Investing in Junk Armies
Why American Efforts to Create Foreign Armies Fail
By <
http://www.tomdispatch.com/authors/williamastore> William J. Astore
16.10.2014
In June, tens of thousands of Iraqi Security Forces in Nineveh province
north of Baghdad collapsed in the face of attacks from the militants of the
Islamic State (IS or ISIS), abandoning
<
http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/11/mosul-isis-gunmen-middle-east-
states> four major cities to that extremist movement. The collapse drew
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/world/middleeast/american-intelligence-of
ficials-said-iraqi-military-had-been-in-decline.html> much notice in our
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/monkey-cage/wp/2014/06/13/why-the-iraqi
-army-collapsed-and-what-can-be-done-about-it/> media, but not much in the
way of sustained analysis of the American role in it. To put it bluntly,
when confronting IS and its band of lightly armed irregulars, a reputedly
professional military, American-trained and -armed, discarded its weapons
and equipment, cast its uniforms aside, and melted back into the populace.
What this behavior couldn’t have made clearer was that U.S. efforts to
create a new Iraqi army, much-touted and funded to the tune of
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/06/13/world/middleeast/american-intelligence-of
ficials-said-iraqi-military-had-been-in-decline.html?_r=0> $25 billion over
the 10 years of the American occupation (
<
http://www.military.com/daily-news/2013/03/06/too-much-money-spent-in-iraq-
for-too-few-results.html> $60 billion if you include other reconstruction
costs), had failed miserably.
Though reasonable analyses of the factors behind that collapse
<
http://warontherocks.com/2014/07/inside-the-collapse-of-the-iraqi-armys-2nd
-division/> exist, an investigation of why U.S. efforts to create a viable
Iraqi army (and, by extension, viable security forces in Afghanistan)
cratered so badly are lacking. To understand what really happened, a little
history lesson is in order. You’d need to start in May 2003 with the
decision of L. Paul Bremer III, America’s proconsul in occupied Iraq and
head of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA),
<
http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/war_stories/2007/09/who_dis
banded_the_iraqi_army.html> to disband the battle-hardened Iraqi military.
The Bush administration considered it far too tainted by Saddam Hussein and
his Baathist Party to be a trustworthy force.
Instead, Bremer and his team vowed to create a new Iraqi military from
scratch. According to Washington Post reporter Tom Ricks in his bestselling
book Fiasco, that force was initially conceived as a small constabulary of
30,000-40,000 men (with no air force at all, or rather with the U.S. Air
Force for backing in a country U.S. officials expected to
<
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/174807/> garrison for decades). Its main
job would be to secure the country’s borders without posing a threat to
Iraq’s neighbors or, it should be added, to U.S. interests.
Bremer’s decision essentially threw 400,000 Iraqis with military training,
including a full officer corps, out onto the streets of its cities, jobless.
It was a formula for creating an insurgency. Humiliated and embittered,
some of those men would later join various resistance groups operating
against the American military.
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/28/world/middleeast/army-know-how-seen-as-fa
ctor-in-isis-successes.html> More than a few of them later found their way
into the ranks of ISIS, including at the highest levels of leadership. (The
most notorious of these is
<
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10065919/Izzat-Ib
rahim-al-Douri-the-King-of-Clubs-is-back-and-he-may-yet-prove-to-be-Saddam-H
usseins-trump-card.html> Izzat Ibrahim al-Douri, a former general in
Saddam’s army who was featured as the King of Clubs in the Bush
administration’s deck of cards of Iraq’s most wanted figures. Al-Douri is
now
<
http://www.democracynow.org/2014/10/3/jeremy_scahill_on_obamas_orwellian_wa
r> reportedly helping to coordinate IS attacks.)
<
http://www.amazon.com/dp/1608463656/ref=nosim/?tag=tomdispatch-20> IS has
fought with considerable effectiveness, quickly turning captured American
and Syrian weaponry,
<
http://www.washingtonsblog.com/2014/07/isis-taking-iraq-using-captured-amer
ican-weapons.html> including artillery pieces, Humvees, and even a
helicopter, on their enemies. Despite years of work by U.S. military
advisers and all those billions of dollars invested in training and
equipment, the Iraqi army has not fought well, or often at all. Nor, it
seems, will it be ready to do so in the immediate future. Retired Marine
Corps General John R. Allen, who played a key role in organizing, arming,
and paying off Sunni tribal groups in Iraq the last time around during the “
<
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/02/can-another-anbar-awakening-save-ir
aq/78053/> Anbar Awakening,” and who has been charged by President Obama
with “coordinating” the latest American-led coalition to save Iraq, has
already
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/04/world/middleeast/coalition-leader-warns-o
f-long-fight-in-iraq.html> gone on record on the subject. By his
calculations, even with extensive U.S. air support and fresh infusions of
American advisers and equipment, it will take
<
http://schnizzle.biz/82383/coalition-leader-warns-iraqi-military-wont-be-re
ady-to-take-back-mosul-for-at-least-a-year/> up to a year before that army
is capable of launching a campaign to retake Mosul, the country’s second
largest city.
What went wrong? The U.S. Army believes in putting the “bottom line up
front,” so much so that they have even turned the phrase into an acronym:
BLUF. The bottom line here is that, when it comes to military
effectiveness, what ultimately matters is whether an army -- any army --
possesses spirit. Call it fire in the belly, a willingness to take the
fight to the enemy. The Islamic State’s militants, at least for the moment,
clearly have that will; Iraqi security forces, painstakingly trained and
lavishly underwritten by the U.S. government, do not.
This represents a failure of the first order. So here’s the $60 billion
question: Why did such sustained U.S. efforts bear such bitter fruit? The
simple answer: for a foreign occupying force to create a unified and
effective army from a disunified and disaffected populace was (and remains)
a fool’s errand. In reality, U.S. intervention, now as then, will serve
only to aggravate that disunity, no matter what
<
http://online.wsj.com/articles/sunnis-question-plan-for-iraqi-national-guar
d-1411076197> new Anbar Awakenings are attempted.
Upon Saddam’s overthrow in 2003 and the predictable power vacuum that
followed, score-settling ethno-religious factions clashed in what, in the
end, was little short of civil war. In the meantime, both Sunni and Shia
insurgencies arose to fight the American occupiers. Misguided decisions by
Bremer’s CPA only made matters worse. Deep political divisions in Iraq fed
those insurgencies, which targeted American troops as a foreign presence. In
response, the U.S. military sought to pacify the insurgents, while
simultaneously expanding the Iraqi constabulary. In military parlance, it
began to “stand up” what would become massive security forces. These were
expected to restore a semblance of calm, even as they provided cover for
U.S. troops to withdraw ever so gradually from combat roles.
It all sounded so reasonable and achievable that the near-impossibility of
the task eluded the Americans involved. To understand why the situation was
so hopeless, try this thought experiment. Imagine that it is March 1861 in
the United States. Elected by a minority of Americans, Abraham Lincoln is
deeply distrusted by Southern secessionists who seek a separatist set of
confederated states to protect their interests. Imagine at that moment that
a foreign empire intervened, replacing Lincoln with a more tractable leader
while disbanding the federal army along with state militias due to their
supposed untrustworthiness and standing up its own forces, ones intended to
pacify a people headed toward violent civil war. Imagine the odds of
“success”; imagine the unending chaos that would have followed.
If this scenario seems farfetched, so, too, was the American military
mission in Iraq. Not surprisingly, in such a speculative and risky
enterprise, the resulting security forces came to be the equivalent of so
many <
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Milken> junk bonds. And when
the margin call came, the only thing left was hollow legions.
A Kleptocratic State Produces a Kleptocratic Military
In the military, it’s called an “after action report” or a “
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotwash> hotwash” -- a review, that is, of
what went wrong and what can be learned, so the same mistakes are not
repeated. When it comes to America’s Iraq training mission, four lessons
should top any “hotwash” list:
1. Military training, no matter how intensive, and weaponry, no matter how
sophisticated and powerful, is no substitute for belief in a cause. Such
belief nurtures cohesion and feeds fighting spirit. ISIS has fought with
conviction. The expensively trained and equipped Iraqi army hasn’t. The
latter lacks a compelling cause held in common. This is not to suggest that
ISIS has a cause that’s pure or just. Indeed, it appears to be a complex
mélange of religious fundamentalism, sectarian revenge, political ambition,
and old-fashioned opportunism (including loot, plain and simple). But
<
http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/2014/09/09/the-islamic-state-how-obama-
and-the-united-states-got-here> so far the combination has proven compelling
to its fighters, while Iraq’s security forces appear centered on little more
than self-preservation.
2. Military training alone cannot produce loyalty to a dysfunctional and
disunified government incapable of running the country effectively, which is
a reasonable description of Iraq’s sectarian Shia government. So it should
be no surprise that, as Andrew Bacevich has
<
http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/even-if-we-defeat-the-islamic-state-
well-still-lose-the-bigger-war/2014/10/03/e8c0585e-4353-11e4-b47c-f5889e061e
5f_story.html> noted, its security forces won’t obey orders. Unlike
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Charge_of_the_Light_Brigade_%28poem%29>
Tennyson’s six hundred, the Iraqi army is unready to ride into any valley of
death on orders from Baghdad. Of course, this problem might be solved
through the formation of an Iraqi government that fairly represented all
major parties in Iraqi society, not just the Shia majority. But that seems
an unlikely possibility at this point. In the meantime, one solution the
situation doesn’t call for is more U.S. airpower, weapons, advisers, and
training. That’s already been tried -- and it failed.
3. A
<
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/iraq-10-years-on-how-ba
ghdad-became-a-city-of-corruption-8520038.html> corrupt and kleptocratic
government produces a corrupt and kleptocratic army. On Transparency
International’s 2013 <
http://www.transparency.org/cpi2013/results>
corruption perceptions index, Iraq came in 171 among the 177 countries
surveyed. And that rot can’t be overcome by American “can-do” military
training, then or now. In fact, Iraqi security forces mirror the kleptocracy
they serve, often existing largely on paper. For example, prior to the June
ISIS offensive, as Patrick Cockburn
<
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/isis-an-hour-away-from-
baghdad--with-no-sign-of-iraq-army-being-able-to-make-a-successful-counterat
tack-9763658.html> has noted, the security forces in and around Mosul had a
paper strength of 60,000, but only an estimated 20,000 of them were actually
available for battle. As Cockburn writes, “A common source of additional
income for officers is for soldiers to kickback half their salaries to their
officers in return for staying at home or doing another job.”
When he asked a recently retired general why the country’s military pancaked
in June, Cockburn got this
<
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n14/patrick-cockburn/battle-for-baghdad> answer:
“‘Corruption! Corruption! Corruption!’ [the general] replied: pervasive
corruption had turned the [Iraqi] army into a racket and an investment
opportunity in which every officer had to pay for his post. He said the
opportunity to make big money in the Iraqi army goes back to the U.S.
advisers who set it up ten years ago. The Americans insisted that food and
other supplies should be outsourced to private businesses: this meant
immense opportunities for graft. A battalion might have a nominal strength
of six hundred men and its commanding officer would receive money from the
budget to pay for their food, but in fact there were only two hundred men in
the barracks so he could pocket the difference. In some cases there were
‘ghost battalions’ that didn’t exist at all but were being paid for just the
same.”
Only in fantasies like J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings do ghost
battalions make a difference on the battlefield. Systemic graft and rampant
corruption can be papered over in parliament, but not when bullets fly and
blood flows, as events in June proved.
Such corruption is hardly new (or news). Back in 2005, in
<
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/12/why-iraq-has-no-army/30
4428/> his article “Why Iraq Has No Army,” James Fallows noted that Iraqi
weapons contracts valued at $1.3 billion shed $500 million for “payoffs,
kickbacks, and fraud.” In the same year, Eliot Weinberger,
<
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v28/n01/eliot-weinberger/what-i-heard-about-iraq-in-20
05> writing in the London Review of Books, cited Sabah Hadum, spokesman for
the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, as admitting, “We are paying about
135,000 [troop salaries], but that does not necessarily mean that 135,000
are actually working.” Already Weinberger saw evidence of up to 50,000
“ghost soldiers” or “invented names whose pay is collected by [Iraqi]
officers or bureaucrats.” U.S. government hype to the contrary, little
changed between initial training efforts in 2005 and the present day, as
Kelley Vlahos noted recently in her article “
<
http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-iraqi-army-never-was/>
The Iraqi Army Never Was.”
4. American ignorance of Iraqi culture and a widespread contempt for Iraqis
compromised training results. Such ignorance was reflected in the
commonplace use by U.S. troops of the term “
<
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hajji> hajji,” an honorific reserved for
those who have made the journey (or hajj) to Mecca, for any Iraqi male;
contempt in the use of terms such as “
<
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/05/02/opinion/02herbert.html> raghead,” in
indiscriminate firing and overly aggressive behavior, and most notoriously
in the events at Abu Ghraib prison. As Douglas Macgregor, a retired Army
colonel,
<
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2005/04/getting-out-right/30382
8/> noted in December 2004, American generals and politicians “did not think
through the consequences of compelling American soldiers with no knowledge
of Arabic or Arab culture to implement intrusive measures inside an Islamic
society. We arrested people in front of their families, dragging them away
in handcuffs with bags over their heads, and then provided no information to
the families of those we incarcerated. In the end, our soldiers killed,
maimed, and incarcerated thousands of Arabs, 90 percent of whom were not the
enemy. But they are now.”
Sharing that contempt was Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, who chose a
metaphor of parent and child, teacher and neophyte, to describe the
“progress” of the occupation. He <
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/145283/>
spoke condescendingly of the need to take the “
<
http://www.cbsnews.com/news/bush-holds-gop-pep-rally-on-iraq/> training
wheels” off the Iraqi bike of state and let Iraqis pedal for themselves. A
decade later, General Allen exhibited a similarly paternalistic attitude in
an
<
http://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2014/08/gen-allen-destroy-islamic-state-now
/92012/> article he wrote calling for the destruction of the Islamic State.
For him, the people of Iraq are “poor benighted” souls, who can nonetheless
serve American power adequately as “boots on the ground.” In translation
that means they can soak up bullets and become casualties, while the U.S.
provides advice and air support. In the general’s vision -- which had déjà
vu all over again scrawled across it -- U.S. advisers were to “orchestrate”
future attacks on IS, while Iraq’s security forces learned how to obediently
follow their American conductors.
The commonplace mixture of smugness and paternalism
<
http://contraryperspective.com/2014/08/22/general-allens-revealing-article-
on-iraq/> Allen revealed hardly bodes well for future operations against the
Islamic State.
What Next?
The grim wisdom of <
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qrjFuTbl_SA> Private
Hudson in the movie Aliens comes to mind: “Let’s just bug out and call it
‘even,’ OK? What are we talking about this for?”
Unfortunately, no one in the Obama administration is entertaining such
sentiments at the moment, despite the fact that ISIS does not actually
represent a clear and present danger to the “homeland.” The bugging-out
option has, in fact, been tested and proven in Vietnam. After 1973, the
U.S. finally walked away from its disastrous war there and, in 1975, South
Vietnam fell to the enemy. It was messy and represented a genuine defeat --
but no less so than if the U.S. military had intervened yet again in 1975 to
“save” its South Vietnamese allies with more weaponry, money, troops, and
carpet bombing. Since then, the Vietnamese have somehow managed to chart
their own course without any of the above and almost 40 years later, the
U.S. and Vietnam find themselves
<
http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/10/02/us-usa-vietnam-arms-idUSKCN0HR29V
20141002> informally allied against China.
To many Americans, IS appears to be the latest Islamic version of the old
communist threat -- a bad crew who must be hunted down and destroyed. This,
of course, is something the U.S. tried in the region first against Saddam
Hussein in 1991 and again in 2003, then against various Sunni and Shiite
insurgencies, and now against the Islamic State. Given the paradigm -- a
threat to our way of life -- pulling out is never an option, even though it
would remove the “American Satan” card from the IS propaganda deck. To pull
out means to leave behind much bloodshed and many grim acts. Harsh, I know,
but is it any harsher than incessant American-led bombing, the commitment of
more American “advisers” and money and weapons, and yet more American
generals posturing as the conductors of Iraqi affairs? With, of course, the
usual results.
One thing is clear: the foreign armies that the U.S. invests so much money,
time, and effort in training and equipping don’t act as if America’s enemies
are their enemies. Contrary to the behavior predicted by Donald Rumsfeld,
when the U.S. removes those “training wheels” from its client militaries,
they pedal furiously (when they pedal at all) in directions wholly
unexpected by, and often undesirable to, their American paymasters.
And if that’s not a clear sign of the failure of U.S. foreign policy, I
don’t know what is.
A retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel and history professor, William
Astore is a
<
http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175855/william_astore_uncle_sam_doesn%27t_w
ant_you> TomDispatch regular. He edits the blog The Contrary Perspective
<
http://contraryperspective.com> .
Received on Thu Oct 16 2014 - 11:42:39 EDT