Iraqization Now

Melvin R. Laird, Defense Secretary under Richard M. Nixon, noted in a recent issue of Foreign Affairs (Volume 84, Number 6, November/December 2005) that the current Bush policy of “stand up, stand down” in Iraq is structurally indistinguishable from the strategy of “Vietnamization” Laird himself forged during that prior conflict. I would agree with him, though for different reasons, that the outcome of Vietnamization should not engender absolute skepticism of the prospects of “Iraqization.” Iraqization may succeed, not because Vietnamization ever stood a chance of success (as Laird argues), but because Iraq and Vietnam are different places conditioned by different historical forces. Where no critical mass of support for a partitioned Vietnamese nation could be generated in Vietnam, Iraqi history demonstrates that a critical basis of support for a unified Iraqi state does exist under certain conditions. The US might see some provisional success in Iraq because its goals serendipitously accord with the aggregate political will of the Iraqi people.

If one accepts this analysis of “Iraqization” and its potential for success, flaws in the Bush strategy of “stand-up, stand down” become apparent. On returning from Tuesday’s trip to Baghdad Bush declared “it will endanger our country to pull out of Iraq before we accomplish the mission." Such analysis overestimates the degree of control the US enjoys over final outcomes in Iraq. If the best hope of Iraqization lies in its correspondence to the general will of the Iraqi people, the first principle for “mission success” among US leaders must be “first do no harm.” In this regard it is as or more dangerous for Coalition troops to withdraw too late as too early. One lesson the prior experience of Vietnamization does afford is that a long period of habituation to dependency can cripple a regime, eroding its ability to establish its own authority or effectively control its own military assets.

Moreover, the notion that the US will “stand down” as the Iraqi military “stands up” confuses the causal forces at work in Iraq. Pundits among both opponents and supporters of the Bush policy have made a talking point of the lack of “combat readiness” of the Iraqi Security Forces, but both sides confuse or ignore the origins of this condition. The transpired time since the invasion of Iraq now equals the interval between Pearl Harbor Day and February 1945. In that time the US military went from an active-duty force of 458,000 to one of 12,123,000 personnel. Why has the time in which the US produced 11.6 million soldiers and sailors fit for the invasion of Europe and the Battle of Iwo Jima not been sufficient to produce an Iraqi military capable of fighting the insurgency? Even if one accounts for variables like the increasingly high-tech nature of warfare and the vagaries of training in a quasi-combat zone, one cannot account for the disparity between these two efforts at militarization by recourse to technical or financial explanations.

The Iraqi military does not perform as a professional, national army because it does not feel like a professional, national army. Indeed, this is not a merely subjective reality. As long as the US military remains, Iraqi forces will never fully operate as an autonomous military force. Thus far the Bush policy of Iraqization has exemplified none of the confidence in the Baghdad regime that the Nixon policy of Vietnamization did in the Thieu regime of South Vietnam. The Iraqi military has almost none of the heavy weapons that were lavished upon the ARVN during the closing years of the Vietnam War. The Iraqi Army has only 99 battle tanks, Iraq’s air force consists of 24 transport and utility helicopters and 8 reconnaissance planes. Saddam Hussein was allowed to launch more aerial firepower in the suppression of the Shi’ite uprisings of 1991 than have been entrusted to the Iraqi Security Forces in the face of the current insurgency. In practical terms, without the air support and armor provided by the Coalition the Iraqi army takes the field in a state of virtual combat parity with the insurgents.

Though US commanders declare that Iraqi forces are increasingly “taking the lead” in combat operations against the insurgency, every such operation is an object lesson to Iraqi soldiers on their dependent status, as all are contingent upon coordination with US artillery, armor, and air power. Waiting for Iraqi soldiers to “stand up” under such circumstances is a losing gambit. If the Iraqi Security Forces ever “stand up” it will be as, not before US soldiers withdraw from Iraq. Providing the Baghdad government politically establishes its authority and legitimacy, Iraq’s soldiers will rise to the task of defending it if and when they are fully entrusted with that task. Conversely, the authority and legitimacy of the Baghdad regime will only increase as it is perceived to control a professional and autonomous military. Thus both the stability of the Baghdad regime and the efficiency of the Iraqi military await the withdrawal of US forces, not vice-versa.

If the Bush administration were to be completely candid, it might admit that its reticence to “stand down” flows from the same impulse that has prevented it from fortifying the Iraqi Security Forces with heavy weapons. US leaders do not fear the actions of the insurgency in the wake of a US withdrawal any more than they do those of certain constituents of the Baghdad government. Highly independent elements like Moqtada al-Sadr’s Mahdi Army or Ali al-Hakim’s SCIRI might be tempted, in the wake of a US withdrawal, to seize the military assets of the nascent Iraqi state and turn them against other constituencies of the Baghdad government itself rather than the insurgency. Here again, however, a reluctance to withdraw derives from an overestimation of the degree to which the US can direct or control Iraqi political agents in the long term. If al-Sadr or al-Hakim are determined to machinate for power to the detriment of the Baghdad regime there is little the US may do to dissuade them in the long term. More depends on how skillfully and with what degree of integrity Iraq’s current leaders establish, secure, and preserve the secular institutions of the new state than on how long US soldiers remain on the ground.

With a fully-staffed and democratically elected government in place in Baghdad the time is now right for a policy of Iraqization to shift into high gear. President Bush’s assertion that “ it will endanger our country to pull out of Iraq before we accomplish the mission” casts the strategic debate into false terms. Advocacy of ground-force withdrawal is not necessarily, as Karl Rove would characterize it, a vote of no confidence in the possibility of success in Iraq. Iraq’s experiment in democracy may well fail for reasons that are beyond the control of the US, but to the degree that the US military may influence the future evolution of Iraqi politics at all it can do far more damage by staying in Iraq too long than it can by leaving too quickly. Even the recent death of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi does not argue against this principle. Reducing the US troop presence on the ground in Iraq would not seriously degrade the American regional tactical capabilities (intelligence gathering, remote aerial targeting) that brought down Zarqawi. In the final analysis, decreasing the visible US military footprint in Iraq will do far more to bleed the insurgency of political capital than Coalition firepower has done to deter or defeat insurgent operations. A staged withdrawal of US forces over the next year to a year and a half is the wisest strategic course, otherwise the prospects for the success of Iraqization will rapidly deteriorate to resemble those of Vietnamization just over thirty years ago.