The current New Republic has an article by Andrew J. Bacevich entitled “Army of One: The Overhyping of David Petraeus.” (Hat tip to Ethan Rafuse) It sounds like a swipe at Petraeus; it’s really about how the de facto U.S. strategy — propounded by Petraeus but accepted by all “but the doughty warriors at the American Enterprise Institute” — has become one of “buying time for Iraqis to reconcile.” But, he notes, the Washington clock is running out faster than the Iraqi clock. The pace of Iraqi reconciliation is running at about the same rate as that of my extended family, while the pace in Washington, governed chiefly by the 2008 election campaign but also by a sense that the Bush administration has blown it beyond redemption, is running a lot faster. An excerpt:
The most fundamental question that should be asked about the strategy is: Exactly how much time does Petraeus need to buy? The answer: a lot. With his frequent references to “the Washington clock” and “the Baghdad clock,” Petraeus himself has recognized that “buying time” is by no means a simple proposition. The problem with the two clocks — one driven by domestic politics and the other connected to events in Iraq itself — is that they are wildly out of synch. As Petraeus himself has acknowledged, “The Washington clock is ticking faster than the Baghdad clock.” Indeed, the steady erosion of popular and congressional support for the war, lately even among Republicans, suggests that time on the Washington clock has all but expired.
To correct this situation, Petraeus speaks of “trying to speed up the Baghdad clock a bit to produce some progress on the ground that can, perhaps … put a little more time on the Washington clock.” Yet Petraeus himself must recognize that this qualifies at best as a long shot. He knows that any counterinsurgency is by definition a protracted project. Success requires not weeks or months of exertions but years. As he told the BBC in a recent interview, “The average counterinsurgency is somewhere around a nine- or a ten-year endeavor.” For his strategy to succeed, putting “a little more time” on the Washington clock won’t come close to doing the trick. Indeed, unless the Petraeus strategy gains the firm and enthusiastic support of President Bush’s successor, it doesn’t stand a chance of working. Yet, unless John McCain’s campaign pulls off a remarkable turnaround — an unlikely event — the president who takes office in January 2009 won’t have campaigned on a strategy of “buying time” to prolong the Iraq war.
Furthermore, Washington’s typically narcissistic preoccupation with the political clock has diverted attention from the fact that the U.S. military’s Baghdad clock is also quickly running down. Apart from the doughty warriors at the American Enterprise Institute, most informed observers understand that, with the ongoing surge, America’s land forces have shot their wad. The current commitment of 160,000 troops to Iraq is unsustainable beyond early next year, absent draconian measures like extending yet again the combat tours of soldiers who have already seen their deployments go from twelve to 15 months in duration. If the wizards who concocted President Bush’s Long War had decided back in 2002 or 2003 to increase the Army’s size, options for maintaining a large force in Iraq might exist. But Petraeus will find little consolation in such might-have-beens. “Buying time” in Baghdad requires the ability to sustain a very robust U.S. troop presence for years to come, and that’s simply not in the cards.
Then there is the question of whether the actions of coalition forces, now engaged in the so-called “surge,” are actually conducive to putting time back on the clock. Right now, it appears the opposite is true: Instead of putting more time on the Washington clock, the surge is actually causing it to run down more quickly.
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In reality, Professor Bacevich didn’t get to pick the headline. He probably wouldn’t have liked it.
But his essay triggered some recollections about some of our military scholarship that’s come from this war.
One of my thoughts has been about “time.”
Let me spatchcock something I wrote in another forum last week:
In what we call “classic COIN,” the assumption is that time is always on the side of the insurgent. In Iraq, where so much of traditional COIN theory is turned upside down anyway, (name redacted) and I seem to have independently arrived at a shared position: Time isn’t always on the side of the insurgent, and especially so in Iraq.
There are various time tables involved. We have limits on how long we can keep active duty troops at this level in Iraq. THere are domestic political spans that involve upcoming Congresional hearings, recesses, elections and even the end of this administration in 2009.
There are time lines necessary for calling up and training and deploying National Guard and Reservist units.
There are time limits on the Iraqi government, one that is seen as increasingly corrupt and incompetent.
There are time limits on JAM forces as they seek to destabilize shrinking numbers of potential communities in order to speed up our withdrawal timeline.
There are time constraints on AQI (no longer the name, by the way) and organic salafistic terror organizations to fight back the “surge” or sow confusion before Congressional hearings.
There are time limits on Badrist forces because the hold of their civilian parties on the government isn’t guaranteed any longer, and if US forces start to pull out they will have diminishing capabilities, through the IA, of fighting back against rival militias.
There are time limits on Syrian support because of an upcoming UN report that is expected to hurt the ties Damascus has to Hezbollah and other groups it manages along with Iran.
There are time limits on Iran, who is facing a growing coalition of Sunni Gulf states and Egypt over a counter-response to perceptions of Iranian hegemony.
There are time limits on the Kurdi, who want their own state with the important constitutional protections over Kirkuk from Iraqi and Iranian influence. They also have time considerations because of Turkish ire over PKK infiltrations.
To whom in these instances does time really favor?
I don’t know. But I don’t believe we can categorically say that it favors the so-called “insurgent” (there are many sorts of insurgencies) any more than it favors the American-led Coalition or the weak, corrupt central government or JAM or anyone else.
And this might become the new battlefield: Over time.
In the game of GO, as elsewhere, having the initiative and forcing play is almost a certain harbinger of victory. This is what Petraeus has done, and seems determined to continue. There are COIN buzz-phrases for this: getting inside the opponent’s decision cycle, etc.
In any case, both the insurgency and the home-front anti-liberationists have been back-footed, and my money is on the guy with the initiative and the wit to keep it.
Petraeus is Westmoreland 2.0. He will make it “All The Way” to Chief of Staff or CJCS. I hope it is worth it.
I doubt the Army would ever let a Marine general serve as a theater commander over Army troops in wartime. Unfortunately, interservice rivalry is another major problem with the Army officer corps.
My money is on a bizzaro version of 1968 in 2008. The insurgents launch a Tet Offensive, American public opinion boils over, Hillary Clinton announces she has a secret plan to end the war on terror, protestors and internal dissent over Iraq disrupts the Republican convention, and the Democrats win a very close election.
But Westmoreland wasn’t kicked up to CJCS, an important policy-making institution.
Like Gen Casey, he was promoted after failure to Army Chief of Staff.
When the first post-Desert Storm plan for the invasion of Iraq was confected, the man in charge of the planning and CENTCOM was a Marine, Zinni.
There are many differences between Iraq and Vietnam, not least of which are having an all-volunteer force, facing a very fragmented enemy, and with the Iraqi people hardly offered two distinct ideological choices in rival governments.
There are many insurgencies, and they haven’t coordinated much except during the early 2004 uprising, when impoverished Shiite militias loyal to Moqtadr al-Sadr timed their attacks on Najaf and Karbalah with organic salafists in Fallujah.
In some ways, fighting a counter-insurgency war in Iraq is easier because one is more likely to exploit differences in social networks in local areas. In other ways, however, it’s far harder, because one can’t find a consensus “political solution” for so many people who identify with kinship groups, tribes, region, religion, ethnicity, class or language before they do the “state” of “Iraq.”
It’s sort of like asking in 1993 for all Bosnian Serbs and Moslems, Catholic Croats, Moslem Kosovars and Orthodox souls in Montenegro to believe in a common union that makes sense to all of them and surmounts questions of tribe or language or theology.
Think more about Germany during the wars of Reformation than Vietnam, and the warfare that results will follow.
In what we call “classic COIN,” the assumption is that time is always on the side of the insurgent.
Why?
I can see why in Iraq, because maintaining the Army in Iraq costs the US money and soldiers, but why in general?
Presumably time usually favours the side which can keep the war going more easily than the other.
That might well be the counterinsurgent, if he controls the oil wells.
SoldierNoLonger:
First, let me say that I find your commentary illuminating and highly competent.
However, I disagree with your time limits referring to the insurgency and the regional powers unallied to the US in this conflict in Iraq.
The insurgency is basically a war of attrition against US forces deployed in Iraq, and it is a sectarian civil war. Your assessments of time limits for US forces I consider accurate. You are obviously an expert. But the relative time frames you provide for insurgent and political forces in Iraq, as well as the regional players of Iran (and Saudi Arabia) are nowhere near the intensity of those affecting the US.
JR Clark:
Petraeus is not Westmoreland 2.0. Rather, he is Abrams 2.0.
Ad, when we study certain guerilla movements, we arrive at key phrases, such as the theory of the “long war.” It wasn’t a term re-invented by a White House speech writer for the GWoT campaign.
Rather, it was a belief, perfected by Mao, that posited a protracted war first against the Nationalists, then the Japanese, then both, wherein the weak shall nip at the strong, wearing them down.
Emboldened by their proletarian virtues, suffering much but winning by not getting destroyed, this protracted war was what brought Mao to victory in China, and Ho Chi Minh’s forces, eventually, to ring the desk clerk at the Saigon Hilton.
It has been long believed that this sort of war favored the weaker party, who can be diffused in the population, living famously as a fish in a school of fish, patiently wearing down the dominant force by degrees, until such a day comes that it is the imperialist satrap who is the hunted, and the worker the hunter.
These examples are obvious now, largely because these were predominately nationalistic struggles over people far more homogeneous than the various insurgencies in Iraq.
There are certain militias in Iraq that have a view about “long war” and how it can be used against the US and other power blocs in Baghdad.
But most are far more ad hoc. There are criminal syndicates that act as insurgencies. There are militias allied to tribes, kinship groups, business oligarchies (both Shiite and Sunni), religious leaders and former exiles in Syria and Iran (Badrists).
There’s an army (Pershmerga) of a defacto state-within-a-state in Kurdistan, just as there is a predominately Shi’i Iraqi Army largely under the control of the US.
If I’m the leader of the 1920 Brigade (a nationalistic Sunni group with salafistic overtones), kicked out of Anbar by tribal forces armed by the US, what is my time limit? I no longer am under the umbrella of AQI, so my foreign funds dried up. I can’t get many volunteers from Anbar anymore because the tribes there will rat me out.
I don’t know many people in Diyalah, and my own organic movement is fracturing as some of my best people splinter off, fed up with our dwindling fortunes.
What if I’m Moqtadr al-Sadr and I am pushing the US to exit Iraq sooner, rather than later, but I no longer have any cabinet positions, which were my source of graft. I have been proven equally incompetent at getting my people electricity, and I made a rash decision to agree not to fight the Americans again, although I still smart from the Najaf and Karbalah disasters.
My militias are splintering off, too, and these are the guys killing Americans, and now the Americans want to do something about me.
How long do I have to prove myself?
If I’m a Badrist, I know that my political parties got their majority in parliament by the barest of margins, and already the political wing of JAM has bolted, the Allawi-led bloc has bolted, the Sunnis are giving up and the Kurdi have their own state anyway.
So far, we’ve had the US basically fighting our wars for us, but now we have to get serious because the US Congress is talking about pulling out. Will we have to fight JAM before we turn to the Sunni tribes, now armed by the US?
How long do we have to prove to our people that we aren’t as obviously incompetent and corrupt as we seem? And is Iran really now giving all those EFPs to more rival militias?
See how complicated it gets? If it was one enemy, one social network of like-minded souls against a common enemy, like Mao’s “long war” struggle against imperialist-backed Nationalists, the time frame is simple: As long as it takes.
But for these other very disparate groups, the spans might vary widely. The US could exploit these fissures, but only if we, too, knew what our time frame was, right?
Maybe we won’t have the troop levels we have currently in late 2008, but could we exert a similar sort of pressure with, say, 40,000 troops? How would we do so?
Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick.
But Soldier:
The forces within Iraq and the regional powers adjacent can be considered local, they aren’t going anywhere. They may face inside and even outside pressures, but they will adapt. This, in itself, provides them with a pretty much unlimited time frame. The Sunni’s have the Saudi’s to bank on. The Shia have Iran to count on. The Kurds are actually the weakest, but even they can count to some degree on Iran. The biggest problem with the Petraeus/surge approach is that it can in no way provide a decisive military outcome to the war, which has been a necessity since the beginning of the invasion.
Iraq right now is under a microscope. While historical conflicts didn’t receive the attention or study that is presently allocated to Iraq, many conflicts including VietNam, China, Afghanistan and so forth, exhibited elements of sectarianism in their struggles. And outside powers exerted important influences, as well.
From your commentary, I gather a need for doctrine and manuals to overcome the adverse situation in Iraq. As I’ve alluded to in previous comments, I don’t think that this is the basis of the US problem in Iraq. My views may sound extreme, harsh, outdated, unacceptable by contemporary Western standards and overly critical. But they’re based on a Hegelian approach to military history.
What has been the primary accomplishment of the US Military in its post-Sadaam war of occupation? It has successfully forestalled medium to large unit sized combat between the various warring factions in the Iraq Civil War. You take away US ground forces, this condition will still be maintainable by US Air Power. However, without foot soldiers on the ground, the political leverage on Iraq will not be maintainable.
Certainly the members of those insurgencies will be there, but they might not be in those insurgencies.
Men like to be compensated for their services, and if part of the fracturing of social networks means the arrest of their paymaster, then the culture indicts the guy not getting a check — the greatest obligation upon him as a male in Arab society is to provide for an extended family.
He loses far more esteem by giving his services away for a militia than not earning his daily bread.
For a group like 1820, they have to garner funds and volunteers or the process of attrition will eventually marginalize them. At what point do they cease to function as a coherent organization? How many must go?
There never was a military solution to any of this. There likely never will be a “political” solution, at least not for another generation or so.
Much as we saw in Yugoslavia — another rump of the Ottoman Empire propped up by the Cold War but, eventually, unwound by social forces beyond its control — the utility of force is quite small, really.
Personally, I believe the use of us would have been better spent partitioning Iraq along the ethnic fault lines, where we see so much violence today. These contours along the seams of strife will eventually become the “borders” of Iraq, whether they are recognized by the UN or not, just as the “borders” of Congo really don’t follow any reality.
Our strategy in Anbar worked because we reinforced cultural norms that have existed for centuries. Our so-called “Surge” likely will fail because we’re dealing with institutions aged only a year or so.
Right general, wrong plan.
But we should all hope he succeeds.
Would it be fair to summarise this as saying that we will likely not win, but the groups we are currently fighting may not win either?
I tend to assume the war will be won by whoever ends up in control of the south. They will control most of the oil revenues, and will be able to import weapons.
They can then conquer the rest of Iraq, if only to secure their legitimacy.
This argument assumes that they are not blockaded…
SoldierNoLonger:
Yugoslavia was not a rump of the Cold War. I visited that country in 1975 while it was touted as the world’s only example of a pluralistic economy. If anything, Yugoslavia was a product of a highly successful resistance movement during WW2, being the only nation in the region to liberate itself from German occupation. Also, while its past included the Ottoman Empire, its modern history belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and it should be remembered that there were many wars fought within the Balkans before 1914. I think it simplistic to compare the situation in Iraq with Yugoslavia simply because both states shared a time period with a strong central leader and afterwards became decentralized. The actual processes that brought about this condition were very different. And the state once known as Yugoslavia cannot compare to the ruthless determination of Sadaam Hussein’s Baathist controlled Iraq. The histories are very different.
From an American perspective, I would draw attention to a comparison between the situation in Lebanon during the Israeli 1st War of Lebanon which lasted through the 80’s and 90’s. There you had elements of a foreign invasion and a civil war with sectarianism at the forefront. There Israeli occupation forces faced similar players, such as Sunnis (Palestinians and Sunni Lebanese), Druze, Shia (Hezbollah and Amal), Christians and Syrians. In fact some of the enemy tactics you faced- SoldierNoLonger- the IDF faced for the first time at places like Bent Jbeil and the Baalbek.
ad:
It is highly unlikely the US will fully exit Iraq. But if it did, the three major forces would mobilize and the real war for Iraq would begin in earnest. Numbers, fighting capacity and regional alliances favor the Shia should this struggle come about. And it would be settled decisively on the battlefield of Iraq.
One more thing, SoldierNoLonger, it must be admitted that Iraq is not a legacy of an antique Ottoman Empire, rather it is historically a territory arbitrarily established by the British to further its own ends for empire.
Concerning General Petraeus, every day he reminds me more of a contemporary Caesar. At the moment he has propped the power of the Anbar Sunnis (a much more natural ally of the US, given the sympathies of a fellow ally, the Saudis), much to the anguish of the Shia, who had previously been provided the more favored relationship with the US. What’s more, most of the recent war communiques signal battles between US forces and Shia militias. The Shia response? Predictably, PM Maliki is in Tehran for talks with Ahmadinejad and Khamanei.
One must truly admire General Petraeus for he is no ordinary American commander.
In both cases, “Yugoslavia” and “Iraq,” western powers glommed statist structures onto carved off Ottoman territories. This was done for the good of western powers, not to help the Sublime Porte or the citizens of these new “nations.”
Austria-Hungary really simply inherited a bad situation. Why? Because the Turks, much like Stalin, had a crafty way of bepopulating their empire with peoples from all over the joint. Whether it was through conversion or simply marching neer-do-wells in one part of the empire to someplace where they wouldn’t cause so much trouble, Moslems ended up in places they tended not to exist before the Ottoman soldiers swept in.
Why are there Shiite and Sunni Turkomen in Tal Afar surrounded by Sunni Arabs who are surrounded by Kurdish villages in Iraq?
Why were there pockets of Serbs, Moslems, Kosovar Albanians, Montenegrans, Roma, Jews and Croats dotting all parts of what we now think of as “Serbia” or “Croatia” or “Bosnia?”
Thank the Turks.
The Yugoslavian example actually is quite interesting, because Tito’s partisans killed more Chetniks than they did Germans, just as the Chetniks killed more Partisans than anyone else (each lost more than 200,000 members, and another 500,000 civilians died in the crossfire, at the hands of Germans, or were Jews or Roma deported to the death camps).
The occupying German power, prodded by the Partisans into increasingly brutal reprisals against civilians, did more to wear down opposition to the Partisans than probably anyone other than, well, the Partisans.
Tito’s iron fist on the party kept the civil war that broke out in WWII below the surface. His death brought the ethnic strife back, and it took a decade (and a US-led peacekeeping force after the ethnic cleansing had reached its likely endpoint) to create more natural boundaries.
“Iraq” was the invention of Gertrude Bell, a well known scholar and a woman who did as much as any imperialist to shape the Middle East.
Because the Ottoman administrators had more sense than British colonialists, they divided what’s now Iraq into three “vilayets” — headquartered in Mosul (then predominately Kurdish), Baghdad (then mostly Sunni) and Basra (then as now, mostly Shi’i).
There were very different ethnicities sprinkled within, which made them more dependent (not less) on Ottoman rule. Because the empire’s administration was a meritocracy, it wasn’t unusual to find a Kurd lording over a district in what today would be Israel, or a Shiite put to good use in Bulgaria.
This is possible in an empire. The problem comes, however, when the empire falls, which thanks to T.E. Lawrence it did. As a gift to Faisal, Sharif of the Husseins, for his family’s help against the Turks, Bell gave him Iraq.
The “Iraqis” didn’t wish to be in “Iraq” and they certainly didn’t wish for a regent.
The Kurds, then as now a pugnaciously independent sort of people, rebelled. The first army to use gas against the Kurds wasn’t Saddam’s; it was the UK’s.
One of the few good things about the American invasion of “Iraq” has been the fact that we’re on the right side of history. The Shi’i, all the various sects and shades thereof, have been the majority ruled by a tiny minority, and more so during the Hussein years when a small, orthodox Sunni Tikriti clan ruled the roost.
In the military, we consider always the “utility of force” — what can our power of inflicting violence do to achieve which ends? In Iraq, I’ve always felt that the sanest use of US forces would be to achieve partition along ethnic boundaries that make sense for the people who live in them.
This is an unpopular perspective, and so the US has been attempting to enforce boundaries that never made sense during the Paris Conference, much less today.
But that is the mission, and what can 24,000 dead or wounded men and women say when we’re given a mission that isn’t likely to succeed?
SoldierNoLonger:
Your perception of the Turks is a bit distorted. First of all, empires are in themselves vehicles for the distribution of peoples. Thus in ancient times we have Iranians entering Europe and India, Greeks entering Iran and India, Arabs entering Spain and Iran, and so forth. In this regard, the Turkish Empire was no different. It must also be pointed out that the true roots of the Turkish people lie in the Central Asian Steppes and the Mongols, so many of the areas you identify reflect the historical homeland of the Turkish people.
Per your notes concerning Yugoslavia, it should be pointed out that Croatia allied itself with Germany. Upon self-liberation from the Germans, Tito exacted no collective reprisal on these people. There were many factors at play during the Balkan wars that ensued after the death of Tito and the breakup of the USSR. Also, the period of warfare went through successive phases, with outside and internal factors that are beyond the scope of blog commentary.
Yes, I’ve heard the romantic story of Gertrude Bell. That’s what it is- romantic. But the hardball facts of British imperialism dictated the partitioning of area left vacant by the receding Turks. Ataturk rolled back the borders of Turkey, for purely defensive military purposes, and the British and French filled the vacuum. You’re being overly generous in your commentary relating to Lawrence. There were many actions in the Theater that did not involve him, such as Gallipoli and Kut, both Turkish military victories over the British.
SoldierNoLonger:
You would be surprise how the dynamics of the US war in Iraq is evolving. The new Petraeus war is one of finesse, and the US favored relationship among the Iraqis is actually shifting toward the Sunnis. Rest assured, soldier, this war is nowhere close to being settled. The US military presence will be in effect in comparable terms to the Israeli presence in southern Lebanon during its 1st Lebanon War. It is no longer, if ever it was, a war to rid the world of Iraqi WMD’s. It is now a war to re-contain Iran, and maintain a political hegemony upon the region, by means of a sizable US military presence. This in the very heart of the world’s largest oil producing region.
Cheer up, Soldier. You certainly fulfilled the personal aspirations of your profession. And as an American, I thank you.
Why would I be surprised? I’m due for a third deployment (stop loss).
The COP/JSS tactics used by the “Surgists” were first tried by us in east Anbar and HR McMaster’s crew in Tal Afar.
And don’t thank me! I do my duty as a professional man of arms. I am no better or worse than nearly every adult American man from Pearl Harbor to the fall of Saigon.
I thank the American people quietly every day for giving me the great honor of serving this republic.
We few. We happy few.
Soldier, when my cousin came back from VietNam in ‘68, hardly anybody thanked him. So I make it a point to say thanks.
My cousin was the ripe old age of 18 when he came back from VietNam, having served two tours with the First Marine Division. He used to tell me he loved the Corps and serving in VietNam up until Tet. After Tet, it was all business. He’s gone now, Soldier, but I keep his medals on the family mantle.
A few months ago I bought a black T-shirt, the kind I wear when I’m riding my motorcycle. After taking it out of the package I went to put it on, but before I did the T-Shirt tag caught me eye. It read “Made in VietNam”.
Gentlemen, as the security agreement requires that US forces withdraw from all cities to the rural areas, this brings a very serious shortcoming to light. First, we don’t have a mastery of how the Iraqi tribal system works. Secondly, we are moving from the cities, where tribalism is weaker, to the rural areas, where it is stronger. As insurgent sanctuaries are generally in rural areas, they are engaging the tribes to coexist with and recruit from them.
It is imperative that we as Americans fighting the war in Iraq gain some mastery on how to interact with the Iraqi tribal system. When we are in harmony with the culture with which we coexist on a tactical level, it saves soldiers’ lives, and it also is a powerful counter to insurgent information operations.
To that, please have a look at http://www.theiraqitribalsystem.com. It’s not the answer to all questions…but it is the first more comprehensive treatment of the subject, with applied methodologies for leveraging the tribal data contained in the book for the purpose of establishing strong relationships with tribal leadership that are based on respect, humility, and trust.
If are able to fill the gap between what we think is intelligence and what causes cultural phenomena such as the insurgent groups in Iraq, we are will be well on our way to helping the Iraqis themselves towards state formation.
That’s victory!
Respectfully,
Sam Stolzoff
http://www.theiraqitribalsystem.com