By Roger Cohen
The New York Times, 29 January 2006
BAGHDAD, Iraq - It was when the Iraqi Army platoon, riding at midnight on the back of a Korean-made cargo truck, managed to get the vehicle stuck on the median of a bridge that the American Army captain finally lost his cool.
"I don't know why the hell they tried to jump the curb," said the captain, Christopher Center of the First Brigade, 10th Mountain Division, as he gazed out into the Baghdad night from his seat behind a computer screen in an armored Humvee. "This amazes me sometimes. The I.A. needs to get out of Baghdad to border areas. They should be securing the borders."
For now, however, units like this platoon from the Iraqi Army's First Brigade, Sixth Division, are being trained by officers like Captain Center. The training is important. The pace of an eventual withdrawal of more than 140,000 American troops depends on it. There's progress, but it's not easy. Baghdad by day is no picnic. By night it's ugly, a world of stray dogs on deserted streets and intermittent small-arms fire.
Sgt. Christopher Bush, seated behind Captain Center, shook his head. "They try so desperately to be like us," he said. To the point of driving a jury-rigged goods vehicle over a median because, hey, a Humvee can do it.
Sergeant Bush clambered out. Twenty minutes later, the Iraqis were back on the road.
"This is true Iraqi-American cooperation," Captain Center said, rolling again into the western Shula district of Baghdad. "This is how it all comes together. They're great guys, they mean well, they just sometimes don't have the equipment."
Captain Center had regained his can-do composure. But almost three years into the United States effort to remake Iraq, the scene on the bridge was not encouraging: a bunch of guys, Iraqis and Americans, in a spooky place, unable to talk to each other without an interpreter, trying to attach a cord to the stranded truck of an embryonic army.
When Saigon fell in 1975, a framed quotation from T. E. Lawrence was found on a wall of the United States Embassy. "Better to let them do it imperfectly than to do it perfectly yourself, for it is their country, their way, and your time is short."
Three decades later, the Vietnamese prime minister, Phan Van Khai, was in New York ringing the opening bell on Wall Street. So perhaps in Iraq, too, it would be best to get out of the way and wait for time to do its mysterious work.
Col. Mark Meadows, whose father was a legend of special operations in Vietnam and elsewhere, thinks not. "They don't want us to leave, they're worried that if we leave the government is not strategically prepared," he said. "The Iraqi Army is gaining respect here and has to carry the weight of the nation until the government gets on its feet."
That could take time. It will most likely be months before a coalition government is formed out of the Dec. 15 elections. Until then the Iraqi Army, in its United States Army surplus uniforms, is indeed the most visible face of nascent Iraqi authority. Colonel Meadows is concerned that current Shiite and Kurdish domination of the army may skew that authority; he wants more Sunnis in the armed forces. But at least the army has secured the airport road, now less dangerous than it was. It "owns the battle space," in American army parlance, across much of Baghdad.
That space is lined with mushrooming concrete blast walls. The walls are adorned with fraying election posters. Is the insurgency prevailing, as all the concrete suggests, or freedom, as embodied in those pictures of Middle Eastern politicians trying to raise a reassuring smile?
Anyone who claims to know the answer is bluffing. The only certainty in Iraq is the uncertainty of the outcome.
But a functioning army would help. Based in a former torture center of Saddam Hussein's intelligence services (the wood-chip machines found in the basement are said to have been used to process human flesh), the Iraqi brigade working with Captain Center in western Baghdad at what is now named Camp Justice is one of the more advanced in the training program now at the heart of America's exit strategy.
Col. Jeffrey Snow explained. These troops have reached Level 2 — defined as the capacity to plan and execute and sustain counterinsurgency operations with American support. If they could do it without the support, they'd be at Level 1. When everyone's at that level, Americans can turn out the lights (actually, they're out already, much of the time) and go home.
But there are problems: Iraqi forces need far greater logistical capacity (anyone got some spare parts?), a clear command structure, a proper definition of authority at the Ministry of Defense, an unambiguous division of responsibilities between that ministry and the Interior Ministry, a larger Sunni presence and an effective noncommissioned officer corps.
"Down here we're really moving on a professional army," Colonel Snow said. "But then we'll get the minister of defense calling a brigadier — I mean, it would be like Donald Rumsfeld calling me. And he says, 'Hey, would you do this for me today?' There's no real chain of command; the links of family or tribe can seem stronger."
Sorting out command structures is complicated by the fact that the Interior Ministry, now under Shiite control, has its own militias. During a visit I made to the Iraqi Islamic Party, a Sunni party now entering the democratic fray, a sobbing couple abruptly confronted me.
Hussein Alwan Radli, a retired engineer, and his wife, Attaya, said their son, Ali, 39, had been seized that morning by a militia group and had disappeared. The couple — Sunnis — accused Shiite Interior Ministry forces. Whether this was true, and where he had gone, was lost in the fog of war. But the couple's pain was irrefutable.
As for the fog, it, too, was irrefutable out on patrol with Captain Center. Shula is not lovely. Even in winter its canal-side market, where animals are slaughtered, stinks. Guts are left on the road. Its late-night charm receded further when shots rang out.
"Small-arms fire!" crackled over the radio. Yeah, right.
The Humvee wheeled around. "Light the building," Captain Center ordered. A strong beam swept across the squat dun-colored buildings. Their facades offered as few clues as an expressionless Iraqi face.
"They'll pop off a few rounds and disappear," Sergeant Bush said. On his second Iraq tour in three years, he knows the scene. Still, the American and Iraqi platoons plunged into a warren of narrow streets, beaming lights into bedrooms and earning a disdainful stare from two men on a street corner.
Was this action disruptive to the insurgency or likely to make more enemies of startled Iraqis? It was hard to know. "There's some of the worst evil here," Captain Center said. "It's our presence that prevents all-out civil war. Training this army will do that, too. It's the key — and they're getting there."
So I asked Brig. Gen. Jaleel Khalaf Shouail, the commander of the Iraqi Army's First Brigade, how soon American forces could leave. "We need permanent United States military bases in Iraq," he said. "Look at Japan, look at Germany, look at Italy. They all have bases and they're successful societies. We can be the same."
He gave me a radiant smile. Simple.
----------------------------
Citation: Roger Cohen. "Playing Den Mother to a Fledgling Iraqi Army," The New York Times, 29 January 2006.
Original URL: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/29/weekinreview/29word.html?_r=1
----------------------------