By Michael R. Gordon
The New York Times, 18 August 2006
The rules posted on the wall of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Barwana concisely summed up its predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq.
The convoy's goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in a U.S.-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans who are training it.
The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all the U.S. military's fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, insurgent organizations and jihadists who make up part of Iraq.
But there are other important rationales as well. With U.S. forces stretched perilously thin, fielding an Iraqi military - along with a parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police - is the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
According to Pentagon officials, there is to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The U.S. advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq's Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay.
A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone absent without leave - or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Colonel Jebbar Abass, a beefy Iraqi with a drooping mustache, commanded a battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers last autumn. It had dropped to about 400 troops. Since almost one-third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the U.S. Marine Corps forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
Figures provided by U.S. military commanders show that the two Iraqi divisions in Anbar Province are about 5,000 short of their authorized strength, while some 660 soldiers are currently absent without leave.
The Americans have some genuine Iraqi partners in one of Iraq's most hostile regions, and U.S. commanders believe that Iraqi troop levels in Anbar have finally bottomed out and may be slowly starting to improve. But what kind of exit strategy is it when Iraqi soldiers have been leaving faster than the Americans?
The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, U.S. generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control the country. A plan to enlist the support of anti-Saddam Iraqi troops was approved in March 2003 by President George W. Bush.
But the Iraqi Army vanished when faced with the rapid U.S. push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior U.S. military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Iraq at the time, began to work toward this end with the CIA station chief in Baghdad by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals.
Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was informed in advance.
Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a country that was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and the police was pursued with a new urgency. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card, embodied in the Multinational Security Transition Command, led by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.
I stopped at Camp Falluja to see Colonel Tom Greenwood, who had been a military aide on the staff of the National Security Council leading up to the war, and then commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Baghdad. Now he was finishing a six-month tour as the senior marine responsible for training the Iraqi Army and police forces in Anbar.
Greenwood explained that the pay issues in Haditha were quite common. In the Anbar region, about 550 Iraqi soldiers received no pay for June, while another 2,200 were receiving less pay than they were entitled to by rank.
Logistics was another of Greenwood's worries. U.S. commanders in Baghdad had pushed the Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own logistics, but that led to cases in which Iraqi soldiers had received spoiled meat and rotten vegetables.
Each month, Iraqi soldiers are granted about a week's leave to deliver their pay to their families, who may live hundreds of kilometers away, a custom that reflects the lack of an effective banking system in Iraq. With all the dangers, hardships and problems, the soldiers do not always come back. Factoring in the generous leaves, the First Iraqi Division, which has the responsibility for parts of Falluja and is deployed near Habbaniya, is at about 50 percent strength.
When I raised some of these issues in a telephone interview with Dempsey, who oversees the training effort for all of Iraq, he insisted that the problems had to be put in perspective. The two divisions in Anbar, he said, were deployed in one of the harshest regions and were in the worst shape.
Most Iraqi divisions, he said, had 85 percent to 90 percent of the troops they were authorized. When leaves were taken into account, that meant they were at 65 percent to 70 percent strength.
The pay problems at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, he said, were being addressed. They reflected the lack of an automated system but also stemmed from the need to guard against corruption and ensure that Iraqi units in the field did not obtain more pay than they were entitled to by putting phantom soldiers on the rolls.
The Iraqi government, he said, was eager to enlist recruits and would now allow a soldier to sign up for a two-year tour in which at least one year was spent in his home province. As for logistics, Dempsey said, it is important that the Iraqis demonstrate that they are in control of their own military by assuming responsibility for sustaining and paying their own soldiers, though measures to ease the strain, like allowing commanders to buy some provisions locally, are under consideration.
The day after I visited Greenwood, I went to a dilapidated soap factory in Falluja where a U.S. military advisory team was working with an Iraqi battalion.
U.S. commanders consider Falluja a success story. After the U.S. Marine Corps cleared the city in a violent battle in 2004, seven checkpoints were established to control access, making Falluja Iraq's largest gated community.
For all that, militants have managed to slip back in. The night I arrived, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another during a shift change at an observation post.
The military advisory team at the soap factory was commanded by Major David Richardson. He volunteered for his assignment in Iraq and was advising the battalion headed by Colonel Abdul Majid, a 41-year-old officer who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, participated in the invasion of Kuwait during Saddam's era, looks older than his years and presides over the battalion with an air of complete authority.
By reputation, Majid is a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is to assume responsibility for securing Falluja this autumn, though a U.S. Marine Corps unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble.
"I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it," Richardson said. "That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don't have any confidence in the army. I don't see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Majid being one of them."
One of Majid's bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when three VIPs arrived for a visit: Iraq's new defense minister, Abdul Qadr Muhammad Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani; and General George Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander.
Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems: the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police - and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had fewer than half the 759 troops it was authorized.
The Iraqi defense minister said he was only then learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Majid if he thought anything would come of his appeal.
"Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won't get results soon," he said. "It is going to take a while."
Michael R. Gordon is chief military correspondent for The New York Times. This article was adapted from The New York Times Magazine.
The rules posted on the wall of the U.S. Marine Corps base in Barwana concisely summed up its predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi-U.S. convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq.
The convoy's goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in a U.S.-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans who are training it.
The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all the U.S. military's fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, insurgent organizations and jihadists who make up part of Iraq.
But there are other important rationales as well. With U.S. forces stretched perilously thin, fielding an Iraqi military - along with a parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police - is the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
According to Pentagon officials, there is to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad.
The U.S. advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq's Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay.
A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone absent without leave - or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Colonel Jebbar Abass, a beefy Iraqi with a drooping mustache, commanded a battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers last autumn. It had dropped to about 400 troops. Since almost one-third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the U.S. Marine Corps forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
Figures provided by U.S. military commanders show that the two Iraqi divisions in Anbar Province are about 5,000 short of their authorized strength, while some 660 soldiers are currently absent without leave.
The Americans have some genuine Iraqi partners in one of Iraq's most hostile regions, and U.S. commanders believe that Iraqi troop levels in Anbar have finally bottomed out and may be slowly starting to improve. But what kind of exit strategy is it when Iraqi soldiers have been leaving faster than the Americans?
The project to field a new Iraqi Army was greatly hampered by clumsy political engineering in the months following Saddam Hussein's fall. From the start, U.S. generals realized that they lacked the troop strength to seal the borders and control the country. A plan to enlist the support of anti-Saddam Iraqi troops was approved in March 2003 by President George W. Bush.
But the Iraqi Army vanished when faced with the rapid U.S. push to Baghdad, and the Bush administration had to make a decision. Senior U.S. military commanders wanted to stick with the basic plan and recall Iraqi troops to duty. Lieutenant General David McKiernan, the top U.S. general in Iraq at the time, began to work toward this end with the CIA station chief in Baghdad by meeting with current and former Iraqi generals.
Those efforts were stopped, however, when L. Paul Bremer 3rd, the senior civilian official in Iraq, issued a decree abolishing the Iraqi Army, a move that was essentially an extension of the Bush administration's de-Baathification campaign. Bremer gave his order after consulting with Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, but neither Condoleezza Rice, then Bush's national security adviser, nor Colin Powell, then the secretary of state, was informed in advance.
Once the Iraqi military had been abolished, a methodical effort to rebuild the armed forces from the ground up was begun. Three Iraqi divisions were to be trained and equipped over two years, an extraordinarily slow pace for a country that was in chaos.
Meanwhile, the security situation got only worse. Most of the Iraqi officers I talked with in Iraq thought Bremer's decision to disband the military was a mystifying blunder. After the strength of the insurgency became apparent to Washington, the effort to rebuild the Iraqi Army and the police was pursued with a new urgency. The training effort that was once something of an afterthought is now the Bush administration's final card, embodied in the Multinational Security Transition Command, led by Lieutenant General Martin Dempsey.
I stopped at Camp Falluja to see Colonel Tom Greenwood, who had been a military aide on the staff of the National Security Council leading up to the war, and then commander of a Marine Expeditionary Unit in Baghdad. Now he was finishing a six-month tour as the senior marine responsible for training the Iraqi Army and police forces in Anbar.
Greenwood explained that the pay issues in Haditha were quite common. In the Anbar region, about 550 Iraqi soldiers received no pay for June, while another 2,200 were receiving less pay than they were entitled to by rank.
Logistics was another of Greenwood's worries. U.S. commanders in Baghdad had pushed the Iraqis to take over responsibility for their own logistics, but that led to cases in which Iraqi soldiers had received spoiled meat and rotten vegetables.
Each month, Iraqi soldiers are granted about a week's leave to deliver their pay to their families, who may live hundreds of kilometers away, a custom that reflects the lack of an effective banking system in Iraq. With all the dangers, hardships and problems, the soldiers do not always come back. Factoring in the generous leaves, the First Iraqi Division, which has the responsibility for parts of Falluja and is deployed near Habbaniya, is at about 50 percent strength.
When I raised some of these issues in a telephone interview with Dempsey, who oversees the training effort for all of Iraq, he insisted that the problems had to be put in perspective. The two divisions in Anbar, he said, were deployed in one of the harshest regions and were in the worst shape.
Most Iraqi divisions, he said, had 85 percent to 90 percent of the troops they were authorized. When leaves were taken into account, that meant they were at 65 percent to 70 percent strength.
The pay problems at Iraq's Ministry of Defense, he said, were being addressed. They reflected the lack of an automated system but also stemmed from the need to guard against corruption and ensure that Iraqi units in the field did not obtain more pay than they were entitled to by putting phantom soldiers on the rolls.
The Iraqi government, he said, was eager to enlist recruits and would now allow a soldier to sign up for a two-year tour in which at least one year was spent in his home province. As for logistics, Dempsey said, it is important that the Iraqis demonstrate that they are in control of their own military by assuming responsibility for sustaining and paying their own soldiers, though measures to ease the strain, like allowing commanders to buy some provisions locally, are under consideration.
The day after I visited Greenwood, I went to a dilapidated soap factory in Falluja where a U.S. military advisory team was working with an Iraqi battalion.
U.S. commanders consider Falluja a success story. After the U.S. Marine Corps cleared the city in a violent battle in 2004, seven checkpoints were established to control access, making Falluja Iraq's largest gated community.
For all that, militants have managed to slip back in. The night I arrived, a roadside bomb killed one Iraqi soldier and wounded another during a shift change at an observation post.
The military advisory team at the soap factory was commanded by Major David Richardson. He volunteered for his assignment in Iraq and was advising the battalion headed by Colonel Abdul Majid, a 41-year-old officer who fought in the Iran-Iraq war, participated in the invasion of Kuwait during Saddam's era, looks older than his years and presides over the battalion with an air of complete authority.
By reputation, Majid is a decisive and experienced officer, which is all to the good, as his forces are approaching a critical phase. The Iraqi Army is to assume responsibility for securing Falluja this autumn, though a U.S. Marine Corps unit will be poised to rush in if there is major trouble.
"I think they will take it over, struggle with it a bit and then grow into it," Richardson said. "That is the best-case scenario. The worst-case scenario is they take it over, heavy, heavy violence breaks out and essentially the people don't have any confidence in the army. I don't see that happening because there are some pretty strong battalion commanders, Majid being one of them."
One of Majid's bravest performances may have come that day at the soap factory, when three VIPs arrived for a visit: Iraq's new defense minister, Abdul Qadr Muhammad Jassim; its new interior minister, Jawad Kadem al-Bolani; and General George Casey Jr., the senior U.S. commander.
Pointing to the list of 70 casualties his battalion suffered in an earlier fight for Ramadi, the Iraqi colonel recounted the familiar litany of problems: the failure to pay soldiers according to their new ranks, the difficulty in getting the Ministry of Defense to approve promotions, the higher pay provided to the local police - and in this case the failure to provide any salaries at all to 34 recruits who graduated from boot camp in April. Because of combat losses and a dearth of recruits, the battalion had fewer than half the 759 troops it was authorized.
The Iraqi defense minister said he was only then learning of such problems and promised to take corrective action. Later, I asked Majid if he thought anything would come of his appeal.
"Sure, he is going to work on it, but he won't get results soon," he said. "It is going to take a while."
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Citation: Michael R. Gordon. Trying to build an army in a combat zone," The New York Times, 18 August 2006.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2006/08/18/news/iraqarmy.php
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