The Army and Vietnam, part 3

by Ted on January 25, 2006

Still more from The Army and Vietnam by Andrew F. Krepinevich. What strikes me in this passage- and I know this is done to death outside of the Pajamasphere- is the incompatability of counterinsurgency strategy with the Rumsfeldian goal of minimizing troop numbers. The coalition in Iraq had a striking advantage, which Americans in Vietnam did not: they were replacing an unpopular dictator with a much more inspiring fledgling democracy. Maybe we could have short-circuited the escalation of violent ethnic conflict if we had paid sufficient attention on Iraqi security. I don’t know.

(As always, Arms and Influence has more.)

(UPDATE: This sort of corruption, of course, is another big part of the story.)

Quote taken down. Buy the book.

{ 48 comments }

1

Brendan 01.25.06 at 11:27 am

Hmmm….well Krepinevich is a professional anti-insurgency type expert and I’m not, so I suppose we should listen to what he has to say. But if you want my uninformed opinion, I think the key paragraph, and the one where it all goes wrong, is here:

‘After the army has driven off or killed the main guerilla forces, its units must remain in the area while local paramilitary forces are created and the influence of the police force is reestablished. The paramilitary forces should be drawn from among the inhabitants of the area and trained in counterinsurgency operations such as small-unit patrolling, night operations, and the ambush. Resurrection of the local police force is equally important. Properly trained, the police can make an invaluable contribution to the defeat of the insurgents by weeding out the political infrastructure, thus preventing the reemergence of the insurgent movement once the army departs.’

Now. Let’s bend over backwards to be fair and assume it is easy or at least doable to drive out the insurgents. The key problem is this, in a nutshell: to create a non-corrupt, well disciplined ‘indigenous’ police and (then) army.

Now the key to this is not tactics or any specific anti-insurgency model or anything like that. It’s quite simply: money. If you pay the police well they have no incentive to be corrupt (take bribes etc.), and if they have adequate numbers they have little incentive to be brutal. So you don’t just need a well paid police force, you need a well paid, well disciplined police force with plenty of policemen and women.

The problem is: who is to pay for all this? Not the US: they have already indicated their ‘financial patience’ is drying up. But Iraq is bankrupt. So: who pays?

Moreover it’s clear that this police force (and then, on the same model, army) has to be set up immediately, when you have a ‘blank slate’ with which to operate. When things are allowed to drag on a culture of corruption and brutality can (and in Iraq, has) been allowed to develop, in which even the honest cops, to get on, have to ‘turn a blind eye’ to all the bad things they know are going on.

And of course, this new, corrupt, brutal police force acts as a recruiting force for the insurgency, as they are then seen as simply the tool of the occupier: and since they act for the highest bidder, and the occupier will almost always be the highest bidder, this is usually true.

This is only the start of the problems but it is the key one. Counter-insurgency is, above all, costly, and it seems that the coffers of the US in Iraq (and soon, it seems, Afghanstan) are almost empty.

2

Brendan 01.25.06 at 12:02 pm

I have just read the link, incidentally, about the corruption. This illustrates my point. It’s a lot easier to ‘nip this in the bud’ right at the start (a chance that was missed) than trying to ‘uncorrupt’ a country that has been allowed to go that way. The problem now is that even if money was poured into the country it would probably just be pocketed by various people and not end up in the wage packets of the ‘native’ Iraqi army and police.

3

abb1 01.25.06 at 12:19 pm

Poland was occupied for what – 6-7 years? They had local polizei forces, local paramilitary forces and all that. And in the end Polish reistance managed to maintain not one but two organized armies there. I guess the Germans didn’t read the book.

4

Ron F 01.25.06 at 12:59 pm

Ted –

“The coalition in Iraq had a striking advantage, which Americans in Vietnam did not: they were replacing an unpopular dictator with a much more inspiring fledgling democracy.”

Huh? Wasn’t the original (public) motive for invasion to disarm Iraq? And wasn’t the original intention to shoehorn Ahmed Chalabi into power, despite him having virtually zero support in Iraq? And didn’t the (deeply flawed) elections take place due to pressure from the Iraqis, with Sistani as figurehead?

5

y81 01.25.06 at 1:10 pm

Not to be cynical, but I doubt very much that anything the U.S. could have done would have nipped corruption in the bud in Iraq or any other Arab country. It’s deeply engrained in that culture.

Of course, if success in pacifying Iraq was going to require an uncorrupt indigenous paramilitary and police force, that would count as an argument against invading in the first place, but it doesn’t seem to me like a fair criticism of the execution of the occupation.

6

Bro. Bartleby 01.25.06 at 1:32 pm

… nor nipped corruption in the bud in Washington DC … seems to be engrained in that culture … I guess. But I wonder, is academia corruption free? Is the corporate world corruption free? Do we actually require a corruption-free Iraq before we will consider their government legitimate?

7

joel turnipseed 01.25.06 at 1:45 pm

Interesting series of threads, Ted. Of course, a lot of this is just elaborations on what T.E. Lawrence said in Seven Pillars and, within the U.S. military, what the Army learned fighting the Plains Indians/Filipinos & the Marine Corps learned fighting the Filipinos/Banana Republics (all discreditable actions, more or less, from a state policy standpoint–but at least the USMC learned something from them: Keith Bickel’s Mars Learning: The Marine Corps’ Development of Small Wars Doctrine, 1915-1940 is a fascinating read).

One thing beyond the troop level question that I learned from a retired Special Forces general last spring–and a story I haven’t seen anyone follow up/check–is that during military downsizing of 1990s we gutted our Civil Affairs battalions, including something like 70% of the reserve component. Now if you wanted to go into a major invasion with a severe handicap against making it work, I think that would be a good way to do it.

Alas, a highly un-sexy story for the newspapers.

8

Barry 01.25.06 at 2:02 pm

Brendan, the corruption problem is even worse, once a functioning guerrilla force is around. They can ‘pay off’ the police in violence, for screwing with them. It becomes much safer for the police to squeeze unconnected schmucks for bribes, then – no worries about an RPG round through the bedroom window.

As for nipping it in the bud, that’s almost the opposite of the administration strategy. It seemed to rely on having enough troops and firepower to kill some people and piss off the survivors, but not enough to lock things down.

9

roger 01.25.06 at 2:08 pm

I have to agree with Ron F. It seems evident to me that we did not replace a dictatorship with a fledgling democracy. We replaced it first with the governance of a floundering old American, Jay Garner (who at least had the sense to know that Americans, completely ignorant of even the most minimal elements of Iraqi culture, couldn’t run the state and advocated immediate elections) and then the governance of the CPA under an American businessman, Paul Bremer, who not only ruled Iraq without any supervision for Iraq’s money (the famous 8 billion or so that is unaccounted for), which is the kind of non-trasparency one associates with dictatorship, but also used the judicial branch as a mere branch of the executive (the shutting down of Sadr’s papers and his arrest warrent, for instance, were – comically — filtered through the court, completely vitiating any chance of the court appearing to be autonomous).

If anything, the CPA was your normal military dictatorship government, not very different from Nasser’s in the aftermath of the officer’s coup in the fifties, except that the financial corruption was completely speeded up, and its beneficiaries existed entirely outside of the country.

The rule of law, without which democracy is a sham, has been violated at the whim of the Americans even after the CPA supposedly ceded its sovereignty. For instance, the CPA laid down rules for the time period within which the constitution was to be created and voted upon. The national assemlby, of course, under American pressure, simply tossed out those rules when they became inconveniant.

And this is only to focus on a small part of Iraq — it is a baghdad-centric account. If one looks at, say, what the British have protected in Basra, it is pretty evident that security concerns — for the British themselves — long ago overthrew even the flimsiest shred of democratic activity. The Sicilian mafia is more democratic than the town council of Basra.

The reduction of democracy to a function of the slogan, vote early and vote often, means the collapse of democracy into mere farce. I would view the models the occupiers planted in Iraq as being anti-democratic in the extreme.

10

J Thomas 01.25.06 at 3:15 pm

Suppose that when Wolfowitz said that iraqi oil revenues could finance both the whole reconstruction and pay for the whole invasion, he was actually describing policy and not just making a wild off-the-cuff lie.

If the Bush administration believed that iraq had much more reserves than they’d announced, we could quickly get the investment to develop those reserves. Iraq would be a rich country, not under sanctions. Lots of jobs, lots of money, why fight?

I haven’t seen any evidence about that. It seems like a remarkably stupid lie, if he didn’t believe it. But suppose it’s true. And then they took Baghdad and the Oil Ministry and found that Saddam’s records indicated he had rather *less* reserves than he’d claimed. What would they do then? It would be like buying a subsidiary thinking it would be a cash cow, and then finding out about the problems that would cost a whole lot of money to fix. OK, you made a mistake. You don’t want to sell out quick or the stockholders will know it was a big mistake. Clearly the better solution is put it on life support so they don’t get too irate, but don’t pour more money into it than you have to. Look for some other good result to distract shareholder attention.

I think the analogy works pretty well.

We might have done OK at setting up democracy. But Bremer noticed that religious candidates tended to win, and Bremer didn’t want that. So he preferred to appoint loyal expatriate iraqis instead.

Also, there’s the matter of deciding who the insurgents are. You want to get truces with some potential insurgents and come down hard on other, weaker ones. The one kind sees that you’ll probably be out of there in a while regardless, so why should they kill themselves getting you out when the other guys are already doing it? Once we decided who the insurgents were going to be, then we couldn’t very well have democracy in their areas — we’d be setting up insurgent local governments. Which we had for example in Fallujah. The local government tried to be polite to us but it was clearly an insurgent government, voted in by an insurgent population. We didn’t want that. We wanted to kill off the insurgents and have a democracy restricted to iraq

11

J Thomas 01.25.06 at 3:19 pm

Sorry, a keyboard error.

We wanted to kill off the insurgents and have a democracy restricted to iraqis who didn’t oppose us.

And it had to be done on the cheap. It could be argued that the money siphoned out of iraq by contractors etc was good for the USA — it’s like getting money out of a failing subsidiary before you close it down. Why spend money on something that’s going to fail anyway?

12

Carlos 01.25.06 at 3:22 pm

It’s a good piece by Krepinevich, but it seems to assume that the guerrilla controls territory mainly by fear. What if the local population actually supports the guerrilla not because they fear them, by because they agree with them. If destroying the political infraestructure of the guerrilla means killing most of the civilian population, ¿what are the choices?

13

Brendan 01.25.06 at 3:34 pm

Y81
I think this issue was touched on in the ‘Tokyo nerve gas’ post, but I’m deeply sceptical about explanations that depend (implicitly in this case) on the ‘Arabic national/racial character’ or anything like that. I don’t know where Iraq was in the 70s in terms of the world corruption league, but I know that it’s near the top now. Extreme totalitarian regimes can have many problems but ‘common or garden’ corruption tends not to be one of them. On the contrary: everyone is honest because the penalty for ‘everything’ is death so people are too terrified to break even minor laws.

The fact is that if a police force is badly paid relative to the rest of the population then you have an incentive for corruption in a way you don’t if the police force is highly paid: you just have to assume people acting as rational utility maximisers. You don’t need to invoke the ‘Arabic character’ or anything like that. Bro Bartleby’s point is apposite here. The Abramoff scandal would seem (to an outsider) to indicate that Congressional (at least) American politics is now institutionally corrupt. Is anyone pointing a finger at the ‘white man’s’ or ‘anglo-saxon’ propensity towards corruption?

I could have gone on (and on and on…..) about the problems following from this, but there are obvious problems that ‘The Coalition are heroic liberators’ crowd won’t admit. That doesn’t mean they weren’t/aren’t real. The fact is (and this IS a fact) that if ‘your’ country (whatever that might be) had done nothing to another country, and that other country invaded and occupied your country, you would be resentful, no matter how liberated you might feel (if you deny this, my response is simple: i don’t believe you). Therefore the people who tend to ‘collaborate’ with the invaders will tend to be the sort of people who were described in ye olden days as people of ‘bad character’: i.e. they will be doing it purely for the money. So you have a problem right for the start: your army and police force are not staffed by bright eyed, intelligent, fearless patriots, but instead by people there to make a quick buck. And these people will tend to be more quickly swayed by the option of a large bribe to avoid doing all that paperwork.

And once you have a culture of corruption, it’s hard to get rid of. Who would want to join the Iraqi army or police force now? Everyone knows the culture is one of dissatisfaction, poor training, poor morale, poor pay. So they become pitied, looked down on, and as this happens, they become increasingly likely to lash out. And then they become despised.

And it’s at this point that the insurgents message: ‘they are just stooges for the invaders’ starts to spread, along with increasing insurgent targetting of those collaborating with the Iraqi army/police force. Result: even poorer morale, which means more bribery, corruption etc. etc. etc.

The end result is that every time the Americans try and ‘hand things over’ to the ‘regular’ Iraqi army, that army promptly collapses. And this is not to mention the problem of insurgents masquerading as police/army, insurgent spies, and so forth.

I believe it can’t be said enough that when Bush and Blair state that ‘we will leave when the Iraqi army is ready to take over’ they are effectively saying ‘we will stay forever’ because (without a radical revision of tactics) the Iraqi army will never be ready.

14

abb1 01.25.06 at 3:39 pm

¿what are the choices?

Why, death squads, of course.

Sunnis accuse the Interior Ministry, run by a Shi’ite minister, of running sectarian death squads that target their community, a charge the ministry denies.

The Iraqi Islamic Party, the biggest Sunni Arab political grouping, which has committed itself to talks on a coalition government, said the gunmen had “come down like wolves”.

“Interior Ministry uniforms are now recognised … as the uniforms of terrorism,” it said in a statement. “We call on people to be aware of these criminal gangs … and to face them in any appropriate way to defend their souls, honour and wealth.”

15

Barry 01.25.06 at 3:46 pm

J Thomas: “Lots of jobs, lots of money, why fight?” Even that would have probably failed, because (a) this administration would have increased its skim percentage, keeping everybody in Iraq poor and (b) they could screw up a one-car parade.

16

Maynard Handley 01.25.06 at 4:12 pm

This emphasis on an infrastructure to be put in place by the US (or whatever the occupying power is) reminds me of a lecture I listened to a year or so ago. The lecture was about why some newly independent countries succeed and why some fail, and the thesis advanced was that successful countries were those whose governments did not have a single large pot of money available (perhaps a sugar dady like the US/USSR, perhaps mineral wealth) because they had to create an infrastructure to collect taxes, and with this infrastructure came both some (albeit perhaps limited) government awareness of conditions all over the country and offices to do something about it, and some expectation on the part of the population that they get something in return for the taxes.

What was especially interesting was that as Q&A opened up, a man, obviously champing at the bit, jumped up to challenge this. What was quite clear was that he had no intellectual argument against this thesis and its various supporting facts, but that he simply could not accept on ideological grounds that anything, not a single good thing, could be said about taxes — and so we heard all sorts of insane and irrelevant claims about how taxes (the very idea of taxes, with no reference to tax levels or tax structure) would kill initiative, blah, blah.

I mention this story because the parallel seems obvious.
If you have people running a country who are so ideologically blinkered about the idea that the only good government is a dead government (drown government, flush it down a bathtub etc), how on earth can you expect them to do anything useful after the war, whether that is to establish a police force or to create a health and education system or fix electricity generation?

17

radek 01.25.06 at 5:41 pm

“not one but two organized armies there”

Three actually. I’m not sure whether you’re forgetting the far-right or the far-left, but probably the former.

18

y81 01.25.06 at 6:03 pm

Brendan, I certainly didn’t intend to make, and don’t believe I have made, a statement about anyone’s “racial character.” I find such statements offensive. For example, I certainly don’t believe that Arab-Americans are more corrupt than other Americans.

Which doesn’t mean that we agree. No doubt you believe that if a group of intelligent, left-leaning, well-meaning, culturally sensitive Western academics opened a university in an Arab country, their indigenous staff wouldn’t be much more corruption-prone than the staff at an American university. I’m confident that they would be.

19

jet 01.25.06 at 8:31 pm

y81, are you talking about Staff or Faculty? :P

20

abb1 01.26.06 at 2:19 am

I remember ‘Krajowa’ and ‘Ludowa’. What’s the third one?

21

Zephania 01.26.06 at 3:27 am

Isn’t trying to illuminate the analysis through an American light misleading?

Take a look at Global Guerrillas – the whole blog. At the time of writing, the first story is about “THE GUERRILLA OIL CARTEL” and describes how these people (terrorists – no; crooks, racketeers) control 5 million barrels per day of oil (cf Saudi 2 million barrels per day). What America is going to do about it and the Iraqi war are tangential issues. It isn’t even worth debating whether or not the invasion made the situation worse: it did.

In short, we’re looking at the demise of the nation state. Any analysis that doesn’t take this into account is suspect.

22

Andrew Brown 01.26.06 at 4:11 am

Well, wrt Poland — it was only four years: the Poles had very great reason to hate the Germans, and to hope for deliverance (or at least a defeat for the Germans) from the outside; they had all those forests. Remember that the Russians did then manage to stamp out all guerilla activity in Poland and the Baltics within four or five years of taking over. I don’t think Krepinevich ius being unrealistic.

23

abb1 01.26.06 at 5:05 am

Remember that the Russians did then manage to stamp out all guerilla activity in Poland and the Baltics within four or five years of taking over.

If by ‘Poland’ you mean the part of Poland annexed by Stalin in 1939, then I don’t think that’s true. I don’t have any links at the moment, but it is my impression that organized armed resistance in Western Ukraine and Lithuania was active well into the 1950s and some spontaneous anti-Russian/anti-Soviet terrorist activity pretty much until the end of the USSR.

And if by Poland you mean Poland – well, communist Poland was after all a sovereign state. If I’m not mistaken they even had a multi-party political system there. A client state for sure, but no more so than, say, Japan or South Korea during the same period.

24

Alex 01.26.06 at 5:56 am

Further, as everywhere in occupied Europe, the Germans were able to keep control of the bits they cared about – industrial centres, railways and such – up to the bitter end. Even in 1944, when the various resistances sallied out of their remote bases to attack the LoCs, they usually got a beating; major operations were launched to beat them back, up to and including airborne assaults on the base areas themselves.

25

abb1 01.26.06 at 6:12 am

Well, sure, if the goal of counter-insurgency is to control industrial centers and railroads – then it’s not unrealistic, but that’s not what Mr. Krepinevich is writing about. Also, the Warsaw uprising killed 15-20 thousand German soldiers in the course of a couple of months. That’s not peanuts.

26

soru 01.26.06 at 6:15 am

is the incompatability of counterinsurgency strategy with the Rumsfeldian goal of minimizing troop numbers

I think this is specifically wrong.

The problem with the whole US strategy is that it fell between two stools:

1. enough troops to guarantee a secure occupation independantly of the opinions and actions of the locals. If they had had enough troops to do this, that would have been a political dead end anyway, as it would be practically impossible to withdraw from such a situation.

2. few enough troops to be able to ignore problems instead of getting into unnecessary fights with irrelevant local groups (see fallujah). Forces in Afghanistan have had some success precisely because they have been able to ignore the problems of drug cultivation, warlordism and womems’s rights in rural areas in favour of dealing with solvable problems. As an aside, toleration for drug cultivation is supposed to be ending, which will probably end that success.

As the arms and influence blog says, the need in Iraq was and is for fewer, not more, troops. That forces decision makers to stop thinking in absolute terms of ‘what is right and wrong’ and instead on ‘what can we achieve’.

soru

27

lurker 01.26.06 at 6:42 am

Abb1, the genocidal Nazi policies in Poland made the creation of any reliable Polish local forces quite impossible.
Nazi policies in all occupied countries were so destructive and exploitative that compared to them almost any government anywhere looks not too bad.
Even hard-core Fascists like Quisling and Mussert were disappointed and demoralized by the Nazis.
They’re really not a good benchmark to use.

28

Brendan 01.26.06 at 6:42 am

‘As the arms and influence blog says, the need in Iraq was and is for fewer, not more, troops. ‘

Well I don’t think that you’ll finding many people arguing against that proposition here. But the key problem is: who replaces the Americans as they leave? The Iraqi army is weak, corrupt, and thoroughly infiltrated by the insurgency. This situation, despite the pious wishes of the Bush/Blairites is unlikely to alter anytime soon.

I don’t mean to beat this metaphorical comparison to death (and a metaphor is all it is) but all this is UNCANNILY similar to Vietnam. Everyone forgets nowadays that from about 1968 the Americans were desperate to get out of Vietnam. Desperate. The problem was that everytime they tried to pull out, the South Vietnamese army would begin to disintegrate or (what was worse, from the Americans point of view) South Vietnamese politicians would fall over themselves to do deals with the North. So the Americans would be drawn back in again, would build up the South Vietnamese army, carry out all the ‘approved’ anti-insurgency tactics and so on. Then they would pull out and the whole process would begin again. Eventually the Americans were reduced to a massive bombing campaign from the air to try and ‘square’ this particular circle, but in the end it was all for nothing.

Up until now, the Americans haven’t even begun to try to pull out, but it’s safe to say that when they do (and it’s only a matter of time) this whole process will begin again.

The paradox is this. The Americans can defeat the insurgency (or at least contain it) easily. But the Iraqi army can’t do it at all. So everytime the Americans try to leave they will inevitably be pulled back in, as the ‘state’ of Iraq will begin to disintegrate into civil war as soon as the Americans try to pull out. And the Americans re-entry will then make the growing civil war worse. And so it will go on.

Anyone who disagrees might care to read this article , from July 1969.

‘For months it has been clear that Richard Nixon’s prime goal is to get American forces out of Viet Nam. The only questions have been when and how he would withdraw the more than 535,000 Americans and what Communist concessions he might get in return. When former Secretary of Defense Clark Clifford put forth his own timetable last month, the President reacted snappishly, declaring that the Administration hoped to move even faster….’

The headline is: ‘THE WAR: OUT BY NOVEMBER 1970?’

In fact, Saigon did not fall until 1975, and the North and the South were not reunited until July 1976.

Since we are not even at the stage yet that Nixon was at in 1969 (that is, one in which concrete withdrawal plans were being put on the table) I think it is almost 100% certain that the war will go on for at least another 5 years, and probably a lot longer than that.

29

abb1 01.26.06 at 7:00 am

OK, Lurker, fair enough. What about Maquis in Vichy, then? There was functioning French government in Vichy with all kinds of local institutions, police/military/paramilitary and non-trivial local support.

30

soru 01.26.06 at 8:21 am

The Iraqi army is weak, corrupt, and thoroughly infiltrated by the insurgency.

Actual performance of the Iraqi forces seems to have been pretty good the last year. Reported problems tend to be those of excessive zeal (i.e. torture and assassination), not surrender or going over to the other side.

US military assessment of readiness is the statistic usually quoted to support your view. An assesment produced by the same set of officers who mismanaged the situation in the first place.

Pick which to believe.

soru

31

Brendan 01.26.06 at 8:50 am

‘US military assessment of readiness is the statistic usually quoted to support your view. An assesment produced by the same set of officers who mismanaged the situation in the first place.’

Er no because in both cases the bias is the same: excessive optimism.

In any case, even if your point was accurate there are even deeper problems, as this article describes:

‘With American help, the Iraqi army is emerging as a lightly armed counterinsurgency force that may control more of the country than the U.S.-led coalition by this spring, U.S. military officials say.

But in coming years the Iraqi army will remain too weak to defend the country and reliant far into the future on America to guarantee Iraq’s sovereignty, experts say….The dilemma for Washington, which wants to hand off its counterinsurgency duties and depart as soon as possible, is that a weak Iraqi army could leave U.S. forces providing security for Iraq for many years…if Iraq is to avoid domination by neighbors – especially Iran – Alani said Baghdad will eventually need a military at least twice as large as planned, armed with weapons that are not in the cards: artillery, attack aircraft and even ballistic missiles.

“Self-defense can’t be done with the forces they’re talking about,” Alani said. “If America wants an independent Iraq that can stand on its own and prevent intervention, there’s no option but to build an offensive capability.”

There are no plans to provide Iraq with artillery or other heavy weapons….’

Moreover: ‘Sectarian divisions continue to be a problem. Anthony Cordesman, a military analyst with the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, said some security forces were allowed “to act as a virtual extension of Shiite efforts to attack the Sunnis.”

The Kurds’ peshmerga militia remains stronger than Iraq’s national army, Alani said, and most Kurds want to ensure the peshmerga is never disarmed. Shiite parties, too, want to keep militias intact, he said.

“They don’t want to see a strong army because it won’t allow these militia to operate,” Alani said.’

So even if (somehow) the problem of inflitration by the insurgency, corruption, brutality, underfunding, and so forth could be sorted, you have an even more fundamental problem which is that neither Iraq’s neighbours (especially Kuwait) nor significant forces within Iraq (especially the Kurds) actually WANT a well funded, well armed, efficient army on the (well founded) grounds that this might be used against THEM. Moreover, many ‘soldiers’ in the Iraqi army are in fact members of the Kurdish militia with loyalty only to the emerging stage of Kurdistan.

Of course to accept this line of thinking would involve admitting that the Kurds are part of the problem as well as being part of the solution, and so I don’t expect this thoughtcrime to be accepted by the ‘pro-occupation’ crowd anytime soon.

32

lurker 01.26.06 at 9:11 am

@Abb1 (post29):
I Am Not A Historian, But:
The main asset of the Vichy was that they started as the legitimate French government and that they inherited the existing government machinery (military, police, judiciary…) intact. The nation was built to begin with and had some real potential. But the Vichy was doomed to political failure and eventual impotence because Hitler had no intention of giving them a semi-sovereign status comparable to the People’s Republic of Poland or of making any real concessions to them.
Their legitimacy crumbled as they failed to protect French interests against the Nazis (it was impossible not to notice this – for one thing most people were hungry all the time and knew who to blame). Nutjobs with guns (like the Milice) were far fewer and less useful than bureaucrats who kept doing their old jobs as long as they could, trying to believe they were still serving France. In the end that was impossible and the Vichy lost their real base.

Ps.
The resistance in the Baltic states after WWII subsided because if there’s a really ruthless overlord with overwhelming forces at his disposal and no hope of outside aid, eventually all the people ready to die heroic deaths in a hopeless struggle will be dead. The rest will just try to survive and hope for better times.

33

J Thomas 01.26.06 at 9:27 am

“Extreme totalitarian regimes can have many problems but ‘common or garden’ corruption tends not to be one of them. On the contrary: everyone is honest because the penalty for ‘everything’ is death so people are too terrified to break even minor laws.”

Brendan, that varies a whole lot.

The first thing that helps with corruption is ideology. If a whole lot of people have ideals, they personally won’t do corruption unless they have to for survival. And they’ll despise corrupt guys when they find out about them.

The second thing that helps is feedback. When corrupt guys get turned in and neutralised, everybody who knew they were corrupt sees the system working. But when they get caught and the guy who caught them just wants a piece of the action, then it fails. Everybody who knows about it sees a culture of corruption.

The early soviet union might have been pretty non-corrupt. I dunno. But as it matured and the ideology failed, that definitely broke down. If you and your division chief are both corrupt, he’ll try to protect you. He’ll show you he’s doing as much as he can to protect you hoping that if you do get caught you won’t rat on him, and there’s a reasonable chance you’ll go to your grave with his secrets. Usually no point replacing either of you, the next guys will be just as bad. At least you’re loyal to the next guys up. Every now and then some guys get shot for corruption and it’s generally considered just their bad luck.

To make it work you need at least enough incorruptible people to inspect the others’ work. That’s ideology. They have to believe that the system is worth maintaining, or the inspectors will cheat whenever they can get away with it, just like the regular officials.

“Who will watch the watchers?”

34

J Thomas 01.26.06 at 9:50 am

“And once you have a culture of corruption, it’s hard to get rid of. Who would want to join the Iraqi army or police force now? Everyone knows the culture is one of dissatisfaction, poor training, poor morale, poor pay.”

A whole lot of iraqis are unemployed. And the pay is not bad. Could be dangerous, though. Police work is particularly dangerous unless you’re in a good area.

But military isn’t that bad. You get paid while they train you, and then you don’t have to desert until they send you to do something dangerous.

And there are incentives to stay in, although they chance of dying if the insurgents attack you is something like 16 times that for US troops.

Opinion polls make it appear that shias generally approve of iraqi army recruits. They feel liket he iraqi army is going to do good things. They like the idea of having an iraqi army.

35

abb1 01.26.06 at 9:53 am

Well, I disagree about the Baltic states – these states had been a part of Russian empire for 200 years, I don’t think 20 years of independence (1918-1939) was enough to inspire many people there to fight and die. Plus the overlord wasn’t, in fact, too ruthless most of the time; these republics had higher standard of living than most of the USSR; they had a degree of autonomy, and their culture wasn’t suppressed much, as far as I know. They were unhappy for sure, but not too unhappy.

As far as Vichy goes, I think you’re right and the point is: if there is a political cause for an insurgency – the insurgency is not going away whether you eliminate their ‘infrastructure’ or not. You have to eliminate the cause or eliminate significant part of the population.

And if the insurgency is just a bunch of bandits not supported by the population, … well, then it’s not really an insurgency, is it?

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J Thomas 01.26.06 at 10:00 am

“The Iraqi army is weak, corrupt, and thoroughly infiltrated by the insurgency.”

US military assessment of readiness is the statistic usually quoted to support your view. An assesment produced by the same set of officers who mismanaged the situation in the first place.

Actual performance of the Iraqi forces seems to have been pretty good the last year.

Pick which to believe.

Who assesses actual performance?

When some of the same officers who mismanaged the situation in the first place say that the iraqi army is widely dysfunctional, while others of them say it’s had good performance, which do you believe?

Which ones would get rewarded for spinning, the ones who say it’s bad or the ones who say it’s good?

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J Thomas 01.26.06 at 10:53 am

And if the insurgency is just a bunch of bandits not supported by the population, … well, then it’s not really an insurgency, is it?

That sums up the early response. We officially thought it was only a few thousand “dead-enders” who hadn’t figured out they’d lost yet. Kill enough of them that the rest give up and it’s no problem.

We want to think of ourselves as liberators that almost everybody supports. So if we find out that a significant part of the population opposes us, we then need some reason why so many people would be evil enough to oppose liberation.

38

Luc 01.26.06 at 10:58 am

Hasn’t anyone noticed that this strategy is far more suited for for a dictator than for a democracy?

Hand this checklist to a Saddam type and he’ll succeed.

Try to do this in the circumstances that the US army faced in Iraq and it’s a recipe for disaster.

Creating local militias? Intelligence operations by local police? Destroying the political cadre of your opponents? All counterproductive for a stable democratic process.

If you look at Iraq in this light you can see the contradictions. On the one hand you need the Peshmerga, Badr corps and the Mahdi army, on the other you need to disband them.

On the one hand you’ll need an old fashioned secret police to gather intelligence, on the other you need a public and transparent police force to maintain law and order.

Etc.

This military talk reminds me of the standard prejudices of the US army when they were exercising in Europe in the last cold war years. Naivite. Following orders. Silly plans.

Maybe the US army did better in Afghanistan because a lot of the planning was done by the CIA there.

39

Brendan 01.26.06 at 11:07 am

First off: to answer Soru’s point:

‘Actual performance of the Iraqi forces seems to have been pretty good the last year. Reported problems tend to be those of excessive zeal (i.e. torture and assassination), not surrender or going over to the other side.’

From 2005:

‘Iraqi army and police units are deserting their posts after the recent escalation in insurgent attacks, according to reports from around the country yesterday.’

However, let’s bend over backwards to be fair and assume (wrongly in my opinion) that this is a dealable with problem.

Next problem: ‘Opinion polls make it appear that shias generally approve of iraqi army recruits. They feel liket he iraqi army is going to do good things. They like the idea of having an iraqi army.’

Well, perhaps. Or is it, perhaps, that they like the idea of a Shia dominated Iraqi army?

‘The Bush administration’s exit strategy for Iraq rests on two pillars: an inclusive, democratic political process that includes all major ethnic groups and a well-trained Iraqi national army. But a week spent eating, sleeping and going on patrol with a crack unit of the Iraqi army – the 4,500-member 1st Brigade of the 6th Iraqi Division – suggests that the strategy is in serious trouble. Instead of rising above the ethnic tension that’s tearing their nation apart, the mostly Shiite troops are preparing for, if not already fighting, a civil war against the minority Sunni population.’

The only question for me is: will historians, looking back, date the beginning of the Iraqi civil war to 2009? Or 2005?

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J Thomas 01.26.06 at 2:50 pm

Brendan, I have disagreed with you on two points, that iraqi police and military are poorly paid, and that the iraqi public despises them.

While they are very poorly paid by US standards, they are quite well paid by iraqi standards. Opinion polls and anecdotal evidence say they are respected by iraqis, though it of course tends to be kurdish soldiers who get respected by kurds and shia soldiers who get respected by shias.

If iraq survives as an entity then the iraqi army has some good will and might have a place. I think it’s possible iraq might survive as one or two nations, or maybe three, and many of the units we’ve trained might maintain continuity. I suspect our training hasn’t been all that useful but to the extent they have group morale they might keep going despite problems of pay and supplies.

It might be the best training that some of the shia militias get, despite its obvious flaws.

I can’t tell how likely civil war would be if we left. We have been nurturing ethnic conflict since that provides a need for us. Would they settle down without us? It might be possible if shia gave minorities enough reason to stay. I don’t know whether they would, without our influence. But they won’t while we treat sunnis as enemies and shia can at best be neutral.

Historians might date the civil war to the attacks on Fallujah/Najaf. We came back and destroyed Fallujah after our elections, but we agreed to stay ot of Najaf — shia agreed to a separate cease-fire.

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Brendan 01.26.06 at 5:11 pm

‘Brendan, I have disagreed with you on two points, that iraqi police and military are poorly paid, and that the iraqi public despises them.

While they are very poorly paid by US standards, they are quite well paid by iraqi standards. Opinion polls and anecdotal evidence say they are respected by iraqis, though it of course tends to be kurdish soldiers who get respected by kurds and shia soldiers who get respected by shias.’

Well I’m not really disagreeing with you. I think the solution to the problem is to see that the problems of Iraq has changed. Initially, the Iraqi forces were badly paid, and despised. But as you pointed out (although I think they are still badly paid) unemployment has increased a lot since then, so it’s probably not as bad a job as it once was. In the same way, just because (as the rest of the economy disintegrates) it’s one of the few jobs still around, to join the army or police force is probably a lot less societally unacceptable than it used to be.

So in a sense the Americans have solved that problem. But at what a cost! The way the problem has been ‘solved’ of course is by the creation of a Kurdish militia and a Shia militia, both operating under the rubric of ‘the Iraqi army’: neither having any loyalty to ‘Iraq’, but only to Kurdistan in the one case and…well….Iran probably in the other.

And of course all the problems stated in the first paragraph STILL apply (double) to the Sunni areas.

Incidentally, when I used to write for the unlamented (by everyone except me) ‘no war blog’ i once semi-jokingly remarked that perhaps the Americans would return back to their Sunni-Ba’athist friends. After all, the Ba’athists and the Americans worked well together: the Americans still support Sunni extremists in Saudi Arabia, and Iran is now the new enemy of the minute. It seems I might have been right:

‘Three years after Washington ousted Saddam Hussein from power, some Shi’ite leaders and even U.S. allies say it is switching favor to the ex-leader’s Sunni minority to counter Iran and its nuclear ambitions.

U.S. officials say the efforts to “reach out” to Sunni Arabs are needed to undermine a violent insurgency they are waging and to foster a stable government.

But Shi’ite leaders brought to power by the U.S.-led invasion also see an attempt to clip their wings because of the influence over them of neighboring Shi’ite Iran.’

It’s not completely impossible that when all this nightmare has run its course in (say) 20 years time that the situation will end up much the same as it began, with a neo-Saddam, backed by the US, back in power.

But I still think a catastrophic civil war, which will probably enlarge and engulf the whole region (possibly with the use of nuclear weapons) is still the most likely scenario.

42

George 01.26.06 at 6:55 pm

The neocons in the Defense Department never wanted a secure, united Iraq. They were happy that the artifacts of this ancient civilization and the government records necessary for civil administration were destroyed by organized looting. Now they are on to destabilize Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and most importanatly Iran. Why? One reason is neocon allegiance to Israel and the second reason is the belief that in a destabilized region, the US could buy Chalabi and other Quislings to secure control of oil.

43

radek 01.26.06 at 7:33 pm

“What’s the third one?”

The right wing NSZ (Nationalist Armed Forces) – it split in ’42 or so with the moderate half joining the “Krajowa” (the other half was pretty much fascist). It had more members than the “Ludowa” though, at least prior to the split.

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lurker 01.27.06 at 2:50 am

@Abb1, post 35:
What I meant was that really massive, really unrestrained repression does work, for a time (sometimes for generations) if the people have no hope. Though not forever, unless were talking genocide.

Granted, post-Stalin Soviet governments were not run by paranoid mass murderers, but people who’d seen the trains to Siberia running at full capacity were a bit wary of taking risks.

To use another example, I’d say there was plenty of political cause for an anti-Franco insurgency in Spain after 1939, but the situation was too hopeless. The Republic had been defeated, most of the best people were dead or in exile, no outside power was about to step in, and the repression following guerilla incidents was horrific. Didn’t stop the Spanish from opting for freedom the first chance they got, but as long as the old monster was alive…

45

lurker 01.27.06 at 2:52 am

@Luc (post 38):
“Creating local militias? Intelligence operations by local police? Destroying the political cadre of your opponents? All counterproductive for a stable democratic process.”
I’d say a government (democratic or otherwise) able to mobilize real popular support could definitely do all of this but they’d do it themselves without waiting for a foreign military to tell them to do it.

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abb1 01.27.06 at 3:43 am

In the Spanish civil war, though, technically the fascists were the insurgency and the Republicans were the government – and the insurgency won.

And it’s not obvious to me at all that there was plenty of political cause for an anti-Franco insurgency. It was an agrarian, conservative Catholic country; socialists and anarchists have gone too far in the 1930s and the fascist reaction hasn’t, it wasn’t too brutal.

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J Thomas 01.27.06 at 8:09 am

Lurker, when there’s no government of any sort then that sort of thing would have to arise locally. And then the various local governments might not get along. But when we tried local elections in the first year we were getting islamist local governments (or anyway local governments that expressed a lot of respect for islam, perhaps no more than many american local governments do for christianity, but still…) and Bremer tried to shut those down and replace them with appointed local governors.

We could still get workable local governments with local militias and local police. But at this point the places we’re having trouble, those would be insurgent local governments with insurgent militias and insurgent police. If they were represented in regional and national government they might not fight, but the US government would probably consider it a defeat.

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Brendan 01.28.06 at 6:27 am

Rather than quote this entire article to back up my points earlier, I’ll just give the URL:

http://www.motherjones.com/commentary/columns/2006/01/sectarian_violence.html

But the basic jist of it backs up what I was saying above.

‘As is true of practically everything about the U.S. occupation of Iraq, the strategy of pitting Shiites and Kurds against Sunnis was not the result of careful planning. Its origins were, in fact, in a purely military response to the most important turning point in the occupation of Iraq — the complete collapse of Sunni security forces in which the U.S. command had placed such high hopes.

During an April 2004 offensive launched by the insurgents, most Sunni military units simply disappeared overnight. According to a June 2004 Government Accounting Office report, the number of Civil Defense Corps troops in Western Iraq, which included the Sunni strongholds of Fallujah and Ramadi, was estimated to have fallen by over 80% — from 5,600 to about 1,000 — largely because of “collective desertion of units.” ‘

In other words, my point was right. As of 2004 and, for that matter early 2005, the ‘Iraqi army’ was thoroughly infiltrated by the insurgency, badly trained, incompetent, badly equipped, and had poor morale. When faced with the insurgents, they just ran away.

Therefore: ‘American officers in Mosul, however, were not concerned with ethnic strife but with winning a war, or at least staunching their losses, and the peshmerga seemed like the only effective Iraqi instrument in sight for doing so. “They’re well-organized, fierce and get the job done,” a U.S. company commander in Mosul rhapsodized about them.

Later, the Kurdish militiamen would be joined by the fierce Shiite “Wolf Brigade,” whose founder reportedly considered the Sunni members of the Association of Muslim Clerics to be “infidels”. That unit tortured innocent Sunnis to force them to confess to being part of insurgent organizations — confessions which the local authorities recognized as having been coerced once the Brigade left the city. Nevertheless, in December 2005, NBC’s Richard Engel reported that the Wolf Brigade was considered to have been effective in Mosul. ‘

IN EFFECT, therefore, what happened in the Summber/Autumn of 2005 (unremarked by the world press) was the dissolution of the Iraqi army, and its replacement by Shia/Kurdish militia.

As of now (i.e. early 2006) there is, strictly speaking, no Iraqi army (and one might imagine that the situation vis a vis the police force is not much better). Instead there is a Shia army, a Kurdish army and….well that’s it. Oh and a lot of very frightened Sunnis.

‘The US command still prefers Shiites and Kurds to police Sunni cities and towns.’

But that’s ok because ‘ In October, a “senior military official in Baghdad” was quoted in another Tom Lasseter piece saying, “Maybe they just need to have their civil war. In this part of the world it’s almost a way of life.” ‘

The article concludes:

‘But the fact that a senior American military official would resort to such a racist explanation to evade responsibility for creating civil-war conditions in Iraq only underlines the depths to which the United States has descended.’

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