My thoughts on the Iraq mess and what the US ought to do

[xiphias]

I was listening to the BBC World Report this morning, and they were interviewing Iraqis who were very worried about what the Democratic takeover of Congress meant to Iraq. In general, they were happy to see Rumsfeld go, but were a lot more worried about whether the Democratic takeover would mean that the US would go -- which they very much did NOT want to see.

I personally wish that we could just pack up and go home, but I don't feel that we ethically can do so. I find the "Pottery Barn Argument" unfortunately compelling. If you screw something up, you have a moral obligation to make it right again, even if it costs you. The Iraq War is costing us a hell of a lot of lives, and a vast amount of money, and yet, we can't go home, no matter how much we want to.

That said, there is a hell of a lot we can do better, and I want to see the Democrats pushing for those things. Fundamentally, our strategic goal remains the same, now that we actually HAVE one -- make Iraq stable enough that we can go home without the civil war expanding even further. But our tactics have sucked.

The problem, as I see it, is that the United States doesn't have "security forces", nor should we. We have a military. And a good one. Our military fights wars. And does so pretty damn well. Our soldiers, sailors, airmen, and Marines are not trained to be police, as security forces, theoretically, are. They are trained to fight.

SWAT teams are trained to clear rooms very carefully. They may throw a flash-bang in first, then storm in, covering each corner of the room, looking for threats, getting "bad guys" to surrender, and killing them if they present an immediate threat, protecting and extracting innocents.

In order to get onto a SWAT team, you need to start out as a police officer, and be a damned fine one to be allowed to even try out. Then you need to pass a battery of tests to be allowed to train. Then you go through an extremely arduous training course to become SWAT trained, and you need to maintain your training with yearly refresher courses.

It's extremely difficult and dangerous, and mistakes do happen (although, most of the time, when you hear about a SWAT team screwup, it's done by a bunch of guys who CALL themselves a SWAT team because they want to handle automatic weapons, but don't have the qualifications or training). SWAT teams are made up of unbelievably brave men and women who are willing to accept an amazing degree of personal danger in order to protect innocent lives.

(And I think SWAT teams are over-used in the US -- using a SWAT team to serve a warrant against and arrest someone who you strongly suspect is heavily-armed and would kill an average police officer is totally reasonable. Using SWAT teams to serve routine warrants, less so.)

Our military doesn't have the same training. Nor should they. They are equally brave, but their job is very different, and they face different risks.

You know how the US Infantry is trained to clear rooms? TAW missile. Well, ideally. If you HAVE to leave the room more-or-less intact, you creep up to the window, throw a couple grenades in, then poke the muzzle of a SAW in and spray down the room. THEN you enter, in a similar careful manner to how SWAT teams do.

Innocent people? Bad guys who didn't present immediate threats and would have surrendered? That's not the job of a military. That's not what they're trained to do, nor SHOULD they be so trained. They are trained to fight wars.

And we need security forces to do the job in Iraq.

That sucks, by the way. I hate the idea of having Americans trained as security forces. I'd rather have actual police, and an actual military, and not the in-between thing which security forces are. Security forces are fine for military dictatorships and so forth, but I hate the idea that Americans will be trained for that. Yet there's no other choice.

The US has been beginning to re-train our people to be security forces, but it's a slow process, and it's an entirely different mindset. And I hope the new Congress and new Defense Secretary can continue to push this training and mindset.

That's thing one.

Thing two, and even more important, is rebuilding infrastructure. I don't need to say much about that, because I assume that it's fucking obvious why this is important in defeating an insurrection and building a society which is stable enough to live on its own.
Remember -- al Qaeda and Hamas and all the other "terrorist organizations" are popular largely because they build schools, provide hospitals, do food aid. . . we have to build more schools, better hospitals, feed more people. We have to totally overwhelm the terrorists in good works. We need overwhelming superiority in humanitarian aid.

That doesn't replace direct military force -- but direct military force doesn't replace that, either.

And I hope the Democrats can push these policies.

Comments

[ron_newman]

If by remaining in the Pottery Barn, you're breaking more and more dishes every day, aren't you better off leaving?

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I definitely think that "The Bull In The Pottery Barn" situation is a relevant thing to discuss. But what I'm hoping is that, with the midterm elections, we've replaced the bull with, I dunno, a bunch of crazy glue and a credit card.

Okay, the analogy got strained there towards the end. But you get the point.

[adrian-turtle.livejournal.com]

According to that analogy, the elections just *removed* the entire force we have in Iraq (all those forces who are trained for the wrong job and provoking so much trouble), and replaced them with a bunch of Congresscritters. Interesting thought. If the election managed that, no military in Iraq, just the Congress itself, I could see the way clear to getting out quickly.

[sinboy.livejournal.com]

3)We need 10 to 50 thousand people we can trust, who speak the local languange, and have been trained to understand local customs.

2)We some sort of miracle that lets us disarm the millitias without massive civillian casualties.

1)We need the support of the rest of the world to help us fix this mess.

We just won't be able to honestly declare the place fixed until we stop the millitias and tettorist groups. And I don't have much faith that we *can* stop the terrorist groups, becuase they're not based out of one country.

Bush's 'Flypaper' strategy was a sucess. The problem is, we have an effectivley unlimited amount of terrorists, and nothing we're doing in Iraq or anywhere else is addressing that.

rebuilding infrastructure is impossible until the violence stops. And stopping the violence means stopping terrirists from getitng into Iraq, from being started in Iraq, and from operating in Iraq.

We can't do that on our own right now. I wish we could.

[sashajwolf.livejournal.com]

We need overwhelming superiority in humanitarian aid.

Yup. There were similar lessons in the British conflict with the IRA.

We also need to be willing to talk (and listen) to anyone who still has a grievance after the aid's been put in place - anyone, even those we think may have blood on their hands. We need to get to the point where no-one thinks shedding blood is the only way to get our attention - but meanwhile, if they do get to the point of bloodshed before we give them a hearing, we need to admit our mistake and be willing to put that right, not spout "we don't talk to terrorists" slogans. The Northern Ireland peace process succeeded as much as it has largely because a succession of people, starting with the present Mayor of London, were willing to talk to Sinn Fein and not be too squeamish about their relationship with the IRA - and many of the problems with splinter groups in that process have been down to the behaviour of others who didn't get it and, by trying to drive a wedge between the two, ended up weakening the control of the saner elements over the batshit crazy ones.

[jehanna.livejournal.com]

I don't see where we'd get these trainees without a draft. And I don't think that draft is going to happen, nor do I think it SHOULD happen. We're already in deeper than we ever should have been.

I think that given the choice of two evils, I would rather we got the hell out militarily and did as much as we could aidwise to support the reconstruction efforts. I don't think sending even more of us in there against our will when we never should've gone in the first place is going to help anything.

[holzman.livejournal.com]

I think you're misapplying the pottery barn theory -- the theory is "you break it, you buy it;" not "you break it, you fix it." Because of the way Bush has handled the occupation, the United States cannot be the entity that fixes it. As painful as it is to admit, the uniform of the United States Soldier in Iraq is the uniform of the murderer and the torturer, and that's simply going to get in the way.

Someone else has to do the work of making peace there, even if we are stuck picking up the tab.

[papersky.livejournal.com]

You have three really good precedents here, the thriving republics of Germany, Japan and South Korea.

[navrins]

I have been wondering, idly, in what way Iraq is different from Germany and Japan such that we didn't have to fight insurgents in those countries for years after their governments fell, as we are in Iraq. (Or *did* we fight insurgents for years in Germany and Japan, and it just isn't as widely known now?)

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

The main thing I see is that those countries genuinely surrendered. They were fighting a war -- and that means that they knew that there was a chance they could lose -- and they lost, and their governments surrendered. The Emperor and the German government told their people to lay down arms. As a society, they decided to stop fighting. It was over.

The second part, and related, is that the WERE fighting a war. The Iraqi people weren't. They were just minding their own business, when the US came in and started killing people and blowing shit up. If the Iraqis had attacked someone else, they would emotionally understand being attacked back -- there really wasn't that much anti-American backlash, more than you'd expect, after the first Persian Gulf war -- they attacked Kuwait, they got beaten back, you understand that. It's a risk you've taken. Minding your own business and getting attacked? Far less forgivable.

The third thing was the Marshall Plan, and the whatever it was that was similar for Japan. Germany started out with a devistated economy, Japan's was reasonably healthy to start with, but got progressively worse as the war went on. Immediately after they were defeated, Germany's economy improved massively. The life of the average German was palpably better immediately after the US took over.

With Japan, I don't think it was as dramatic, but their ecomony did improve, and continue to improve. And, anyway, they had decided, as a society, to accept what had happend, and accept the Emperor's edict that the war was over.

In Iraq, by contrast, the average Iraqi's life is harder than under Saddam, and nobody the average Iraqi respects has stated that they've been conquered and it's time to accept that fact.

[sethg]

Developing a "SWAT team" within the US military large enough to stabilize a substantial part of Iraq, let alone the whole country would require a tectonic shift in the military culture. In the US armed forces as presently constituted, the way for an officer to rise through the ranks is to be associated with expensive pieces of technology that go "boom".

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

And that's precisely what we don't need. Machines that go boom are very important, but are precisely the Wrong Tool for this job. The Right Tool is human beings with enough guts and training to NOT shoot at things that look threatening until you've doublechecked to see if they're threatening, which is even harder than shooting at things which are threatening.

The other nasty part of this, of course, is that implementing the "Don't Shoot At Things" policy would put soldiers at greater risk, in many cases. . .