Political Views

By MWC Editor At Large Tom Engelhardt

Last One to Leave, Please Turn On the Lights

Recently, our top commander in Iraq, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., was brought back to the United States, officially to consult with George Bush on what the President still calls "our strategy for victory." Along with retiring Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Richard Myers, Centcom Commander Gen. John Abizaid, and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, Casey then testified before Congress on military "progress" in Iraq. As Rumsfeld confidently told the Armed Services Committee, ``Every single week that goes by, the number of [Iraqi] security forces goes up, the total.'' In a statement from the White House Rose Garden after meeting with his generals, the President made the same point: "The growing size and increasing capability of the Iraqi security forces are helping our coalition address a challenge we have faced since the beginning of the war. And General Casey discussed this with us in the Oval Office… Now, the increasing number of more capable Iraqi troops has allowed us to better hold on to the cities we have taken from the terrorists… We're on the offense. We have a plan to win."

Before Congress, however, Casey painted a rather different picture of the Iraqi national-army-that-isn't. In fact, on a crucial point, his testimony bore little relation to the assessments that either George Bush or Donald Rumsfeld claimed they had heard. Last June, the Pentagon informed Congress that three Iraqi battalions were finally at "Level 1" of preparedness -- that is, "fully trained, equipped, and capable of operating independently" of U.S. forces. On Thursday, Casey lowered this estimate to one battalion (evidently not even one of the previous three), calling it a "step backward." In other words, of the 100-plus battalions in the American-created Iraqi army, only one -- perhaps 1,000 soldiers -- is capable of heading off on its own to fight, out of sight of its American protectors. Donald Rumsfeld has often talked about the "metrics" of success. Well, here's perhaps the most significant metric we have on the Iraqi military -- the essence of what passes for a Bush administration plan for the pacification of Iraq -- and it speaks the world.

When queried on this dismal statistic, after at least a year of an intensive American focus on "standing up" the Iraqi army, the general said defensively, "It's not going to be like throwing a switch, where all of a sudden, one day, the Iraqis are in charge." This was perhaps an ill-chosen image in a country in which the Bush administration and its crony corporations have been unable to deliver electricity with any regularity to the inhabitants of that country. (During a blistering summer, parts of the capital got less than eight hours of electricity a day.)

To put all this in perspective, remember that Saddam Hussein's military was disbanded in May 2003 by L. Paul Bremer's Coalition Provisional Authority and a new Iraqi military officially reconstituted in August of that same year. The first units of the new army didn't even finish basic training (and it was evidently basic indeed) until early 2004. Ever since, they have been woefully equipped and poorly led. The earliest units (with the exception of borrowed Kurdish militiamen) broke and fled in battle. The record since hasn't been much better. (And who knows, as Juan Cole points out at his Informed Comment website, what happened to those three battalions that are no longer at Level 1 status. "Did some melt away at Tal Afar?" he asks of a recent U.S. campaign near the Syrian border. There, Iraqi troops, fighting with Americans, were asked to take the lead. The newest round of that campaign, launched in the area just days ago, seems to lack Iraqi troops altogether.)

As the Bush administration became more desperate about developments in Iraq, the Pentagon began placing ever greater emphasis on training the Iraqi military to replace American troops. Thousands of American military advisors under the command of Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who was put in charge of the Multinational Security Transition Command in Iraq, were assigned to Iraqi units in "military transition teams." For a while, Petraeus got much good press here from pundits like David Ignatius of the Washington Post as our possible military savior in Iraq, and many relatively hopeful stories were written about the always "slow" development of the Iraqi forces. Money for the new army and its equipment poured in (striking amounts of which, $1-2 billion or more, have evidently simply been stolen at the Defense Ministry in Baghdad). In addition, the new Iraqi troops are lightly armed, partially out of American fears of what they might do with more powerful weaponry.

By this summer, about the time Cindy Sheehan first landed on the Presidential vacation doorstep, the "Iraqification" effort had been turned into a jingle-style slogan for George Bush. It was the President's only real response to calls, not only from war critics, newspaper editorial pages, and a growing few in Congress, but from within the top ranks of the military, for a withdrawal plan and a timetable of some sort for getting American forces out of the country. He intoned it again and again: "Our strategy is straightforward: As Iraqis stand up, Americans will stand down. And when Iraqi forces can defend their freedom by taking more and more of the fight to the enemy, our troops will come home with the honor they have earned."

The truth of the matter, however, is plain enough for all to see. There is no Iraqi national army. "The only really effective units of the new security forces," as Time magazine's Tony Karon pointed out at his blog recently, "are essentially militias of the Kurdish and Shiite parties loyal to their party leaders rather than to a new state." (Little wonder, by the way, that they are so hated and feared in largely Sunni areas of Iraq.)

When it comes to the rest of the Iraqi military: The Iraqi Air Force essentially doesn't exist -- or rather, the assumption clearly is that, for the foreseeable future, the Iraqi "Air Force" will be the U.S. Air Force. As for the Iraqi Navy, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman recently visited the port of Umm Qasr in "safe" southern Iraq. He had to be "outfitted in body armor" for the crossing of the Kuwaiti border, because IEDs have begun to be planted along the road to the port. With a kind of perverse admiration, he adds, "The enemy just keeps getting smarter. After the coalition forces introduced jamming devices to block roadside bombs detonated with cell phones, the insurgents started using infrared devices from garage door openers. So much ingenuity for so much malevolence."

His visit to the exceedingly modest 1,000-man Iraqi Navy, being trained at the port by the Brits, led to the observation (regularly made by Americans about every aspect of the Iraqi military) that "progress is slow. One day last week a boatload of Iraqi sailors decided to take a long lunch break and blew off the afternoon training. Too hot." The problem is that "middle-management Iraqis" won't "take the initiative." To correct this, it seems, would require "a huge cultural shift. Saddam's tyrannical rule over nearly three decades conditioned people here never to assume responsibility."

That certainly explains it; and it's pretty typical of American explanations, all of which might make sense, if those fiendishly clever insurgents weren't just down that road, exercising their ingenuity, taking the initiative like mad, upgrading their skills constantly, and fighting fiercely without the help of American trainers. I guess they just underwent a huge cultural shift that our reporters and pundits have somehow missed.

This stuff would, of course, be priceless and completely comic, if it weren't quite so tragic; if it weren't leading down desperate roads; if so many weren't dying in Iraq;, if the possibility of civil war, driven by a very minority "Sunni death cult," weren't growing; and if that country hadn't turned into a terrorist training ground. Or, as Gen. Casey put it in his testimony, in perfect militarese: "I'll tell you that levels of violence are a lagging indicator of success."

The question, of course, is: How come we can't find that switch the general spoke of, and "they" can? Or to propose a novel theory, what if the "huge cultural shift" Friedman mentions was us? What if we turned out the lights and smashed the switch. What if we invaded a country under false pretenses; occupied it;, began building huge, permanent military bases on its territory; let its capital and provincial cities be looted; disbanded its military; provided no services essential to modern life; couldn't even produce oil for gas tanks in an oil-rich land; bombed some of its cities, destroyed parts or all of others; put tens of thousands of its inhabitants in U.S. military-controlled jails (where prisoners would be subjected to barbaric tortures and humiliations); provided next to no jobs; opened the economy to every kind of depredation; set foreign corporations to loot the country; invited in tens of thousands of private "security contractors," heavily armed and under no legal constraints; and then asked large numbers of Iraqis, desperate for jobs that could be found nowhere else, to join a new "Iraqi" military force meant to defend a "government" that could hardly leave an American fortified enclave in its own capital. After that, our military trainers, our generals, our politicians, our reporters, and our pundits all began fretting about this force for not fighting fiercely, being independent, taking the initiative, or "standing up." The question should be, but isn't: Standing up for what? (Not dissimilarly, as corporate looters move in to get their "relief riches," what will those evacuees driven off by hurricanes Katrina and Rita, now homeless, car-less, and job-less, be standing up for when they sign on the dotted line for military recruiters who seem to have had less trouble getting to them with offers of help than most of the rest of our government?)

This phenomenon -- two sides that seem to come from different planets: our natives who just don't or can't or won't fight, who need years and vast sums of money and equipment, and then hardly stand up without an American "backbone" nearby; and theirs, who fight willingly, eagerly, fiercely, bravely, and with initiative -- was also a phenomenon of the Vietnam War era. Then, American officers regularly spoke admiringly of the other side, the Vietcong, the NVA, "Charlie," as brave, resourceful fighters and had scorn for "our" Vietnamese. But generally, even when, as in Friedman's piece, the descriptions of Iraqis who fight and those who don't can be found side by side, no comparisons are made, and the farce of attempting to "stand up" an Iraqi Army simply goes on.