Irving at Tacitus has repeatedly claimed that the sort of pragmatism driven by facts-on-the-ground, which is illustrated by the 1st ID in Tikrit, is the rule, not the exception, throughout the US military's operations in Iraq. I have been quite willing to believe him based on moves the military has made since late May-mid June. I am concerned, however, that there are several key factors that are making it difficult to be optimistic about the overall success of this approach, even though I believe it is the only approach likely to produce signficiant positive results.
Response to Irving:
I've believed you before, and it's clearly the right approach. You can't kill them all. Much better to co-opt the ones you can, marginalize the less dangerous ones, and the ones you'll have to kill eventually, either do it now or push them into more limited no-go areas.
But we're far from being "out of the woods" yet. Probabilities are still high that the result will be one of Chatham House's bad-case scenarios -- civil war or regional conflagration.
Four basic problems so far:
There are too many places where this needs to be done for the size forces we have in Iraq -- We're appearing to begin to address this problem by triaging our attention more explicitly. I'm not despondent but instead very relieved that we're identifying areas we don't pretend to control. Call them off-limits but keep the pressure on through stand-off weapons. Make it more difficult for these places to become comfortable sanctuaries, but reduce the amount of damage to your own forces, the friendly Iraqi forces, and Iraqi civilians.
If they're still no-go by the elections, as Allawi said today, tough sh*t. That's not going to stop the elections for the rest of the Iraqis. And the citizens of the no-go areas can't claim that the elections were "unfair," because they were the ones who couldn't/wouldn't work with the US or the government to run the guys out of town who kept them from participating.
There's not enough direction by the Iraqis themselves of managing the carrots and sticks. When a new US unit comes to town to take over from a prior unit that enjoyed some local success, the new guys seem to have to reinvent how they're going to handle the situation. They don't just move in and keep working for the Iraqis the prior unit was supporting.
You may disagree, but it seems the most significant flare-ups have come at handovers from one unit to another (especially one branch of the armed forces to another, but that's a story to look into on another day).I don't think it's just the "not invented here" syndrome. When the US officers are managing the patronage system and doling out the punishments directly, which may be very effective at co-opting the populace, they're relying on personal relations. They've got to create a system that works when they're gone -- first, when they hand things over to another US unit, and ultimately when the US is gone altogether. [BTW -- I'm not including the "handover" to the Fallujah Brigade in the list of lack of success, since that was a political gesture, not a realistic attempt to put the Iraqis in charge.]
There hasn't been sufficient success in building a network of co-opted people who will remain reasonably reliable when the US isn't there. You can't just rely on one guy, because he's too easy to take out. The only way a large enough group will "stay bought" is if they've got ongoing interests in the success of an orderly government in Baghdad (or at least in the province).
Knowing they risk the US coming back in with guns if they don't "stay bought" is one ongoing incentive, but they may be presented with much more compelling immediate incentives in terms of direct threats by insurgents once the US isn't present anymore. A future risk that the US might punish them, versus a certainty that they or their family are going to die tomorrow -- well that's a tough calculus for the US strategy to try to go against.
Simply relying on "negative incentives" are insufficient to get a core group of locals -- who reinforce each other -- to "stay bought." Where are the positive incentives? Can the Baghdad government start managing the handouts of goodies to make it more attractive for the locals to stay on the government's good side? Are there pet projects of a tribal leader or the equivalent of a "city council of elders" that Baghdad could reward but, if they stopped cooperating, could yank? Can handouts be managed by central ministries on the basis of "the public good" rather than to friends, relatives and political allies?
Given the importance to Iraq as a whole (and thus to the US) of obtaining participation by the lion's share of the country in the political process, an explicit awarding of carrots for good behavior would not offend either Iraqis or the US public/Congress. The current situation, which is totally non-transparent on both the US and Iraqi sides, just stirs up suspicion of favoritism, corruption and conspiracies.
Most important missing ingredient -- we're missing an ION Drive. I quote you from last month:
A constant pressure forever and always pushing towards a single vision no matter how slow or how imperceptible the effort. It's in the thousands of constant little decisions, seemingly unrelated yet always decided in the context of a single vector. A thousand mile journey made with little noticed single steps. While not always the right approach, it seems to be the most, or maybe best, approach in solving some of the most daunting tasks of the Age. Nature uses it to throw-up and then tear-down mountains--and to carve Grand Canyons.
The ION drive in Iraq shouldn't be "liberation=freedom=democracy" and "freedom is on the march." That's all about the US, not about the Iraqis. And that's been the problem all along. It was billed as "our war on terrorism" but the success of the adventure is all up to what the Iraqis themselves wind up doing. Remember, they get a vote too. /li>
I've been saying this since I started coming to [Tacitus in May], so I probably sound like a broken record. Our goal is not to kill terrorists, and our role is not to build a democracy. It's to help the Iraqis create a system that allows them to live together in a reasonably orderly fashion so that they can get on with building their economy, their society and their own political system. Hopefully without too much interference from their neighbors and without too much spill-over disruption across the rest of the region.
Tony Cordesman from CSIS, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, made a key distinction between idealism and achievable objectives. He stresses that an excess of idealism may not just get you into the wrong fights, it can get in the way of reaching your goals once you're in a fight.
The US cannot afford to rush into - or stay in - any conflict on ideological grounds. It cannot afford to avoid any necessary commitment because of idealism. What it needs is informed pragmatism. One simple rule of thumb is to stop over-simplifying and sloganizing - particularly in the form of "mirror imaging" and assuming that "democratization" is the solution or even first priority for every country. The US needs to deal with security threats quietly and objective[ly] on a country-by-country and movement-by-movement basis.
This "informed pragmatism" -- informed by understanding the people you're trying to assist, by some practical experience, and by American values -- is what the guys on the ground you talk about are doing. They isolate and marginalize rather than blow away. They're distinguishing between why this guy will just as happily shoot them as look at them and why another guy might cooperate with some Ba'athists but not some foreigners. Or why these Shi'a are worth defending in a low-level civil war that's going on. They differentiate objectives and tactics based on their knowledge of what's happening on the ground and their close collaboration with Iraqis. That's why they're succeeding in a series of small, incremental, quiet steps.
But there's no ION drive. The goals of what the guys are trying to do on the ground isn't being sung from the top, and all the way up and down the ladder. One of the main purposes of the ION drive is to ensure a reasonable degree of consistency across a host of actors making lots of distributed decisions on the basis of local rather than central information. That means it's important that we're reasonably consistent in what we say and what we do from the top down. Another purpose is to leverages our efforts because our unity of speech and action prepares the ground vis a vis others who watch us and listen to us. We get to our goals faster because we don't rely exclusively on act directly on other people or their self-interest calculus -- we also influence them.
Instead, what do we get? "We will defeat our enemies." "Freedom is on the march." "We will honor the fallen by completing their mission" -- what mission? to help Iraq get on its feet so we're out of there as soon as humanly possible because our continued presence is destabilizing? or to wipe our enemies off the face of the earth? or to establish a base of operations to move our defensive perimeter from the East Coast to Baghdad? What a confused and confusing mishmash.
This flag-waving and chest-thumping also doesn't match anything actually happening in Iraq -- both the bad news and the good news that you think doesn't get reported. The ION drive shouldn't create credibility gaps -- they can be pretty near fatal to those vectors you're so fond of.
Success in this venture requires ongoing, credible communication of a combination of clarity of purpose, determination, and common sense. But none of this is being communicated. That's what we should be selling at home and abroad.
In his response to me, Irving claimed that there is indeed an ION drive there in Iraq pushing along much the lines I described. He dismissed the contradictory signals from the WH as simply a matter of their being terrible at explaining all this to the public.
Irving took issue with the way I used the term "co-opt" and made a very important clarification.
The negative reinforcement comes not from the US but from the terrorists. It is they who are devistating towns, setting up roadblocks--and interferring with economic business in the areas. Clan & Tribe leaders are trying to play all sides against each other. Try this thought...you can make a point by NOT engaging the terrorists. In many instances the tribes would like nothing better than to make a profit off of both sides...and like certian politicians, avoid making a decision. If town leaders are enjoying a certian economic prosperity due to the "new" Iraqi economic conditions, and some of the most profitable businesses are kind of shaky in an Islamic Religious kind of way, then pulling-back and letting some fundamentalists impact business...can help some people get off the fence. Is that co-option? Or letting folks see the light of certian possibilities?
My further response:
Setting aside your claim about ION drives being in place, you make a very good point about what you choose not to do being as important as what you choose to do.
Fallujah is also an example where "holding back" is a more effective weapon that head-on assault. They united against the foreign invaders, but there's little that holds the various groups together in a sustained fashion. Already considerable falling out among thieves. A story on that very point, which undoubtedly warms your heart, appeared in today's LA Times:
No longer directly confronting U.S. forces, Coleman said, the rebels had been fighting among themselves, pressured by the U.S. bombing.
"When we attacked in that city, all the various factions that are represented ... coalesced in a marriage of convenience -- and, basically, designated us as the common enemy," Coleman said. "They were arranged in a very tight, 360-degree circle, all faced outward at us, and they were all willing to engage us in the fight."
Absent the U.S. presence, the colonel said, intense opposition has arisen to the hundreds of foreign fighters -- mostly from other Arab nations -- who are said to have concentrated their forces in Fallouja. Reports indicate efforts to impose a Taliban-like Islamic regime there, with women forced to wear veils and religious authorities passing civil judgment.
One indication of the factionalism, Coleman said, is the frequent nighttime gun battles in town -- confrontations that do not involve coalition forces.
"There are many nights in the city when we are doing absolutely nothing there, and there's a lot of activity," he said, noting that in the spring all fire was aimed at coalition forces. "Those same people are now shooting at each other."
Perfectly consistent with the differentiation, triage, marginalization, isolation tactics I tried to describe. Understanding whose cooperation the Iraqi gov't needs, whose disruption needs to be squelched, and what their hot buttons (both positive and negative) are.
I was focusing on the military actions, which was the subject of praktike's "winning ugly" post. Every one seems suicidal that we've finally admitted we don't control all of Iraq, that we've adopted isolation tactics, and we're not going to try to secure all of Iraq at once. I think it's great. Thought they were mad to take on Fallujah the way they did in the first place, with no real Iraqi allies there and the causus belli the death of 4 Americans. The results were textbook predictable, and I note that via the LA Times yesterday, Lt Gen Conway agrees but Gen Sanchez apparently did not.
Najaf was a completely different story. Whether the US was responsible for lighting the match both times is neither here nor there. We were quite deliberate about taking steps to separate friend from foe as much as possible. We were intervening on the side of the good guys in an intra-Shi'a war. And we made the point that we'd intervene again if someone tries to take over by force.
This is why I answered your question sometime ago that we shouldn't go after Sadr personally. By not going after Sadr directly, but rather the hard core who keep fighting in Sadr City, we're splitting the Sadr-ites also. There's a lot of confusion reported among the more militant Sadr-ites about whether this "political participation" road is one they want to travel. So the folks who are doing the bulk of the fighting right now are mostly super-anti-government, or die-hard fundamentalists/Iranians, or hoodlums. But if there's even a whiff of a threat against Sadr, you see an immediate mobilization of the 10s of thousands at the mosques, and you've lost all that advantage of dividing and isolating and reducing the momentum of the fighters.
The problem that can't be tackled the same way is the true terrorism. If the Israelis can't stop the suicide bombers with their security system, we'd better be prepared for high profile, horribly gory events, over and over and over through the elections. Only way that will change is if and when the Iraqi population gets totally fed up with them, since the victims are Iraqi.
The danger from the terrorists is that, though they can't win, they can prevent the government from appearing reasonably effective and reliable. And that's enough to keep things very unstable and ready for a big blowup (e.g. Kurds re the constitution or Kirkuk).
Facts are facts, but perceptions are reality.
PS -- Not accusing praktike of going suicidal over the Pentagon finally admitting there are no-go areas. I believe he would take quite the opposite position -- that a little truth-telling is extremely constructive.
The first afoe European weblog awards
Response to Irving: I've believed you before, and it's clearly the right approach. You can't kill them all. Much better to co-opt the ones you can, marginalize the less dangerous ones, and the ones you'll have to kill eventually, either do it now or push them into more limited no-go areas. But we're far from being "out of the woods" yet. Probabilities are still high that the result will be one of Chatham House's bad-case scenarios -- civil war or regional conflagration. Four basic problems so far:
- There are too many places where this needs to be done for the size forces we have in Iraq -- We're appearing to begin to address this problem by triaging our attention more explicitly. I'm not despondent but instead very relieved that we're identifying areas we don't pretend to control. Call them off-limits but keep the pressure on through stand-off weapons. Make it more difficult for these places to become comfortable sanctuaries, but reduce the amount of damage to your own forces, the friendly Iraqi forces, and Iraqi civilians.
If they're still no-go by the elections, as Allawi said today, tough sh*t. That's not going to stop the elections for the rest of the Iraqis. And the citizens of the no-go areas can't claim that the elections were "unfair," because they were the ones who couldn't/wouldn't work with the US or the government to run the guys out of town who kept them from participating.
- There's not enough direction by the Iraqis themselves of managing the carrots and sticks. When a new US unit comes to town to take over from a prior unit that enjoyed some local success, the new guys seem to have to reinvent how they're going to handle the situation. They don't just move in and keep working for the Iraqis the prior unit was supporting.
You may disagree, but it seems the most significant flare-ups have come at handovers from one unit to another (especially one branch of the armed forces to another, but that's a story to look into on another day).I don't think it's just the "not invented here" syndrome. When the US officers are managing the patronage system and doling out the punishments directly, which may be very effective at co-opting the populace, they're relying on personal relations. They've got to create a system that works when they're gone -- first, when they hand things over to another US unit, and ultimately when the US is gone altogether. [BTW -- I'm not including the "handover" to the Fallujah Brigade in the list of lack of success, since that was a political gesture, not a realistic attempt to put the Iraqis in charge.]
- There hasn't been sufficient success in building a network of co-opted people who will remain reasonably reliable when the US isn't there. You can't just rely on one guy, because he's too easy to take out. The only way a large enough group will "stay bought" is if they've got ongoing interests in the success of an orderly government in Baghdad (or at least in the province).
Knowing they risk the US coming back in with guns if they don't "stay bought" is one ongoing incentive, but they may be presented with much more compelling immediate incentives in terms of direct threats by insurgents once the US isn't present anymore. A future risk that the US might punish them, versus a certainty that they or their family are going to die tomorrow -- well that's a tough calculus for the US strategy to try to go against.
Simply relying on "negative incentives" are insufficient to get a core group of locals -- who reinforce each other -- to "stay bought." Where are the positive incentives? Can the Baghdad government start managing the handouts of goodies to make it more attractive for the locals to stay on the government's good side? Are there pet projects of a tribal leader or the equivalent of a "city council of elders" that Baghdad could reward but, if they stopped cooperating, could yank? Can handouts be managed by central ministries on the basis of "the public good" rather than to friends, relatives and political allies?
Given the importance to Iraq as a whole (and thus to the US) of obtaining participation by the lion's share of the country in the political process, an explicit awarding of carrots for good behavior would not offend either Iraqis or the US public/Congress. The current situation, which is totally non-transparent on both the US and Iraqi sides, just stirs up suspicion of favoritism, corruption and conspiracies.
- Most important missing ingredient -- we're missing an ION Drive. I quote you from last month: The ION drive in Iraq shouldn't be "liberation=freedom=democracy" and "freedom is on the march." That's all about the US, not about the Iraqis. And that's been the problem all along. It was billed as "our war on terrorism" but the success of the adventure is all up to what the Iraqis themselves wind up doing. Remember, they get a vote too. /li>
I've been saying this since I started coming to [Tacitus in May], so I probably sound like a broken record. Our goal is not to kill terrorists, and our role is not to build a democracy. It's to help the Iraqis create a system that allows them to live together in a reasonably orderly fashion so that they can get on with building their economy, their society and their own political system. Hopefully without too much interference from their neighbors and without too much spill-over disruption across the rest of the region. Tony Cordesman from CSIS, in testimony to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in May, made a key distinction between idealism and achievable objectives. He stresses that an excess of idealism may not just get you into the wrong fights, it can get in the way of reaching your goals once you're in a fight. This "informed pragmatism" -- informed by understanding the people you're trying to assist, by some practical experience, and by American values -- is what the guys on the ground you talk about are doing. They isolate and marginalize rather than blow away. They're distinguishing between why this guy will just as happily shoot them as look at them and why another guy might cooperate with some Ba'athists but not some foreigners. Or why these Shi'a are worth defending in a low-level civil war that's going on. They differentiate objectives and tactics based on their knowledge of what's happening on the ground and their close collaboration with Iraqis. That's why they're succeeding in a series of small, incremental, quiet steps. But there's no ION drive. The goals of what the guys are trying to do on the ground isn't being sung from the top, and all the way up and down the ladder. One of the main purposes of the ION drive is to ensure a reasonable degree of consistency across a host of actors making lots of distributed decisions on the basis of local rather than central information. That means it's important that we're reasonably consistent in what we say and what we do from the top down. Another purpose is to leverages our efforts because our unity of speech and action prepares the ground vis a vis others who watch us and listen to us. We get to our goals faster because we don't rely exclusively on act directly on other people or their self-interest calculus -- we also influence them. Instead, what do we get? "We will defeat our enemies." "Freedom is on the march." "We will honor the fallen by completing their mission" -- what mission? to help Iraq get on its feet so we're out of there as soon as humanly possible because our continued presence is destabilizing? or to wipe our enemies off the face of the earth? or to establish a base of operations to move our defensive perimeter from the East Coast to Baghdad? What a confused and confusing mishmash. This flag-waving and chest-thumping also doesn't match anything actually happening in Iraq -- both the bad news and the good news that you think doesn't get reported. The ION drive shouldn't create credibility gaps -- they can be pretty near fatal to those vectors you're so fond of. Success in this venture requires ongoing, credible communication of a combination of clarity of purpose, determination, and common sense. But none of this is being communicated. That's what we should be selling at home and abroad.In his response to me, Irving claimed that there is indeed an ION drive there in Iraq pushing along much the lines I described. He dismissed the contradictory signals from the WH as simply a matter of their being terrible at explaining all this to the public. Irving took issue with the way I used the term "co-opt" and made a very important clarification.
My further response: Setting aside your claim about ION drives being in place, you make a very good point about what you choose not to do being as important as what you choose to do. Fallujah is also an example where "holding back" is a more effective weapon that head-on assault. They united against the foreign invaders, but there's little that holds the various groups together in a sustained fashion. Already considerable falling out among thieves. A story on that very point, which undoubtedly warms your heart, appeared in today's LA Times: Perfectly consistent with the differentiation, triage, marginalization, isolation tactics I tried to describe. Understanding whose cooperation the Iraqi gov't needs, whose disruption needs to be squelched, and what their hot buttons (both positive and negative) are. I was focusing on the military actions, which was the subject of praktike's "winning ugly" post. Every one seems suicidal that we've finally admitted we don't control all of Iraq, that we've adopted isolation tactics, and we're not going to try to secure all of Iraq at once. I think it's great. Thought they were mad to take on Fallujah the way they did in the first place, with no real Iraqi allies there and the causus belli the death of 4 Americans. The results were textbook predictable, and I note that via the LA Times yesterday, Lt Gen Conway agrees but Gen Sanchez apparently did not. Najaf was a completely different story. Whether the US was responsible for lighting the match both times is neither here nor there. We were quite deliberate about taking steps to separate friend from foe as much as possible. We were intervening on the side of the good guys in an intra-Shi'a war. And we made the point that we'd intervene again if someone tries to take over by force. This is why I answered your question sometime ago that we shouldn't go after Sadr personally. By not going after Sadr directly, but rather the hard core who keep fighting in Sadr City, we're splitting the Sadr-ites also. There's a lot of confusion reported among the more militant Sadr-ites about whether this "political participation" road is one they want to travel. So the folks who are doing the bulk of the fighting right now are mostly super-anti-government, or die-hard fundamentalists/Iranians, or hoodlums. But if there's even a whiff of a threat against Sadr, you see an immediate mobilization of the 10s of thousands at the mosques, and you've lost all that advantage of dividing and isolating and reducing the momentum of the fighters. The problem that can't be tackled the same way is the true terrorism. If the Israelis can't stop the suicide bombers with their security system, we'd better be prepared for high profile, horribly gory events, over and over and over through the elections. Only way that will change is if and when the Iraqi population gets totally fed up with them, since the victims are Iraqi. The danger from the terrorists is that, though they can't win, they can prevent the government from appearing reasonably effective and reliable. And that's enough to keep things very unstable and ready for a big blowup (e.g. Kurds re the constitution or Kirkuk). Facts are facts, but perceptions are reality. PS -- Not accusing praktike of going suicidal over the Pentagon finally admitting there are no-go areas. I believe he would take quite the opposite position -- that a little truth-telling is extremely constructive.