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« Team of Rivals | Main | Military Equipment Woes » December 05, 2006Solving the Wrong ProblemWhile I find attempts to blame Iraq for our current difficulties there reprehensible, there is no getting around the most important factor that continues to undermine our attempts to hand over a secure Iraq to the Iraqi government: without a sense of national identity, there is nobody to hand the reins over to. Even assuming we're able to get the violence under control in Iraq, there's very little evidence that we could hand Iraq over to any security force that was particularly interested in continuing to mete out impartial security to the country. As the LA Times reported about a recent battle involving Iraqi troops, while they may be used with some effectiveness against other sects, it's difficult to trust a unit composed of Iraqi Shiites to take on a Shiite militia.As long as that's the case, it's difficult to see how increasing the number of American advisors with the Iraqi Army will help much. While a larger slice of advisors will probably make the units somewhat more effective, they will still only be effective against a selected slice of the Iraqi population, meaning there will be only small differences between the Iraqi Army forces and the sectarian militias. Granted, if Iraqi Army units don't engage in reprisals, that alone will be a significant difference, but the end result is still bad if the Iraqi government doesn't have a force capable of standing up to all varieties of sectarian fighter. Much of what is driving the violence in Iraq now is reprisals: a Sunni force hits a Shiite neighborhood, so Shiite fighters hit a Sunni neighborhood, creating a cycle of violence that is very hard to break. While there are Iraqis willing to turn the other cheek, far too many would rather turn to vengeance, and so the killing goes on and on. A neutral force capable of stopping much of this violence might convince more Iraqis to forego revenge killings, but the U.S. Army in Iraq doesn't have the troop strength to do the job, and the Iraqi Army isn't yet a neutral force, and it's questionable whether it ever will be. Increasing the size of the training teams will probably help make the Iraqi Army a more effective fighting force, as the small size of the teams assigned to the job until now have made it very difficult for them to really improve the units they're linked with. Providing better equipment to the Iraqi Army would doubtless help as well, as the fact they must depend on the U.S. to support them logistically removes one of the key factors that helps to bind an army: the knowledge that they all depend on one another. As the Times notes in its article, larger teams would also be better able to watch Iraqi units for abuses, although that's a two-edged sword, since such discoveries might well reveal just how much trouble the Iraqi Army has, although that's speculation and not fact. But improving the Iraqi Army's ability to fight will do little to no good until and unless the Iraqi Army can become a truly national army. Unless its members are willing to fight for the country rather than for their individual tribes and sects, all we're doing is making a more effective group of fighters who will be of great use to their tribes and sects when the U.S. leaves. powered by performancing firefox Posted at December 5, 2006 06:53 AM
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