I noted on the Daily Dish today that Andrew is irritated with the awarding of presidential freedom medals to George “Slam Dunk” Tenet, Tommy “We Have Enough Troops” Franks, and Paul “Disband the Iraqi Army” Bremer. I don’t give much of a hoot about awards. They’re all political in every sense (especially the ones for which I was nominated and lost!), but the issues involved with the latter two men interest me somewhat. (I agree that Tenet was inept.)
As it happens, the question of whether we should have “disbanded the Iraqi Army” came up at our party for Iraq the Model the other night. Because I have never been to Iraq, speak no Arabic, never have been in the Army, etc., unlike others, I have never had a strong opinion on this issue. I simply do not consider myself qualified. But I have to say I was surprised at the response to the question. Omar, the younger brother, all of twenty-four but waaay wise beyond his years, simply laughed and said it would have been impossible. There was no way we could have kept the Iraqi Army together even if we had wanted to. The Iraqi Army, hugely underpaid conscripts who hated what they were doing, had already dissolved before we got to Baghdad. No one wanted any part of it. There was no Iraqi Army to preserve. We had to start all over again - which we have… eventually.
So there you have it - that issue according to one Iraqi anyway. Believe him if you wish. I weight his opinion at least more highly than my own. But others would prefer to blame Bremer. As for whether we had enough troops, I remain agnostic on that too.
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37 Comments
1. chuck:I suppose the question of troop levels is another of those tradeoff thingies. I mean, given that they could be supported, supplied, available in a timely manner, integrated into the force structure, and not weaken other commitments, what commander would not want more troops?
Then there is the question of occupation as opposed to development. The Iraqi venture will fail in the long term if the Iraqis themselves do not develop a commitment to liberty and put forth the effort to bring it about. It is their baby. If we do too much it will be counterproductive in the long term. The correct levels are a judgement call, and I don’t feel qualified or sufficiently knowledgeable to make that call. In a few years we will be able to look back and play monday morning quarterback, but now is much too early.
I think Andrew puts *way* too much faith in his own understanding and intelligence. But that is probably a neccessary trait in a pundit.
Dec 14, 2004 - 9:34 am 2. jedrury:Roger, you are correct.
Who can really know whether the Iraqi army could have been kept together. This gap in knowledge tho does not prevent the anti Bush crowd from expressing an opinion that disbanding was “a major strategic mistake.” I can almost hear the Joe Biden rant from here.
The argumentative structure to the political debate about the president is intriguing; is the glass full, half full or empty?
The reality of the war situation confronting the military is always secondary to the choice of arguable alternatives depending on outcome.
A choice made is always wrong if the outcome fails. No allowance is ever made for the vagaries of war or the best case scenario at the time.
This type of analysis and argumentation was never more evident than in the public hearings of the 9/11 Commission.
Dec 14, 2004 - 9:44 am 3. charlotte:What would be the whingeing today had we not disbanded the Ba’athist Army and ensuing terrorism and betrayals occurred, and had we deployed many thousands more troops to theater, only to have logistical and occupation perception problems, as well as more casualties?
The thing is: there is NEVER 20-20 hindsight, because who can know how alternatives would have played out?
Dec 14, 2004 - 9:53 am 4. thedragonflies:The idea that we were supposed to keep the Iraqi army together never made sense to me. How do you invade a country, fight its army, and then try to keep that same army together and in power once your are in country? Who would think that they could be trusted? Who decides which members are to be trusted? Why would that army turn from fighting you to helping you? Isnít some of that army now fighting us as ìinsurgentsî?
The old media and the Dems have come up with this big mistake that we made, but what kind of mistake would it have been to try to keep the army intact and direct it to our purposes? Do people think that would have been some kind of easy thing to do? The old media and the Dems would likely now be harping on what a big mistake it was to try to keep a hostile army together and be arrogant enough to think that you could trust them.
Dec 14, 2004 - 10:01 am 5. jerry:You never have enough troops, munitions and weapons when you go to war. You also have too much of the wrong stuff and not enough of the right stuff. You always have weapons that have never been used that don’t work as predicted or fit into the actual environment. If you sit around waiting for the right numbers and weapons you don’t win wars. You come as you are with what you got and make it work until you find something better. War is all about improvise, adapt, overcome and not about following a Hollywood scripted plan.
Besides, we all know that if it were revealed that Tommy Franks was a big supporter of Gay Marriage Sully would be the first demanding that Franks get the Medal of Freedom.
Unfortunately, everything in Andrew Sullivan’s life now comes down to Gay Marriage.
Dec 14, 2004 - 10:23 am 6. whistleneck jones:Roger, you are wise to withhold judgment on these issues. These are the things that will be discussed by historians in the future once the history is known and ready to be written. As for us now, there is probably no way of knowing, so we’d best just sit and listen as the facts unfold rather than make snap judgments look foolish later. There are still plenty of military questions and what-ifs we aren’t even close to understanding regarding wars that happened centuries ago.
Your modesty and fairness is always admirable and refreshing.
Dec 14, 2004 - 10:48 am 7. Yehudit:Tommy Franks has said exactly the same thing in several interviews. This is one of the big false memes about the Iraq War. There was no Iraqi Army left to disband, they melted away and rejoined the population as soon as they could. One reason we won so fast.
Dec 14, 2004 - 10:58 am 8. Charlie (Colorado):I think Andrew puts *way* too much faith in his own understanding and intelligence. But that is probably a neccessary trait in a pundit.
You know, Chuck, that really fits with something I’ve been thinking about for a while: what are the qualifications for “pundit”, and why do we pay any attention to any of the usual punditry?
Cf Juan Cole — if that’s his real name — talking about Iraq. He clearly thinks he knows more about the situation in Iraq than Omar et al. Why?
David Hackworth, as I understand it, at least has some record of making decent predictions as long as you only count the times when things aren’t going well, but he appears to predict catastrophe five times for every real one. So why should we take his predictions seriously?
Dec 14, 2004 - 12:31 pm 9. PeterUK:Is the hammock tester saying that Franks, who won an incredible campaign and Bremer, who was number one target in Iraq should get no recognition for their work.
Of course there were mistakes,given all the variables,options and sheer immenseness of the task.Of course things went wrong what does he think it was a re-run of the “A Team”?
Dec 14, 2004 - 1:15 pm 10. AlanC:This topic is the perfect example of why you should vote for character first and only latterly on issues (except as they are indicative of character).
The simple truth as pointed out is that we don’t and can’t know, of all the choices made, which were excellent, which were good, which were only mediocre and which were bad. Just as when, in Nov. of 2000, we didn’t know about 9/11.
So, you vote for the guy with the character that you can trust to do his / her best with those pesky unknown unknowns.
I’m am content with the way things are going with GW in control. Is it perfect? No, but then I don’t expect perfection. Is it the best that is possible? Don’t and can’t know that. Is it going pretty well, all things considered? Yeah, I think we can say that; at least Omar, Mohammed and Ali seem to think so. And, they have a whole lot more expert opinion then anyone sitting around over here has.
Dec 14, 2004 - 1:55 pm 11. Terrye:Well I hate to sound snarky but who the hell is Andrew Sullivan to know?
I mean really, if I have to chose between Tommy Franks’s opinion on military matters and Sully’s, why would I pick Sully?
And as for Bremer disbanding the army, let us all think back to the Americans arriving in Baghdad…do we remember divisions of defenders or looters? I think Omar is right, there was no army to disband. I also think that even if you had more soldiers it would have been difficult to have them where you needed when you needed them there. I think Bremer had a lot of balls to take the job in the first place.
I wonder if we could fight WW2 today… or if we would second guess our military and threaten lawsuits and commissions to such an extent that nothing could be accomplished.
The problem with people like Sully is that they believe there is a simple plan to fix things and it is the job of the people in charge to discover what that plan is.
Dec 14, 2004 - 2:12 pm 12. TigerHawk:There are at least a couple of things that might be said about the disbanding of the Iraqi army.
First, it may indeed not have been sensible to keep the Iraqi army together as a fighting force, but that does not mean that it was a great idea to scatter it to the four winds. We might have taken their weapons away, handed them shovels, pickaxes and other devices of manual labor, doubled their wages, and put them to work. We could have enrolled them per a decree from Ceasar, and then, at least, they would have had jobs, even if they were “make work” jobs, and we would have had some form of census for tracking them. We didn’t do any of that.
Second, while it may be the case that much of the criticism of the postwar administration is rank post hoc second-guessing, the problem of unemployed soldiers is an ancient one that has plagued authoritarian governments for millenia. One of the main reasons for the Crusades (fer Chrissakes!) was to employ all the extra knights knocking around. Otherwise unemployed men-at-arms became brigands — routiers in the French — and were thereby one of the great scourages of the Middle Ages. Sending them overseas bought peace at home.
So whether or not it would have been smart to keep the Iraqi army intact as a fighting force — I tend to agree with the skeptics on that question — it was historically stupid to cut all those soldiers loose with no alternative plan. Would it have been so hard to hire all the soldiers who were not otherwise unreconstructed Ba’athists? I daresay it would have been cheap compared to fighting them.
Dec 14, 2004 - 2:38 pm 13. PeterUK:“I wonder if we could fight WW2 today… or if we would second guess our military and threaten lawsuits and commissions to such an extent that nothing could be accomplished”.
You would be facing a failed Soviet Union that stretched from Vladivostock to Galway Bay.
Dec 14, 2004 - 2:44 pm 14. holdfast:“The problem with people like Sully is that they believe there is a simple plan to fix things and it is the job of the people in charge to discover what that plan is.”
Thats why Sully is better than Kerry - Sully only wants someone in charge to have a simple plan. Kerry was simple-minded, but thought that he had the plan.
Dec 14, 2004 - 3:18 pm 15. BeckyJ:PeterUK:
If it were the “A-Team” the military would be firing cabbages from some piece of plumbing mounted on the back of a hay wagon lighting the fuse with Face’s cigar.
Wait…did I just give too much away about my early TV viewing habits?
Going back to Terrye’s comment; WW2 and how it was carried out was not criticized as much by the press, but the aftermath and the rebuilding efforts in Germany were certainly criticized by the media. It seems that over the years, the American media has appointed itself as the official carper of American politics; if they don’t like the Administration, it can do no right (especially if that Administration is Republican).
Dec 14, 2004 - 3:56 pm 16. PeterUK:Beckyj
How did you know about the top secret Brassica Cannon.
Sullivan has taken the road which is more lucrative,four more years of protest.The are millions of disappointed Democrats out there waiting for an endless deluge of bile.M.Moore made it pay.
Dec 14, 2004 - 4:21 pm 17. chuck:BeckyJ,
I do recall Omar Bradley in A Soldier’s Story talking about the press commentary as the First Army worked through the hedgerows towards the St. Lo breakout. Seems the press was complaining about the slow progress and wondering why the generals hadn’t learned anything about blitzkrieg warfare, yadda, yadda, yadda. Really, if you are a commenter sitting on the sidelines, you are a genius. Anyone actually doing anything is a fool, as nothing goes as well as your average genius thinks it should.
Dec 14, 2004 - 4:26 pm 18. Terrye:Tigerhawk:
My understanding was that the coalition did pay the Iraqi soldiers, now whether they made them do anything to earn the money I am not sure.
I think there was a little too much senstivity in some cases. Work is work. Give them a shovel, a broom..if not they may pick up a gun.
Dec 14, 2004 - 4:44 pm 19. Syl:Tigerhawk:
“Would it have been so hard to hire all the soldiers who were not otherwise unreconstructed Ba’athists? I daresay it would have been cheap compared to fighting them.”
While you make some good points, I wonder just how many of those we are fighting were ex-soldiers anyway? We simply don’t know. I mean it’s not as if the entire Iraqi army is now the insurgency.
Dec 14, 2004 - 5:01 pm 20. DanM:The premise that we “let the Iraqi Army disband” presupposes that we had them in our control in the first place. The argument isn’t valid from any perspective I can find.
What was our captured “Iraqi regulars” number? That is the number of Iraqi Army we could control.
Anything else is pure nonsense. Unless you believe that some monetary psy-ops would have brought them out to take their “paycheck” and return home loving the U.S.
This is the “War Management” oxymoron taken to the absurd level.
chuck - re: 4:26 p.m. post- bingo…
Dec 14, 2004 - 5:01 pm 21. Syl:Regarding number of troops I, of course, don’t know either. But I’ve reached the point where I simply roll my eyes when the subject is brought up. The general quoted is always Shinseki.
Shinseki has been fighting the re-organization of our military forever. I think he’s a couple of decades behind the times and simply doesn’t grok 21st century warfare.
But he criticizes Rumsfeld and Bush and that’s credentials enough for the Left.
Dec 14, 2004 - 5:03 pm 22. BeckyJ:My dad spent a year in Vietnam as one of the now-infamous military advisors in 1965. He has many stories of press reports that misreported the actual activities on the ground, or spun them in such as way as to make things look bad. And this was before the Tet Offensive. The press and the military have never really had a loving relationship. The military views the press as out to get them, and the press assumes that the military is hiding something.
When I first heard the arguments for keeping the Iraqi army intact I thought that except for the senior officer corps, the large majority were conscripts who had no desire to be in Saddam’s army. Why keep them against their will? Secondly, the senior officers were Ba’athists who supported the regime, why would they want to become members of a new, US-supported Iraqi military? Having said that, I do think that US military should have kept closer tabs on the senior officers instead of letting them disappear into the crowds.
IIRC, reports coming from Gulf War I indicated that Iraqi soldiers were surrendering in order to obtain food and clothing. This was not an army worth keeping together.
Dec 14, 2004 - 5:19 pm 23. Catherine:My husband insists that the argument for keeping the army together was simply that the soldiers should have kept getting their paychecks, nothing more.
I don’t quite follow, I must say. If that were the case, you’re talking unemployment checks, not army. Just send everyone some money on a regular basis.
He’s probably right as to what the ‘argument’ really was, though. I remember constantly reading about how the disbanded army had instantly morphed into Shiite insurgents because they were broke.
And, interestingly enough, you don’t hear so much about how The Single Most Fatal Error Was Disbanding The Army now that the Shiites have dropped out of the war.
We’ve probably all been mistaking the argument for keeping the army together as an argument for keeping the army together.
Dec 14, 2004 - 5:58 pm 24. richard mcenroe:Roger ó A benchmark worth keeping in mind: A country worth keeping does not have an army that dissolves.
The Poles were smashed but they fought until ordered to lay down their weapons.
The Finns fought until they had nothing left to fight with.
Even the French Army, defeated, did not dissolve.
The Czechs couldn’t bring themselves to fight for their own country… at least their leadership elite couldn’t.
The Russian army collapsed at the start of Barbarossa and nearly disintegrated before Stalin began reinforcing appeals to Party with calls to defend the Rodina.
The Iraqi army Saddam commanded dissolved like some medieval levy ó “It’s not my castle….”
Dec 14, 2004 - 6:35 pm 25. Retread:Terrye: “The problem with people like Sully is that they believe there is a simple plan to fix things and it is the job of the people in charge to discover what that plan is.”
And it is the job of Sully to carp about whatever the people in charge discover.
Dec 14, 2004 - 6:39 pm 26. Barry Dauphin:Andrew isn’t using hindsight, it’s foresight. Was it a mistake to handle the Iraqi army the way Bremer did? Beats me. We won’t know the answer to that for at least a few years, if ever. Hell we won WWII and some people still think going through Africa was a mistake. Maybe Andrew can entertain us with a thought experiment about how it would be different if Bremer made different decisions. I won’t hold my breath. He never speaks of the flypaper strategy anymore once the fighting got tough and we didn’t kill all the Islamofascists in a day.
Andrew’s certainty about such things must be based upon his longstanding military serivce. Oh wait,can’t be that. Maybe his longstanding publication record as a scholar of military history. Oh wait. Well, it must be based on something. While we are waiting to learn from Andrew what makes him such an expert perhaps he and his pseudo militarians could stop bashing a public servant like Bremer who risked his life coming out of a cushy private life to take on such a huge task.
Dec 14, 2004 - 7:03 pm 27. DennisThePeasant:Regarding Andrew-
2004 wasn’t a good year for Andrew. 2005 isn’t looking much better. Now, evidently, he intends to take his revenge upon we Red Staters by boring us to death with bitchery. It’s not the most original strategy around…a quick look at Atrios, KOS or Josh suggests some sort of United Front in this matter…but it’s either that or trying to think things through, and you know how that’s turned out lately for that crew.
Regarding Troop Levels-
The We Shouldn’t Have Disbanded Iraqi Army Thingee was first advanced by that famed Military Operations Expert Tom Friedman of the New York Times. Being that he’s with the Times, you can be assured Tom’s as well versed on military matters as he is on the Middle East. What more do you need to know? Why trust a large cadre of professional military experts in the finest armed forces in the world when you’ve got a half-assed Op-Ed writer for Al-Jazzera On The Hudson?
Dec 14, 2004 - 7:11 pm 28. BeckyJ:DtP: You are such a peasant! Don’t you know that pundits have all the facts and you and your fellow peasants need to just listen and learn?! Not to mention that the NYT is the fount of all that’s newsworthy (in the case of the NYT & Friedman they seem to think they’re spongeworthy…) When will you learn? Sheesh. (/sarcasm)
Richard McEnroe’s got it. Real states have real armies that don’t dissolve without so much as a whimper.
Dec 14, 2004 - 7:55 pm 29. Barry Dauphin:Maybe Andrew can combine some recent interests. His next column could be that Bremer should have kept the Iraqi army intact and given them steroids since everyone is gonna use them anyway and it’s just another advance like using toothpaste and socks.
Dec 14, 2004 - 8:23 pm 30. IceCold:No need for such diffidence on all these things, Roger (and others). There’s plenty of info available to render common sense judgments — and dismiss the criticism as unserious.
Re the Iraqi military, as many many nobodies like myself commenting in blogs like this, as well as a few somebodies who get published, pointed out when the criticism of Bremer on this first started, the Iraqi army SELF-disbanded. Uh, that’s the major reason the invasion was such a spectacularly quick and low-cost success, by historical standards. And the make-up of that army meant that the formality of disbanding it would hardly affect the security situation: the officer corps was largely Sunni and standoff-ish or outright hostile to us and of limited capability besides, while the rest were Shi’a who were unlikely to oppose us seriously and had very limited military capacity.
By ignoring all this the critics mangle the basic facts of the situation, which is sufficient to toss out their gripe on this point, but it’s worse. They also ignore that Bremer’s challenge at the time was to convince Iraqis things had really changed — particularly to start easing the Shi’a out of their submissive posture so they would bet on a different future and not hedge against a Ba’athist return. Thus disbanding the army and dismissing Ba’athists from govt. service — the latter especially carrying its own drawbacks and hassles — were reasonable and even unavoidable steps.
A more serious second look (at this too-early juncture) would ask not why the army was (symbolically) disbanded by Bremer, but why as early as fall ‘03 the Sunni officers residing in nascent trouble spots were NOT, uh, “recalled” to duty, in the form of mass preventive detention, which besides instantly gutting the military capacity of the indigenous opposition would have allowed us to apply all the familiar techniques of bribery, coercion, and deception to permanently cripple it. (Putting everyone of interest off the rosters of the mukhabbarat and Ba’ath party in selected locales behind wire might have also been a decisive pre-emptive blow — an “insurgency” needs insurgents)
Which gets to the troop level (non) issue. It’s what you do with the troops, not whether you’ve got a few more, that matters most (assuming basic sufficiency). Of course it’s easier with more, and you could do some things that aren’t practical with a smaller force. But things like pursuing overly indulgent or carrot-rich carrot-and-stick approaches long after it’s clear a given town isn’t going to get with the program, persevering in “hearts and minds” campaigns when intimidation is what’s called for, or adopting a policy of always running away from ambushes instead of considering them the start of small battles we will finish and win, are tactical choices not always driven by troop numbers. It’s possible to imagine better results from substantially different tactical choices in Iraq; it’s hard to see how better results would have flowed from a larger force following the same course as has been followed.
Who’s this Sullivan guy? He’s got a blog?
Dec 14, 2004 - 9:54 pm 31. Greg D:At this point in time, I consider people who bitch about decomissioning the Iraqi Army to be ignorant, idiots, or dishonest.
1: The Army was one of Saddam’s tools for controlling hte people of Iraq. Disbanding it was a good symbol of what we were trying to accomplish (getting rid of the Baath, and the dictatorship).
2: Since we disbanded the army, many of the officers used their knowledge to loot military equipment to support the fight against the US. If we hadn’t disbanded the army, they would have used their power as officers to steal equipment and send it to the terrorists, as well as using their official positions to intimidate and terrorize the people of Iraq. Real brilliant, supporting that.
3: Middle Eastern armies suck at least partially because their training methods, standards, ways of opperation, etc. all suck. Unless we wanted Iraq to be stuck with a pathetic military, we needed to dump the old, and replace it with something better.
4: We have lots of useful things to do with money in Iraq. Why in the world would we want to waste it on welfare payments to Baathist officers, when we could be spending it rebuilding water and electrical utilities?
5: Did we really have so many US soldiers in Iraq that we had the ability to properly supervise teh Iraqi Army? And did we really have nothing better we could do with them?
There may exist intelligent and honest arguments showing how Bush has actually done a poor job in Iraq, compared what we could realistically expect to accomplish.
But I’ve yet to see one.
Dec 14, 2004 - 10:54 pm 32. erp:Andrew should stick to his knitting and not comment on things about which he knows nothing.
Dec 15, 2004 - 5:07 am 33. David Thomson:ìWho’s this Sullivan guy? He’s got a blog?î
Andrew Sullivan is someone who deceives himself—and the result is that he is now a second rate analyzer of people and events. Sullivan needs to candidly admit that the gay marriage issue is first, last, and foremost, the most important issue. Instead, he wants to have it both ways. Sullivan pretends that the war on terror is his primary consideration.
Dec 15, 2004 - 6:50 am 34. Knucklehead:Wretchard does an interesting and, IMO, very good job with this topic.
It will roughly 5 or 10 years before we have reasonably competent and comprehensive historical analysis of the conduct of the Iraq war. We’ll barely be out of there by then, if by then. Once comprehensive analysis is possible we’ll see that the historians have very different viewpoints and disagree about many things. Eventually a CW will arise and become the publicly accepted narrative. Thirty or so years will have passed and new information previously classified will become available and give historians a new look at the facts. Challenges to CW arise. Fifty years out those interested will be able to find credentialled historical analysis to support whatever conclusion they wish to reach or, conversely, be able to find sufficiently apolitical and reasonably accurate historical works to follow the information to whatever conclusion seems to make the most sense.
As far as my own speculations go I find it amusing that some of the same elitists who have little, if any, understanding and experience of anything military seem to assume there are two, and only two, motivations that drive US men and women to be part of our military:
- the quasi-conscription of economic desperation
- power-mongering, bloodlusting adrenaline addiction
somehow fail to imagine either of those motivations (or any others) to the members of the Iraqi military in place at the time of OIF. SInce I believe in a somewhat richer set of human motivations I speculate a larger (but still simplistic) set of motivational categories for the members of the Iraqi military that was “disbanded”:
- unavoidable conscription
- quasi-conscription/economic desperation
- this ain’t so bad, I could do a lot worse
- if I play this game well I’ll do OK and I’m better suited to this than HVAC repair
- this is the best path to the good life and status available to me, I’m in for a nickle I might as well be in for a dollar
- tradition; this is what my {family, tribe, townsfolk, etc} does - we’re soldiers, policemen, civil servents, etc.
- I’m a Baathist believer to the core and this is where the party wants me.
The ordering of that list is not meant to suggest any attempt to quantify. It does, however, allow for some speculation about how the Iraqi military was partially “self-disbanding” and why keeping whatever portion of it was possible to keep together may have been deemed hopelessly problematic and/or ill-advised.
Those in the first category are gone the moment the Devine Ms. Opportunity snips the ties that bind. This one’s a no-brainer. The moment the life/death risk assessment reaches 50/50 or better for “flee and live, at least a little longer”, those folks are gone.
The next three fall onto a sliding scale risk-reward assessment that boils down to, to quote The Outlaw Josey Wales, “Dying ain’t much of a living.”
The behavior of those first three categories are reasonably predictable and I assert that nothing anyone could have said or offered them (within practicality) would have enticed them to stay. I don’t believe we could have kept involuntary conscription in place. And while it would have been relative safe to ask them the question, “Would you like to keep your job in the Iraqi Army?”, the answers would have been nearly 100% along the lines of, “Whattayounuts?!? It was {torture, really shitty, not a great deal} when I was in it working for them. Doing the same thing working for you, at this moment in time, would be a death warrant. I’m outta here, have a nice life.”
Asking the question and accepting the answer, of the last three categories is a very risky business. The “in for a nickle, in for a dollar” guys might decide at any moment that the ante is too rich, or that its time to fold, or that maybe they can bluff their way to a win. The traditionalists may or may not be interested in keeping their traditional place in a new society or they may want the traditional society back. And the believers may want The Restoration ASAP or be thinking, “meet the new boss, same as the old boss”.
If that was what I was left with and the decision to keep or discard was mine to make, I’d probably choose to discard and take my chances building something entirely new. Even if the bits and pieces available to build from were often the pulled from the refuse heap, at least I’d have some control over where they were riveted into the new machine. Those remnants would be far too unreliable and far too dangerous to bring into the tent and give a seat at the table in any system that was a salvage and repair job starting with the carcass of the old machine. I speculate that if they had been “kept” we would have seen far more deadly and precise ambushes and setups against our troops. I further speculate that it would have been much more difficult and time consuming to achieve whatever level of cooperation we’ve achieved from the rest of the Iraqi people. The rest of the people may well have looked at that and thought, “How is this different than before and if it isn’t different, why should I give it any active support? I’m staying in my low-profile and timid mode, thank you very much.”
Which is all to say that keeping the Iraqi Army together was not a viable or desireable choice. I can’t speculate about whether keeping some portion of the Baathist civil control structure together was done or attempted or whatever. IIRC Patton was not very happy when they took away his Nazi station masters and utility execs, but I have no idea the depth of the problems that resulted in, how long it took to recover, or whether or not Patton was even justified. And that doesn’t even take into account that the Iraqi infrastructure wasn’t exactly a model of teutonic efficiency at any point. Its certainly possible, maybe even probable, that keeping some portion of the Nazi civil structure together may have been possible or advisable. I don’t see how anyone who didn’t have at least as much information as Bremer did can make the same claim re: the Baathists.
I am pretty sure, however, that Andrew Sullivan wasn’t privy to the nasty details of the situation or responsible for making the best decisions possible under difficult circumstances from a list of suboptimal choices. I think Andrew would do us all a great service by getting married and going on a really long honeymoon. And to think, for a long time his was the first blog I turned to each day. I can’t even force myself to read him anymore.
Dec 15, 2004 - 7:23 am 35. Patrick Tyson:Over a year ago, in my first days writing in Roger’s space, I wrote:
…I supported the war, but [that] I now think it to have been a mistake. I will not vote to re-elect Bush because I think that when a man is charged with making decisions that will cause other men to die he has an affirmative responsibility to be right regarding the reasons for making those decisions. In my view, he and his people were wrong about the weapons of mass destruction, the popular (Iraqi) reaction to our victory and the state of the Iraqi economy.
Not too much later I posted some disparaging comments regarding the writings of almost all current and former employees of TNR.
Before I decided to stop repeating myself regarding Iraq, I wrote on 3/1:
It will be a very long time, if ever, before history vindicates Paul Wolfowitz. That being said, I’m hoping for the best. So long as we stay to ensure the territorial integrity of the nation-state and, in addition, the political rights of minority populations (something I support and expect will be necessary for many years) the vindication question will be an open one. If, a few years after occupation ends, Iraq more resembles Japan than it resembles Cuba, all the blood and money will have been worth it.
President Johnson gave the Medal of Freedom to Robert McNamara as McNamara’s tenure as Secretary of Defense came to an end. They couldn’t stand one another by then. Giving medals to those who helped formulate and carry out their policies is one of the ways in which Presidents try to protect their good name…in history.
…and so it goes.
Dec 15, 2004 - 9:40 am 36. geoffg:All…superb commentary. My questions about the self-disbanding Iraqi army:
Would it ever have been possible to keep them from deserting?
Would one hire a lot of deserters to root out the insurgents?
How would one differentiate between friend and agent/spy/mole/ticking-timebomb?
Who would want to be a recruiter, when the applicant, upon declining the terms of employment, just blows hisself up in front of your desk? I mean you wouldn’t know whether it was you body language, or perhaps you it was when you mentioned the “job will be to kill the insurgents,” one of whom happens to be his cousin.
Dec 15, 2004 - 1:54 pm 37. richard mcenroe:Knucklehead ó Don’t forget, in Iraq you have an additional complicating factor, tribalism, as in “why am I squatting here catching cluster bombs with my teeth for this Tikriti schmuck of a colonel when the Marines just kicked in Granma’s front door back home?”
Geoffg ó Good questions all. But your “Would one hire a lot of deserters to root out the insurgents?” Not in this case. The Iraqi army, to the degree that it was organized at all, was organized on the old Soviet model. A lot of grunts with rusty guns and crappy training, with no idea where they are or what’s really going on, a garbage NCO corps made up mostly of the biggest thugs in each unit, and officers doing the sort of basic leadership and technical work that would be done by corporals and buck sergeants. The officers would have been unreliable at best and the rest wouldn’t have been worth their MRE’s…
It’s tempting to think of using the old Iraqi army the way Crook, for example, used Apache tribes against each other, but the Iraqi rank and file had neither the expertise nor the information to be of any real use to us.
Dec 15, 2004 - 8:17 pm