IRAQ'd Blog - Spencer Ackerman - TNR
DETERRENCE ISN'T ENOUGH: Over 100 are dead and another 100 are wounded in two massive suicide bombings that took place during a single day in and around Baghdad. (It's surely no accident that these savage attacks are happening while U.N. monitors are on the ground attempting to determine if the country is secure enough to hold elections.) This occurred as our forces are reducing their presence in the city and turning security over to Iraqi police. Security experts consider the 8,000-strong Iraqi police force short about 11,000 cops; we're training about 1,000 police every month, which means that the force will be short 6,000 by the handover date of June 30, and the quality of their training is an open question.
With that in mind, let's turn to a senior Coalition Provisional Authority official cited by Neela Banerjee in her dispatch from Baghdad yesterday. Banerjee valuably investigated the prospects for civil war. Based on her numerous interviews with coalition military officials, "Iraqi clerics, tribal sheiks, politicians, foreign diplomats and ordinary people," she indicates that all-out war is unlikely after the handover of power. But there's a massive caveat: The numerous militias in Iraq could very easily become aggrieved and start fighting one another, and inter-militia combat could in turn escalate into full-fledged war. Here's that CPA official:
If serious trouble erupts after the transfer of power, it is not yet clear to what degree the American military could intervene, although a senior official with the Coalition Provisional Authority said the continuing presence of American troops could provide a strong deterrent.
I want very badly to believe this CPA official was stonewalling Banerjee. If he really thinks our 100,000 troops can deter factional violence, he needs to get out of the Green Zone and walk through the carnage in Baghdad. We don't have enough troops to defeat the insurgency, and we don't have enough Iraqi security forces to make up for the shortfall. According to yesterday's CPA briefing, insurgents attack our troops 22 times every day. After the Pentagon's laborious force rotation is completed in the spring, we'll have 105,000 soldiers and Marines deployed in Iraq--a reduction of about 30,000 soldiers--who will face a steep learning curve. Now, you never hear about the attacks that our forces deter, for the obvious reason that they don't occur. I have no doubt that our forces have deterred or preempted an untold (and, to use a Rumsfeldian phrase, untellable) number of assaults through our raids and patrols. But 100 Iraqis died in the last 24 hours alone because deterrence failed. And that was in central Iraq, where the bulk of our forces are.
Beyond deterrence is the absolutely crucial question of when and how our forces will engage to forestall a widening conflict. Banerjee quotes an allied military official as saying, "Wherever we see a spark, we have to dampen it quickly." This means our troops will have to do to something they're largely not trained to do: preventative security operations, a large number of which will surely be police actions. True, we have Special Forces in Iraq and we're going to have Marines there shortly, and they're more familiar with these types of missions. And we're also bolstering our intelligence capabilities, a necessary component of success. But determining what's a "spark" and what's not is an inescapably difficult task--and our poorly trained Iraqi security forces aren't going to be able to do it by themselves. Preventing conflict escalation among factions is not something with much of a margin for error, especially when we've been unable to disarm militias and the parties that control them appear to consider politics in the new Iraq a zero-sum game. Here's someone else Banerjee quotes, a Sunni named Ahmed Taha al-Jibouri, whose father is a tribal leader: "Let the elections occur, and if they bring a government we don't like, we will have demonstrations to get rid of it. And if that's not enough, we'll take it with weapons."
What we really need is to establish a process so that Jibouri can redress his grievances with neither demonstrations nor weapons, but representation. Beyond that, we need General Ricardo Sanchez to very seriously consider what our military is going to do if, in July, intelligence reports begin to indicate rising crime rates or turf wars or demonstrations by factions with known or suspected ties to militias. Failure to provide security is itself provocative: After today's bombing, Iraqis, infuriated by their vulnerability, were chanting anti-U.S. slogans, and it's not hard to see how increasing factionalism can use that anger as a powder keg. With the CPA taking a laissez-faire attitude towards Iraqi politics thanks to the November 15 Agreement, it seems the administration is placing a tremendous burden on our troops. |
