeoning militias.
Pentagon chiefs think that there is no purely military solution for Iraq and that, without major progress on the political and economic fronts, the U.S. intervention is simply buying time, the sources said. They particularly want to see U.S. pressure on the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki to offer amnesty to Sunni insurgents, approve constitutional amendments promised to the Sunni minority, pass laws to ensure equitable distribution of oil revenue, and modify the ban on members of Saddam Hussein's Baath Party taking government positions.
And they are right here. As has been noted on other occasions most of the US government is missing in action in Iraq.
So for the time being we really don’t know what the Chiefs recommended and it would seem that neither does the Post.
Though the Post claims
But as the sources described yesterday, the military planning in both Washington and Baghdad is far along, in some ways tracking the ideas presented last week by the Iraq Study Group
It seems from this reportage that the Chiefs are actually recommending a continuation of what is currently being done in Iraq.
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The Joint Chiefs Report 3 Comments (0 topical, 3 editorial, 0 hidden) Post a comment »
Change the mission from combating insurgents to hunting terrorists? Aren't they the same thing? IE Combating insurgents= terrorists
I think part of Bush's problem is that he is too far deferential to his military people. Not having any combat/military experience himself, I think Bush relies too heavily on those that do and he figures that since they're the military people they're better qualified and he listens to them.
It's a problem he's had going back to Tenet with the CIA, Mueller with the FBI, he keeps people on who have shown their incompetence.
In the Civil War and WW2, Lincoln and FDR had no problem in relieving someone of command of they showed they weren't up to the task. In this case, guys like Abizaid and Casey have been in Iraq for a few years now and have nothing to show for it. Their strategy has been widely recognized by all sides of the political spectrum as a failure. And Bush just keeps listening to them and saying he listens to his commanders on the ground.
If his commanders on the ground have demonstrated that they can't win, it's time for new commanders on the ground.
Eliot Cohen's "Supreme Command" a year or two or so ago...if he actually did read it, it's obvious he didn't take any of it to heart (or understand it or a combo thereof). God save us all from business majors getting elected President. He acts like he works for the Joint Chiefs instead of the other way around.
The effort level of our troops on the ground and their immediate superiors (guys a pay grade or three below the Abizaids and Caseys of the world) have held up their end and then some...it's the President and the brass who've refused to kick in and do everything they could to win. A house-cleaning of gold-plated brass types is long, long overdue. The fact that it hasn't happened after this long makes me think that, despite all the soaring rhetoric, this President doesn't take this war as seriously as he's constantly asking the American public to take it.
Sounds like the Joint Chiefs are trying (understandably) to have it all possible ways - stay faithful to the mission, tell the president they are proposing modest modifications consistent with the overall strategy, and tell the press that they are doing something "new" that is similar somehow to what the ISG recommended.
"No compromise with the main purpose, no peace till victory, no pact with unrepentant wrong." - Winston Churchill