Mere days after sobering official ceremonies marked the end of the U.S. mission in Iraq, America’s most dubious partner – Prime Minister Nouri al Maliki – charged his Vice President Tareq al-Hashemi with aiding and abetting terrorism and sought to remove his Deputy Prime Minister, Saleh al-Mutlaq from office. In short order, sectarian violence spread rapidly from the capital city of Baghdad, further south into Basra and north towards Mosul. Within a month, nearly 450 Iraqis had lost their lives – one of the highest tolls for short an amount of time in years.

However, the physical violence that rocked the struggling democracy concealed a major political crisis simmering below the superficial horrors of car bombs and death squads. Iraqis now face a new crisis as the fragile government juggles uncertain national unity under pressure of sectarian tension and raw competition for political leverage.

The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace is holding a special forum, “The State of Iraq” to discuss the growing political crisis left behind in the wake of America’s military occupation. Ad Melkert, former UN Special Representative in Iraq, and Carnegie’s Marina Ottoway will discuss the prospects for quelling the gathering storm.

The United States has exited Iraq, stage left, but for the second time since the 2003 invasion disrupted Saddam’s autocracy, the state finds itself on the verge of disintegration. Thank goodness some folks haven’t forgotten our obligation to help clean up the mess we left behind.

What isthe measure of a great country? An economist would tell you that it’s the GDPof the country, how much its industries can produce and export. An engineermight tell you to look at the infrastructure of a country. A better answer–though one that still falls short- will tell you that a great country is onethat can ensure its children go to school. Going to school will certainly giveyou the tools for the pursuit of national caliber, but does not in itselfprovide us with a measure of greatness. 
 

The U.S. formally ended the Iraq War today. As The New York Times reports:

Almost nine years after the first American tanks began massing on the Iraq border, the Pentagon declared an official end to its mission here, closing a troubled conflict that helped reshape American politics and left a bitter legacy of anti-American sentiment across the Muslim world [...] For Americans, the ceremony on Thursday marked an uneasy moment of closure, with no clear sense of what has been won and lost.

Lasting nearly a decade and claiming close to five thousand American lives, the war became for many a Rorschach test of the U.S. role in the world. There are millions of people in the world whose first thought when asked to describe America is that we are a country that invades other countries, and Iraq is the premier example. The war was controversial from the start, a war of choice meant to deprive Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction. When those weapons failed to be found, U.S. motives were further questioned (some said it was always about the oil) and the war was recast as an effort to promote democracy. Even as U.S. forces withdraw, the war remains controversial, with some expressing concerns about a precipitous withdrawal and others defending the withdrawal as prudent.

I suspect that the war was never about weapons of mass destruction, oil or democracy. It was about Saddam Hussein and George W. Bush. It was about Hussein trying to assassinate George H.W. Bush and the former president’s son deciding that simply would not stand. Hussein had good reason to expect a covert attempt to remove him from power as soon as George W. was inaugurated, though he probably never imagined such an overt attempt as a massive land invasion. The 9/11 attack created a “permissive environment” in which the exercise of American power in the context of removing a dictator-behaving-badly was well within the bounds of the “new normal,” but I’m not sure it would have mattered. Bush would likely have found a way to remove Saddam from power one way or another. One could make the case that the attempt by a foreign government to assassinate a sitting or former American president constitutes an act of war. Sadly, that case was never made, at least, not in public.

Historians will debate the causes of the war for many years to come. What can’t be debated is the outstanding performance of the U.S. military. The all-volunteer force demonstrated once again that our soldiers will answer the call to duty, even when it means serving in far off lands. The greatest mistakes of the war (sending too few troops and disbanding the Iraqi army) were made by administrators, while military leaders found innovative ways of working with Iraqi tribal and sectarian leaders (the Awakening Councils) and imbedding troops in local communities, strategies that went a long way toward stabilizing Iraq. As our troops return home we can be justifiably proud of their service and sacrifice. They removed a dictator from power and gave Iraq a democratic government – now let’s see if they can keep it.

And finally, let’s return to that idea of Iraq as a Rorschach test of the U.S. role in the world. Yes, the U.S. invaded another country without having first been attacked. Yes, we removed the leader from power and then carelessly crushed all the social institutions that could have provided order, setting the stage for a violent sectarian and tribal bloodletting. That is all true. But we also worked over years, sacrificing lives and treasure, to rebuild what had been destroyed. If a Rorschach test can reveal many different perspectives then my hope is that history will note the negative while focusing on the positive and conclude that the U.S. ultimately did more good than harm and set Iraq on a path to being a prosperous and free country.

Photo Credit: MSNBC

The end of 2011 is fast approaching and with it the departure of U.S. forces and equipment from Iraq by December 31st so thought I’d pass on some of my thoughts. In November, I participated in two Department of Defense sponsored Bloggers Roundtables on our force drawdown efforts there. One was with Army Brigadier General Bradley A. Becker, deputy commanding general for U.S. Division Center, Baghdad. He is responsible for the oversight of support and sustainment to U.S. forces in support of Operation New Dawn. The second was with Major General Russell Handy, commander, 9th Air and Space Expeditionary Task Force-Iraq and director, Air Component Coordination Element-Iraq, who discussed the contributions and legacy of the USAF in training the Iraq — Iraqi Air Force and ongoing air defense training as that mission is transferred to the Iraqis.

I think the first thing that jumps out at me is the continuing disconnect between the American public and the 1% of the nation that has and is participating in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. If you just look at most of the media reports, one is under the impression the timing of the departure is a sole initiative of the Obama administration. If you look into it you discover the timeline for the departure actually was set up by the Bush administration as part of a Status of Forces agreement. A little background is in order. According to the Council for Foreign Relations, “the status of forces agreement is a legal framework that defines how foreign militaries operate in a host country. Typically established by executive agreement, there is no uniform or standard format for the document, which can vary in length and specificity.”

According to an article in the December 12, 2011 New York Times/International Herald: “On Nov. 27, 2008, the Iraqi Parliament ratified a Status of Forces agreement with the United States that set a course for an end to the United States’ role in the war and marks the beginning of a new relationship between the countries. The pact called for American troops to pull out of most Iraqi cities by the summer of 2009 and set the end of 2011 as the date by which the last American troops must leave the country.”

Why is this important? It is not my intent to down play the considerable achievements of the Obama administration in Iraq, simply to provide some additional information in order to put the event in the right context. Why is this important? One of the questions being asked is what happens after the U.S. troops leave? Can the Iraqi security forces handle the expected levels of violence? In order to understand the question and answer, it’s important to gain a sense of how involved have the Iraqis been in providing their security up to this point. Here is how General Becker replied when asked that question:

“I think the Iraqi security forces are capable of managing the violence from both the violent extremist organizations such as al-Qaida and JRTN as well as some of the Iranian-backed militias such as Asaba al-Haq (ph). Those organizations will still be able to conduct attacks. They’ll be able to conduct high-profile attacks periodically. But the Iraqi security forces have shown all the way back to June 2009 when U.S. forces came out of the cities that they are capable of being able to disrupt these organizations to prevent them from, you know, getting away with major sustained attacks and really enforce these organizations to just be able to conduct high-profile attacks that make — that make the headlines, but they don’t really have any impact on the government, and they have really limited impact on the people. In fact, most of the people have, you know, completely rejected these organizations.
So I think the Iraqi — I think there may be a spike in violence…But the Iraqi security forces have been in the lead since Operation New Dawn and since really out of the cities in 2009. So the Iraqi security forces have already shown that they’re capable. They did it during the elections. They did it, you know, during the Arab Spring when there were protests around the region and small protests within Iraq. But the Iraqi security forces have shown that they’re capable for that type of a threat.”

Concerning the Iraqi Air Force, Major General Handy stated:

“Since the president’s comments last month (October 2011) highlighting our current path to compliance with the security agreement to have all of our military forces out by December 31st, we’ve really seen a renewed interest in these efforts from the States. And I’m proud to be able to talk about where we are in that process… The president’s remarks, though, only punctuated what we are already doing, was already under way, and that is our obligation to living up to our commitment of complying with the security agreement.
From an airman’s perspective, this stage of the operation takes on a particularly unique importance and represents unique challenges. Some of our tasks remain constant. We’re clearly still performing all of those air component missions you’ve become accustomed to hearing of: intelligence; surveillance; reconnaissance and close-air support, to keep overwatch and protect our forces; air mobility, to include air lifts and air refueling; search and rescue and personnel recovery; and operating and securing airfields, to name a few.
What is evolving here is how our airmen continue to do all this while they transition bases back to the authority and control of GOI, and assist U.S. Mission-Iraq in their efforts. And we do continue to do this in a dangerous place. We are, regrettably, reminded here on a regular basis there are still those out there who would seek to do us harm and would seek to do our Iraqi partners harm.
Our plans for what we’re doing now, how we’ve postured our force in this phase, have really been in the works for the better part of a year now. This has taken a tremendous amount of collective effort from our entire joint team to be ready for this, and there is still much to be done. But I will tell you, we are ready; it’s under way. And one thing you can be sure of: Our airmen will be here, overhead, keeping watch, protecting our forces until the last convoy, the last soldier, sailor, airman, Marine, Coast Guardsman or civilian departs the country from USF-I.”

Time will tell how successful the Iraqi security forces will be but since they’ve been more involved since 2009 it shows they’ve gained some experience. General Becker provided some interesting background summarizing the drawdown stating:

“At the height of coalition operations in 2007 and 2008, we had 505 bases in Iraq and 165,000 service members. As you can imagine, it’s a monumental task to properly account for all of this property, retrograde what has to be moved out of Iraq and transfer it to the Department of State and the government of Iraq properly designated for transfer to them.
What’s truly impressive, at least to me, is that our soldiers have set the conditions to professionally complete this massive drawdown of people and equipment while continuing to partner with Iraqi security forces and to make them better and successfully transition responsibility to the Department of State to ensure their success in the future…In August of 2010, we developed a very detailed and thoughtful plan for how we would execute this mission. We made adjustments to the plan during to and prior to our arrival in December and have continued to improve the plan since we arrived.
So where we are now in November 2011 with seven bases remaining to transfer, only 1700 truckloads of equipment to retrograde and less than 20,000 soldiers still in Iraq, is a result of a really thoughtful and well-executed plan and, of course, the hard work of thousands of great soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines.”

Think I’ll end here. As always my views are my own.

2011 has been a banner year for taxpayer-funded assassinations — Osama bin Laden, Anwar Awlaki, five senior Pakistani Taliban commanders in October and many more. Given the crucial U.S. backup role in Libya, and the ringing exhortation for the Libyan leader’s death issued by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton just before the event itself, Uncle Sam can probably take a lot of credit for Moammar Gaddafi ‘s messy end too.

Once upon a time, U.S. officials used to claim that they were merely targeting “command and control centers,” rather than specific individuals, as in the hunt for Saddam Hussein during the 1991 Persian Gulf War or the raid on Gaddafi in 1986. Nowadays no one bothers to pretend. Successful assassination missions, whether by elite special forces or remote-controlled drones, are openly celebrated.

Clearly, the sentiment prevalent among our leaders is that eliminating particular enemy leaders is bound to have a beneficial effect. Thus in recent wars, the U.S. has made the pursuit of “high-value targets,” the principal objective of so-called human network attacks, a priority. “The platoon’s mission is to kill or capture HVTs,” recalled Matt Cook, a sergeant in the 101st Airborne based in northern Iraq in 2005. “That is all we do.”

By 2008, according to a U.S. Strategic Command study, the U.S. military was simultaneously engaged in no fewer than 285 human network attack programs.

So, now that assassination is an official tool of U.S. foreign policy, along with trade embargoes and overseas aid, it is surely time for an open debate on whether it is indeed effective. Surprisingly for some, evidence based on hard numbers demonstrates unequivocally that the answer is No.

The numbers are derived from a study conducted in Iraq during the “surge” campaign of 2007-08 that enabled the U.S. to declare victory and wind down the war. Key to the surge was an intensive and ruthless hunt for key individuals in the “IED networks” that were organizing homemade bomb attacks against U.S. troops. Cause and effect — more dead network leaders leading to fewer bombs — seemed so self-evidently obvious that nobody bothered to check.

Early in 2008, however, Rex Rivolo, an analyst at the Counter-IED Operations/Intelligence Center attached to U.S. headquarters in Baghdad, briefed his superiors on some hard realities of the campaign. With access to any and all information relating to U.S. military operations in Iraq, he had identified about 200 successful missions in which key IED network individuals had been eliminated. Then he looked at the reports of subsequent bomb attacks in the late insurgent leader’s area of operation. The results were clear: IED attacks went up, immediately and sharply. One week after the hit, on average, incidents within about three miles of the dead leader’s home base had risen 20 per cent.

Why, with the commander dead, did the enemy fight with such reinforced vigor? Eliminated enemy commanders, intelligence revealed, were almost always replaced at once, usually within 24 hours. “The new guy is going to work harder,” Rivolo told me. “He has to prove himself, assert his authority. Maybe the old guy had been getting lazy, not working so hard to plant those IEDs. Fresh blood makes a difference.”

Once posited, this consequence may appear obvious, but Rivolo’s study, so far as I am aware, was the only time that anyone with access to relevant data had looked at the consequences of our principal national security strategy in a systematic way. However, even as he submitted his conclusions, the same strategy was being exported to Afghanistan on a major scale. Ever-increasing special forces “night raids” have indeed subsequently succeeded in killing large numbers of insurgent commanders (along with many civilians), but the consequences have been depressingly predictable.

“I used to be able to go talk to local Taliban commanders,” a journalist long resident in Afghanistan told me, “but they are all dead. The ones who replaced them are much more dangerous. They don’t want to talk to anyone at all.”

Nongovernmental groups similarly report that the new breed of Taliban leadership is unwilling to allow the free passage of aid workers permitted by their assassinated predecessors. Neither in Afghanistan nor Pakistan, where high-value targets are the responsibility of the CIA‘s burgeoning killer-drone bureaucracy, is there any indication that the enemy’s military capability has been diminished.

As Matthew Hoh, the foreign service officer who quit in protest at the futility of the Afghan war, told me recently, “War is a breeding ground for unintended consequences.”

By: Andrew Cockburn, An investigative journalist and author. His article, “Search and Destroy: The Pentagon’s Losing War Against IEDs,” appears in the November issue of Harper’s magazine.

Sayyiduna Shaykh Abul Hasan Ahmad ibn Mohammad al-Noori Alaihir raHma, a native of Baghdad of a family from Khorasan, was a pupil of Sirri al-Saqati and a faithful companion of Sayyiduna Junaid al-Baghdadi. A leading figure of the Baghdad circle, he composed some fine mystical poetry. He passed away in 295 (908).

The self-discipline of Abul Hussain Noori

Sayyiduna Abul Hussain, who