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.

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.

…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.

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.

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.

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.

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?

Richard McEnroe’s got it. Real states have real armies that don’t dissolve without so much as a whimper.