Letter 102 to Friends and Familiares: more thoughts on Iraq

By necessity this letter will – ¡hallelujah! – be very brief.  Ahora, I am in the process of packing my carpet-bag – this time for Tijuana.  Nice climate, great economy, wonderful opportunity and friends in LOW places; life is good.  But certain articles and sound-blights about Iraq showing up in cyber-space have truly stuck in my craw.  So these ‘blurt-outs’ have their reasonings behind them – trust me (…suckahhhh).

 

First, I supported the invasion in Iraq and I was wrong.  At the time, I argued persuasively that Iraq was a just war for many reasons.  The justice of violence, however, lies in its consequences, making bloodshed rarely open to justice. The aftermath over eleven years has eroded the justification of the war, notwithstanding the true heroism of 75% of the field troops, 50% of the officers’ corps and 25% of the civilians who cared.  To be sure, President Bush deserves credit for realizing this fact of strife and undertaking an unpopular and counter-intuitive surge to preserve Iraq for the Iraqis.

 

Second, the current chaos in Iraq is of Prime Minister al-Maliki’s making by a tyranny grab after the U.S. departed and in the election of 2010.  The difference between a secular and religious tyranny is that the former has the dubious virtue of keeping most of its depredations in-house. 

 

Third, President Obama is pursuing the right course, here. If the U.S. (read: neo-conservatives looking for a vindication of a grossly failed policy they initiated) were to bail out P.M. al-Maliki now, President Obama would simply be kicking this crisis down the road for the next President. Such temporizing does not serve us well. Yes, I argue that President Obama‘s inaction in Syria and Ukraine are disappointing and I have bored people with my reasons why. Suffice it to say, that Iraq, Syria and Ukraine are fundamentally different.  Syria is a regional proxy war with a terrain that makes ‘muscular’ humanitarianism an option.  Ukraine involves external aggression by the Putinista. Iraq is a civil war; more of a crime wave.  The government has to set itself right for its own subjects to defend it.

Fourth, Iran’s help – and ours to Iran – is appropriate. This development may be the only welcome aspect of this sadness in my belovèd Iraq.  Fact is: the American  and Iranian peoples share more in common than with any other people in that region, save Israel and, perhaps, Turkey. The status Iran holds of the largest state-sponsor of terrorism resembles a glass half full of cherry juice. Some say this and some say that; too many drink the U.S. government’s kool-aid.  In the meantime: first things first – stop these blood-drunk  I.S.I.S. bastards from slaughtering innocents in Iraq.

Fourth, making Iran a straw bogeyman makes little sense to me.  Iran does sponsor Hizbolah, winning it the exulted status of being a terrorist state, conferred by Foggy Bottom. While my support for Israel remains strong, if not unconditional, Hizbolah can rightly be seen as a resistance force (whether I agree with it or like it is of no relevance) and vehicle of social services for a largely disenfranchised people stuck in refugee camps (http://nedmcdletters.blogspot.com/2010/06/letter-9-to-friends-and-family.html). Outside of some border skirmishes (swift-boating the Brits in 2009; nobody killed), Iran has not started a major war.  Our proxy, Saddam Hussein, murdered many more people than Hizbolah ever has. It is time to readmit Iran to the community of nations and foster good relations. We all hate the humiliation of 1979; but Iran did not murder those fifty-two hostages. How long would they have lasted alive in Riyadh, Kandahar or Karachi? In fact the most stabilizing powers – with arguably two great civilizations – in the Middle East may well be Israel and Iran.  With a re-democratized Iraq, the “I”s would have it.

 

Fifth, the specter of a nuclear Iran is just that: illusory.  Yes, of course, Iran is striving to manufacture nuclear weapons. Why wouldn’t Iran do that?  Israel has them.  The U.S. has used them. But that is not the motivator, here. Look it: Iran is flanked by a country that killed half a million of her young people and two radical Sunni states spawning the virulent violence, primarily against shi´ites, we see today: Saudi Arabia with the wahabis and Pakistan with the pashtuns / taliban. The only thing worse than decadent infidels to these very few but very lethal extremists are ‘apostates’ (read: shi’ites). We have seen with horror the massacre of Iraqi soldiers who surrendered.  So you tell me: ¿Just who is the bigger worry for Iran?  A nuclear Israel and the United States or Saudi Arabia and a nuclear Pakistan?

Addendum to Letter-100: police reform plan drafted in 2005

Detailed TIME-Line for Police Identification Cards & Salary Reform

Salary Reform will challenge the Ministry of Interior’s (Ministry’s) resourcefulness by requiring the use of the following assets:

• 100 employees deployed temporarily to combine information from a paper data base compiled by the Qualifying Committee’s (QC’s) data-collectors, a computer file of employee information and finger prints and, possibly, governorate-level employee rosters available to the Ministry in Baghdad;
•  several hundred security personnel for at least the first two pay-days under the reform; and,
• 25-50 personal computers to consolidate information.

Should the Ministry find itself in a position to implement pay-parity with the military in conjunction with payroll reform, the Ministry could apply a unified salary plan to assign a certain level of pay with each rank.  Each pay-level would then correspond to a military pay-scale on a basis of 100% equality between the Defence and Interior Ministries.

In the various time-lines presented below, one of two distribution channels will be used for payment of salaries:  the current system of station commanders distributing payments or designated branches of the state-owned banks, Al-Rafidain and Al-Rashid.  If the Ministry is forced to continue with the traditional distribution system that has promoted corruption, it could alleviate potential payroll abuse by station commanders with the installation of telephone hot-lines.  Please recall that, under this reform, the Ministry of Finance will release only the amount of money properly payable to those employees registered with the QC.

The telephone hot-line option will entail the establishment of controls to protect tough-minded station-chiefs from false accusations by angry employees.  This control over the hot-lines is just one example of the many details the Deputy Ministers will decide during the salary reform.  Please note that this time-line is not comprehensive; details have been omitted while the QC will still have to submit a report outlining the criteria for retention or letting go of employees.  The benefits of accelerated salary reform will be:

1. human resource and payroll records centralized at the Ministry in Baghdad;
2. centralized accountability for station commanders through the hot-lines or removal of control over funds from them;
3. convincing evidence for the Ministry of Finance of the Ministry’s rigor and professionalism to argue for pay-parity; and,
4. consolidation of internal controls away from the governorates and the Minister in favor of the Deputy Ministers.

In sum, this initiative will aid you in exerting centralized control and accountability while permitting local police forces to use their discretion in reacting to crimes and other local matters.  The time-lines will abide by the following ‘key’; or, color-coding: 



Letter to Friends and Familiares #100: Arabian Agony

Iraq, stated concisely, may be in her death-throes. The Sunni-based Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (I.S.I.S., anything but a fertile goddess misplaced in the fertile crescent) is sweeping across the Sunni-dominated north and west of Iraq.  The U.S. experiment, initiated by President Bush, appears to be failing.  The politicoes are lobbing blame every which way.  Iraq continues to collapse.

The enormity of the challenge facing the U.S. et al. makes focussing on something or anything not only preferable but, in the eyes of a discredited President, politically imperative. Ten years ago, when I first worked in Baghdad, a wealthy Iraqi construction magnate, a Sunni, warned me of the infiltration into the Ministry of Interior by Shi’ite death squads.

Though AMB Bremer’s reign had only recently ended, his tenure was already proving to be a ‘DefCon-1’ disaster with the wrong analogy (i.e., post-war Germany) applied to the wrong culture (one with little tradition of western-style democracy) at the wrong time (after a devastating three decades). At that point, this friend told me only one insurgent leader was worth a damn: Muqtada al-Sadr.

Al-Sadr? The crazy cleric that many of the ‘cool set’ had long deemed as slightly retarded? The bad-boy of U.S. reconstruction efforts? What my colleague told me was that, as stupid and stubborn as Muqtada al-Sadr was, he was a “crazy kid nationalist”. Religious, yes; a anti-Sunni Shi´ite sectarian, not really.  Obviously, I rejected this insight out of hand. And so did the most Americans, to our subsequent peril.

Ten years later, I have argued until my face is blue against a number of dimensions of delusional thinking overtaking much of American policy. President Bush, at least and at last in 2007, broke the denial and surged troop strength to try to stem the slide toward total civil war. With General David Petraeus in field-command and partnering with Ambassador Ryan Crocker, one of the finest diplomats since General George Marshall, that gutsy surge carried the day.

Unfortunately, American victory in the field has proven not to be permanent. A very senior diplomat and Middle East trouble shooter, who had dealt with Prime Minister al-Maliki quite a bit, warned me in 2008, during his participation in the negotiation of the agreement between the Bush Administration and the duly elected Iraqi government of al-Maliki, that the then relatively new and always scruffy leader was looking to be a dictator.

To my eternal regret, I did not believe him; he was right. Trying to blame someone singularly is not a productive exercise. As far as President Obama’s strategy is concerned, it is time to end the riveting but irrelevant debate with its successive waves of recriminations and alibis. The President has confused detachment with appeasement; his policy has manifestly failed. 

Okay. 

As I have ranted many times, the President failed to act in 2010, when Prime Minister al-Maliki showed his true dictatorial ‘alpha-male fido’ by not handing the reins of government over to the duly elected Ayad Allawi, a secular Shi´ite and former Saddam official who had fallen out of favor with that tyrant for political and not sectarian reasons.

Democrats and liberal apologists need to accept this fact of President Obama’s strategy to date lest the current problems be neither addressed nor solved over time. As a quick aside: the U.S. invasion will eventually succeed in implanting a democratic governance – albeit quite different from the type we are used to – over the next ten to twenty years; think Viêt Nam in the late 1990s. The root causes of the startling advances, in recent days, of this newest crop of blood-drunk radicals in I.S.I.S. calls for nothing other than decisive moves including, but not limited to, the following:

• no aid or action until P.M. al-Maliki resigns while new elections and a new constitutional convention are scheduled;
• integration of the largest tribes into that new convention, the subsequent constitution and the eventual government;
• immediate integration into the security forces of the former Sons of Iraq (the Sunnis disaffected with Al Qaeda in 2007 who sided with the Americans to win the war);
• limited dispatch of Special Forces to usher in U.N. peace-keepers, preferably from non Arab Muslim countries like Indonesia, Senegal and Malaysia;
• limited airstrikes, only if necessary, to slow the I.S.I.S. advance while the honest members of the security forces – guessing roughly a 25-35% core – institute crime-watches and other neighbourhood policing tactics;
• provision of safe-havens for Muqtada al-Sadr and Ayatollah Sistani to avoid a deepening dependence upon Iran as well as high profile sectarian murders; as well as,
• an international police-training effort to clean the Shi´ite death squads out of the security forces.

These suggestions can be implemented rapidly to stanch the bleeding and permit the great majority of moderate Kurds, Sunnis and Shi´ites to take their country back from the current crime wave. I.S.I.S. may have high-sounding rhetoric – and may even believe its own P.R. copy – but it remains, first and foremost, a criminal gang. This insurgency is simply another crime-wave traipsing around in the garb of a galloping caliphate.  The trouble-makers on both sides are sectarian; their even-tempered and far more numerous compatriots may be religious but they are tolerant. All are Arabs or Kurds or both in the end.

President Bush won the war in 2007 by not abandoning the Iraqis to a fate almost as grim as the one implied by this currently dire situation.  President Obama did not fail us by not negotiating a Status of Forces Agreement in 2011. The Iraqis wanted us out. Where President Obama failed us was by not threatening to pull the 50-75,000 American troops still in-country when al-Maliki subverted an American-modeled electoral process based upon a flawed constitution with its civil war time-bomb of ceding vast swathes of territory from Arabs to Kurds. 

That threat of immediate redeployment in 2010 would have pressured Prime Minister al-Maliki  at least to come to the table and, perhaps, to acquiesce in the democratic transfer of power. There are many moving parts in this labyrinth of the two rivers; Ariadne's thread may well have been snipped by now.  There are too many issues for me to be able to perceive and capture as well as far too many to describe here.  The priority now is not to panic and bail out al-Maliki. Instead, cooler minds, Muslim minds, must empower moderate and religiously tolerant Iraqis to squeeze this vanguard of the caliphate out of everyone’s misery. 

What we can not accept right now is the same old reasoning of President Obama that, since Americans are rightly fed-up with war, his administration need not do anything and wait for the problem simply to drift away.  That hasn’t worked in Iraq, Syria and Ukraine. The largely muted responses in these three cases have added up to a tendency toward appeasement, exciting bullies – Putinistas or blood-drunkards – to seize what they can, when they can, until 2017 (i.e., three years).