I recently returned to Brunswick, Georgia,
via sailboat from the Bahamas in an exciting sleigh ride down the Gulf
Stream in 40kt winds and 12-14 foot following seas. But the political
nastiness here in the good ole USA makes the Stream look tame by comparison.
On the other hand, I have been out of touch with events, so perhaps
my sense of confusion and gloom is simply due to the shock of moving
from a culture where one's primary news interest was the daily weather
report from the fabulously inaccurate Barometer Bob.
I asked a friend whom I respect deeply
and who has worked in the US government for many years — a man I will
call "X" for reasons that will become apparent — to bring me up to speed
with his analysis of events. He responded with what is often called
a "net assessment" — a weighing of the pros and cons of what is going
on in Iraq in the form of a formal memorandum. Like most memorandums
it is written in the bland language of the US government, and it is
full of acronyms, but it is nevertheless very insightful and, I think,
important.
Attached herewith is that Net Assessment
for your review and evaluation. I urge you to read it carefully, including
the footnotes. The following list of acronyms is provided for your convenience.
[Comment: Civilian X is a professional member
of the US Government with extensive expertise and experience in issues
relating to the foreign policy and national security of the United States.]
Issue
The Abu Ghraib prison, incidents
focus attention on the ignored but evident fact that the U.S. Government
[USG] occupation of Iraq is not primarily an issue of how to militarily
defeat an insurgency. Rather, Iraq is a grave international political
problem whose solution lies in the political arena; text-book military
solutions generally exacerbate the underlying situation (e.g., by
stimulating insurgent recruiting). This memorandum suggests a course
of action for the USG that addresses this fundamental fact.
A Net Assessment of Operation Iraqi
Freedom [OIF]
Successes
1. U.S. military forces succeeded
in militarily defeating the Iraq Armed Forces and occupying the
national territory without military interference from third states
(a).
2. President Saddam Hussein and
most of his key leadership were captured.
3. A functioning and tolerably
stable Kurdish area has been established. Whether or not this remains
a success depends on (among other things) whether de facto
Kurdish autonomy in Iraq destabilizes the Kurdish situation in Turkey
(and possibly Iran).
4. Concerted USG psychological
operations [psy-ops] to condition the U.S. domestic population (to
include the news media and Congress) to accept OIF rationales were
highly effective in the pre-attack and attack phases. But like all
psy-ops, effectiveness attenuated as reality diverged from the message
(b).
Failures
1. OIF in general, and the Abu
Ghraib incidents in particular, have substantially increased the
circumstances favorable for terrorist recruitment in the Greater
Middle East [GME] and all other areas in which Muslims are a cohesive
minority. This is the gravest failure of OIF: it has directly
and indirectly weakened the national security posture of the United
States and the safety of its citizens. As such, OIF has backfired
in the larger context of the Global War on Terrorism [GWOT] as badly
as Vietnam backfired within the framework of containment policy.
2. More than any other event or
circumstance in the last 55 years, OIF has weakened the U.S.-led
global alliance structure (a substantially Truman-Marshall-Acheson
construct which includes the United Nations, NATO, ANZUS, and various
bilateral arrangements). While a looser global alignment following
the end of the cold war was inevitable, OIF has qualitatively transformed
the relationship to one of mutual suspicion and occasional hostility.
These circumstances make conduct of the GWOT more difficult and
require the USG to expend more political and financial capital to
continue it.
3. Approximately one-half of U.S.
military ground combat power is tied down for an indeterminate period
against an insurgency disposing mainly of stockpiled small arms,
RPGs, improvised bombs, and only an occasional guided weapon. This
circumstance weakens, both materially and psychologically, the U.S.
military deterrent posture in the rest of the world, and exacerbates
military overstretch (c).
4. Primary rationale for OIF—weapons
of mass destruction [WMD]—was demonstrated
by events to be erroneous or a fabrication. USG credibility in rationalizing
future preemptive wars has been diminished.
5. Secondary rationale for OIF—purported
links between the Baath regime and al Qaeda—was
demonstrated by events to be false. USG credibility has been damaged
among foreign publics and U.S. opinion leaders (this may be less
of a psy-op failure than it appears; the bulk of the U.S. electorate
continues to believe Iraq was responsible for 9/11).
6. Tertiary rationale for OIF—nationbuilding
Iraq into a stable pro-western democracy—is
now in the process of being compromised by events into a less democratic
but more politically expedient goal.
[Spinney's note - Reference 1 below
is report in the LA Times describes the vacillating policy wrt
to democratizing Iraq which "X" is referring to.]
7. Additional rationale for OIF—facilitating
a resolution of the Israel-Palestine dispute settlement—was
demonstrated by events to be false. On the contrary, the situation
is demonstrably worse. OIF proponents also asserted that the GME
would be stabilized by U.S. occupation of Iraq; the reverse is true.
8. Sub rosa rationale offered
by USG leaders to U.S. business elites and indirectly to American
consumers —that OIF would yield a bonus
of cheap, abundant oil—was demonstrated
by events to be false. Additionally, the occupation is not self-financing,
as was asserted before the war. Instead, $121 billion has been committed
to Iraq and another $25 billion has been proposed.
Interim Judgments
1. U.S.-led occupation of Iraq
is a quagmire that hinders successful prosecution of The Global
War on Terrorism. In effect if not intent (for intent cannot
yet be determined), the attacks on the World Trade Center and the
Pentagon were, in military terms, a classic "baited trap," which
lured USG policy makers into making a poor strategic choice: The
invasion and occupation of Iraq. USG leaders have occasionally likened
Iraq to a "bug zapper," i.e., a trap which attracts and kills international
terrorists. But the current situation suggests that a more accurate
analogy is that of a "petri dish," i.e., a breeding ground for terrorism,
both inside and outside of Iraq. Polls taken even before Fallujah
and the Abu Ghraib revelations indicate that one-third both of the
Sunni and Shia populations believe terrorist attacks against Coalition
forces are acceptable. Those figures should be understood in the
context of the fact that it only requires relatively small minorities
to make a successful insurgency, e.g., out of 17 million South Vietnamese
there were approximately 250,000 Vietcong infrastructure (slightly
more than one percent of the population) and barely 50,000 Vietcong
combatants at any given time.
2. Time is not on the side of
the occupation. It is tacitly assumed that each crisis or spike
in violence is a self-contained event; once that event passes, things
will improve as "reconstruction takes hold." Likewise, USG leaders
state that the 30 June handover of some limited functions to an
Iraqi Interim Government will confer legitimacy and attenuate hostility
towards Americans. It is more likely that the handover will be of
minor relevance to the strategic situation; more relevant will have
been the fact that two additional months will have passed without
policies having been implemented to extricate the United States
from a quagmire or otherwise improve the situation.
3. Options are narrowing, not
widening. Until August 2003 the USG could have induced the United
Nations to assume a greater burden in Iraq with relatively minor
concessions. The blowing up of the UN facility, Baghdad, took that
option off the table. Other great powers might have been induced
to send troops if, e.g., there had been more open bidding on contracts
and sharing of authority. Now the security situation has deteriorated
to the extent that no "sweeteners" will induce participation on
essentially U.S. terms. The Coalition Provisional Authority [CPA]
could have co-opted the Ayatollahs and other Big Men from a position
of strength and effectively ruled Iraq through them. The CPA may
yet have to do this, but from a position of weakness. The Coalition
of the Willing is getting smaller, not larger.
4. One more incident could make
a barely tenable situation disastrous. Abu Ghraib and other
prisons contained sections with incarcerated females and juveniles.
Any hypothetical abuses from that quarter that might come to
light would be even more explosive than what has gone before. So
would any possible participation in these activities by Israeli
nationals (d). Additional incidents would stimulate insurgent recruitment
among 25 million Iraqis as well as recruitment of international
terrorists within a pool of one billion Muslims. Such a development
would further increase the danger to U.S. armed forces personnel,
U.S. citizens abroad, and high value targets within the United States
itself.
Recommendations
Short-Term Solutions
1. Clean house. Fire all
members of the Iraqi National Congress [INC] on the Governing Counsel,
particularly corrupt individuals like Ahmed Chalabi. Secure all
records and documents from these persons.
2. Change the face of the CPA.
Replace the Americans who give the daily CPA briefing with Iraqis.
USG personnel who want to give press briefings on Iraq should do
so from Washington; the current set-up resembles a colonial administration
and is perceived as such by Iraqis.
3. Stop the corruption.
Credible public information states that up to 20 percent of Iraq
contract funds are lost to corruption. USG should appoint an Inspector
General to the CPA and empower the General Accounting Office to
audit reconstruction contracts (the CPA has been exempted from the
Inspector General Act and GAO audits).
4. Reduce the number of targets.
Pull back troops from sweeps and search and destroy missions
and replace them to the extent possible with Iraqi security forces.
Whether they are militarily competent is less relevant than the
fact that they are less likely to provoke firefights that kill innocent
bystanders and thereby aid insurgent recruitment.
Definitive Solutions
1. A fresh start requires fresh
thinking. A physician who botches an operation is not the most
plausible candidate for repairing the damage. At a minimum, USG
must purge from government office those with greatest culpability
for misusing their positions on behalf of policies not in the national
interest; these persons are commonly referred to as neoconservatives.
They include but are not limited to: Paul Wolfowitz, Douglas Feith,
I. Lewis Libby, David Wurmser, Elliot Abrams, Steven Hadley, John
Hannah, and John Bolton. Others who bear responsibility hold higher
governmental positions, so it is probable that USG institutional
mechanisms would hesitate before acting decisively; however, their
judgment has been so consistently lacking with regard to Iraq and
GWOT that their removal is essential: Donald Rumsfeld, George Tenet,
and Condoleezza Rice. They have fostered an environment conducive
neither to sound judgment nor honesty.
2. Prepare for an early departure.
As GEN Odom and others have asserted, for the sake of American
security and economic power alike, US. should remove its forces
from Iraq as rapidly as possible. "We have failed," he states. "The
issue is how high a price we're going to pay ... Less, by getting
out sooner, or more, by getting out later?" While it may be possible,
by completely abandoning the Geneva Convention, to grind down the
immediate insurgent threat through military means, the collateral
damage to civilians would make long-term pacification of Iraq even
more untenable. At the same time, such actions could destabilize
Saudi Arabia, Egypt, and other Arab-Islamic states. Perceived oppression
of Iraq's 60-percent Shiite majority could lead to massive and sustained
Iranian intervention. Given the Coalition's tenuous supply lines
between Kuwait and Baghdad, potential Iranian intervention could
be roughly analogous to Chinese intervention in Korea in November
1950 (which resulted in the longest sustained retreat in U.S. military
history). Accordingly, the USG should make preparations to withdraw
all military forces by 1 October 2004 as it simultaneously implements
step 3 (below).
3. Transfer military operations
to a coalition of Islamic states friendly to the USG. Under
the aegis of a United Nations Security Council resolution the USG
should hand off military occupation to a coalition of friendly Islamic
states such as Egypt, Jordan, and Indonesia (e). While they may
demand a high monetary price to participate, it would in any case
be cheaper than funding an ongoing U.S. occupation. At the same
time, the CPA would be disestablished and its functions transferred
to United Nations agencies. This step would require painful public
concessions; it is accordingly unlikely that the authors of current
policy would have the character or sensitivity to implement them
(refer to step 1 above) Finally, a future U.S. embassy in Baghdad
should be much smaller than the one currently planned.
4. Refocus the Global War on
Terrorism to its proper objective: al Qaeda. Stabilizing Afghanistan
alone (a larger and more populous country than Iraq and possessing
the most challenging terrain on earth) is a difficult enough objective
without the enormous drain of manpower, intelligence assets, money,
and policy focus created by the distraction of Iraq. Afghanistan
is in danger of reverting to chaos and warlordism such that al Qaeda
can re-establish itself in sanctuaries. Internationally, the USG
should de-emphasize use of conventional military forces for GWOT
and increase emphasis on cooperative international intelligence
efforts, police work, tracking financial flows, and strengthened
international coordination to investigate and combat terrorism.
NOTES
(a) One should not, however, overstate
the military achievement of defeating in conventional military operations
an internationally isolated state comprised of mostly level, treeless
terrain and with a pre-war GDP smaller than that of Fairfax County,
VA; which had been for 12 years under the most comprehensive international
sanctions in history; which disposed of a partially-destroyed (in
the Gulf War) 1970s-era Soviet equipped military manned by incompetent
officers and cowed conscripts; and which (according to statements
by a captured Iraqi general) placed no more than 15 percent of its
total military forces against U.S. and U.K. forces.
(b) U.S. domestic psy-ops were
generally successful owing to cultural, educational, and religious
peculiarities of the U.S. domestic population. A perceptive study
of U.S. psy-op techniques in OIF is the following: Truth from
These Podia: Summary of a Study of Strategic Influence, Perception
Management, Strategic Information Warfare and Strategic Psychological
Operations in Gulf II, by Sam Gardiner, COL, USAF (Retired).
U.S. information operations in third countries have been poor; Pew
Research Center polling of international opinion confirms this:
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?ReportID=206. U.S.
psy-op techniques against enemies (characterized by heavy metal
music, crudely translated threats, and similar methods) appear to
stiffen enemy resistance.
(c) The USG serves the national
interest better by using military force to deter wars, or by using
it to assist in a broad alliance, than when it attempts unilaterally
to fight a determined foe on his own territory. U.S. elites are
consistently misled, more than six decades later, by the myth that
the United States won World War II mostly single-handed. In reality,
seven-eighths of all German ground combat time throughout the war
was expended against the Soviet Union. China absorbed a similar
proportion of Japanese ground combat power. What the United States
accomplished was essentially the deployment of its gross national
product in coalition with a broad alliance to expel Axis forces
from third-party territory. When U.S. leadership has forgotten this
model (as in Vietnam) the results are generally unfavorable. This
problem is compounded by the emergence of Fourth Generation Warfare
[4GW], a historical phase shift which has caught the technocratic,
process-oriented, and historically illiterate U.S. elites unprepared
(d) USG equivocation about the
legal responsibility of contractors, and obfuscation about even
the identities of subcontractors, are suggestive indicators. So
is the fact that the USG put the issue of treatment of prisoners
under the control of the Under Secretary for Policy, Douglas Feith,
rather than under bona fide experts in military and international
law.
(e) There is some risk of GME destabilization
in that the people of these countries might perceive their leaders
as flunkies of the USG (even more so than heretofore) for undertaking
a peacekeeping mission in Iraq. But the dynamic could work the other
way: that these countries are "rescuing" the situation in an Islamic
state - a situation the United States was incapable of handling.
The soldiers of these states might also be more culturally acceptable
to ordinary Iraqi citizens than Western soldiery. In any case, the
risk is worth taking.
[Disclaimer: In accordance with 17 U.S.C.
107, this material is distributed without profit or payment to those
who have expressed a prior interest in receiving this information for
non-profit research and educational purposes only.]
U.S. Tries to Adapt as Options Dwindle
A series of policy reversals in Iraq shows strategies yielding to political
realities.
...
The Bush administration has junked
one plan after another since last fall as it has groped its way, by
trial and error, to a new order in Iraq. Officials have
- all despite earlier vows to do otherwise.
...
"We've got to get this thing moving,
and we just don't have that many friends," said a longtime government
expert on Iraq, who asked to remain unidentified. "That means we've
got to husband the people who are with us in this. We are very weak."
...
...
Another risk is that Iraqis would view
the interim government as corrupt, he added.
...