TEATS ON A BULL

Posted on | by Ed

Eleven years ago George W. Bush sounded a hopeful note on the increasingly (by mid-2005) unpopular war in Iraq, noting that the American role would decline as Iraqi institutions became capable of functioning without direct U.
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S. support. "As the Iraqis stand up, we will stand down," he said rather famously, despite not the slightest hint two full years into that conflict that the Iraqi Army was capable of doing anything other than being infiltrated by terrorists, deserting by the thousands, and showing no particular inclination to do anything that resembled real fighting.

One could reasonably ask if two years (roughly beginning with the summer of 2003 when most of Iraq was essentially reduced to rubble) is enough for a fighting force to become effective.
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Perhaps some time was needed. While U.S. forces continued to complain that Iraq's military was useless, we were repeatedly urged to grant them more time. And more money – tens of billions of dollars were flushed down the toilet that was and is the Iraqi Army including literal shipping pallets full of cash (reportedly $12 billion) that simply vanished without a trace in 2007. The effectiveness of U.S. and some coalition forces brought Baghdad into some semblance of stability, which is to say that Baghdad is still insanely violent but most of the organized terrorist and militant groups have withdrawn from the city to avoid directly confronting its enemies at their point of greatest military strength.

By the time Obama brought combat forces home a few years ago we appeared willing to accept a status quo of a violent, semi-governed Baghdad (and a few other major cities in Iraq's east) with most rural areas of the country outside of the control of its central government. Once they could sort of handle Baghdad on their own, we peaced out. That worked for a while until ISIS happened, and eyes turned to the Iraqi Army to see how it would react to whole cities and territories within the borders of Iraq being put under ISIS control.
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As it turns out, they didn't much seem to mind. We're several years into the proliferation of ISIS as an organized fighting force and the Iraqi Army hasn't so much as farted in their general direction. Whether they are incapable of confronting ISIS or merely unwilling to do it, all doubts about their competence have been erased.

Enter the Kurds. They straddle the border of Turkey, Syria, and Iraq and as inhabitants of that largely rural area they have borne the brunt of ISIS inhumanity. But the Kurdish "state" and people – people who have been the whipping boys of that region for longer than anyone can remember – decided to fight back. Organized into a 5000-strong military force called Peshmerga and with the assistance of an allied but less organized militia force, they recently advanced on Fallujah and Mosul, major cities held by ISIS. And here's the thing – with US/Coalition air assistance, they've kind of kicked ISIS's ass. No one should mistake Peshmerga for a military juggernaut, yet they have taken the fight to ISIS and outfought them.

The point is not to laud the Kurds but to use this example to underscore just how utterly useless the Iraqi Army has been, 13 years into Bush-Cheney's grand experiment. The Kurds are certainly brave, but this is a relatively small fighting force not terribly well equipped or led. The Iraqi Army is on paper a numerically large force that has been inundated with expensive, high tech US weapons and training. It has had its hand held for more than a decade. If 5000-some Peshmerga fighters could dislodge ISIS from a major city, how is it humanly possible that an Iraqi Army with 1,800,000 enlisted men supposedly in uniform and Abrams tanks at the ready could not simply roll in Mosul with 100,000 people and sweep ISIS aside?

There are three possible answers. One is that the Army is so utterly inept that even with 100-1 numerical superiority they can't outfight ISIS. Another is that they simply have no motivation to fight for territory within borders largely defined by Western mapmakers but of no particular significance to people of the region. A third is that they are infiltrated by terrorist elements and sidelined by factional, regional, and ethnic rivalries within their own ranks to the point that they can't be considered anything like an effective fighting force.

If anyone needed a reminder of what a comprehensive and unqualified failure Iraq and the neocon plan to "liberate" it have been, this is it.

37 thoughts on “TEATS ON A BULL”

  • Jeff says:

    Not that the institution isn't a disaster on all levels, but I think that 1.8 million soldiers in the Iraqi Army figure (from Wikipedia?) is massively off base, which probably partially explains the "why not roll into Mosul with 100,000 people" question – according to that same Wikipedia article, it was less than 500,000 strong prior to the US invasion (including the Republican Guard).

    The Telegraph reports 193,000 (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/middleeast/iraq/10894811/Iraqi-forces-by-numbers-who-has-the-biggest-army.html), while http://www.globalfirepower.com says 272,000, while the Guardian says 250,000. (https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jun/12/how-battle-ready-isis-iraqi-army-peshmerga)

  • dat worker doe says:

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  • Major Kong says:

    Since we pretty well decimated the Iraqi Army in 1991, and then finished off what was left in 2003, I'm not surprised.

    When we purged the Baathists (purging the officer corps always works well just ask Stalin) any corporate knowledge that army might have had was lost. Pretty tough to build that back up from scratch.

    Odd thing about the Kurds. I can remember flying Northern Watch from a Turkish airbase, ostenseibly to protect the Iraqi Kurds. Meanwhile the Turkish Air Force would use the same base to send bombing raids against the Kurds.

  • Talisker says:

    Organized into a 5000-strong military force called Peshmerga and with the assistance of an allied but less organized militia force, [the Kurds] recently advanced on Fallujah and Mosul, major cities held by ISIS. […] The Kurds are certainly brave, but this is a relatively small fighting force not terribly well equipped or led

    Corrections:

    (1) The Kurds are advancing on Mosul, which borders Kurdish territory and has a significant Kurdish population. They don't give a shit about Fallujah.
    (2) I'm not a military expert, but AIUI the peshmerga are well known for being hard as nails. They held off Saddam Hussein for more than a decade with very little help, maintaining a de facto independent Kurdish state since 1991. Think of the Vietcong: They may be lightly equipped, but morale and leadership are excellent.

    The Iraqi government and its army are dominated by Shia Muslims, who make up the majority of Iraq's population. ISIS are Sunni, as are the residents of places like Fallujah. The Sunnis and Shias hate each other's guts. If the Iraqi Army marches into Fallujah, they will not exactly be welcomed as liberators. It's kind of hard to motivate conscripts to go and fight for people who don't want them there in the first place (again, there's a loose parallel with the US Army in Vietnam).

    In the long term, a lot of the blame should go to the Sykes-Picot agreement, a deal cooked up between the UK and France in 1916 which determined the borders of Iraq and several other countries in the region.

  • Major Kong says:

    Amazing how we're still dealing with the aftermath of WWI a full century later.

    I wish Americans would spend more time studying WWI. We tend to gloss over it and go on to WWII, where we played a much larger part.

  • Katydid says:

    @Major Kong; my high school history courses barely got us past the Civil War. Anything after that was just a blur. War of 1812? A five-minute mention in a 50-minute class. WWI? A couple of days. World War II? Last day of class before exams. We never got to Korea–what I know about that war came from M*A*S*H. I'm *just* old enough to have vague memories of Viet Nam from the tv news, but not old enough to have any contemporaries who might have gone–none of my contemporaries even had older sibs who might have gone. And I'm an Old. My kids, victims of Bush's all-spring-long No Child Left Untested extravasaster, never even covered WWI.

    I am old enough to have contemporaries who went to the Gulf War Part I. I protested against the Gulf War Part II and was called a commie. It was so very, very obvious that this was a cooked-up war meant to make a profit for Cheney.

  • Dave Dell says:

    What Katydid said but with this caveat: There's too much History to teach. You can cover a lot of Historical ground but you can't cover it all if you teach any of it in depth. If I were in charge of the curriculum I think I'd change the whole subject to a current events approach with in depth looks at why the events taking place have been shaped by past events, decisions, and policies. For example, why are the borders around so many countries the cause of so much strife? It'd be an Economic/Geography/History/Culture mix. It'd need one hell of a teacher. I'd recommend almost any of the commenters on this site for the job.

  • Major Kong says:

    @Katydid

    I was in the Gulf War, as everybody knows. I also deployed in the KC-135 for Bosnia.

    Technically Iraq II is on my DD214 but the closest I got was being part of the air-bridge in the KC-135.

    If they'd wanted me to deploy to the desert for that thing I'd have left ten fingernail marks down the hallway as they dragged me to the jet.

  • Tim H. says:

    Major Kong, if you have time to kill in Kansas City, consider checking out the Liberty Memorial, which has the largest World War 1 museum in the United States.

  • Safety Man! says:

    Ed, also worth mentioning are the service members we and our allies have lost from literally being shot in the back by the forces they were "training". I don't know the numbers but it's not insignificant. I think it was called "blue on green" or something like that.

  • geoff says:

    As the estimable Major Kong points out, US occupation head honcho L. Paul Bremer essentially disbanded the Iraqi army in 2003, which led to the Sunni insurgency in western Iraq and eventually became (at least part of) ISIS/ISIL.

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coalition_Provisional_Authority_Order_2

    Probably our second biggest mistake of the war, after, y'know, invading in the first place.

    Here's some more detail from a Kurdish news source:

    http://www.kurdistan24.net/en/opinion/af72e3ec-12a0-4435-bee0-c1b7894ba975/Islamic-State–The-Iraqization-of-al-Qaeda

  • Katydid says:

    @Dave Dell, I think your suggestions for teaching history classes is EXCELLENT.

    @Major Kong; I didn't realize you went to the first war. I was sent to England during those years. Different MOS. Gulf War 2, Electric Bugaloo–Gonna Avenge Muh DADDEH and Make Cheney Rich, was just so much horrific b.s. and I was shocked and appalled my fellow Murkkkuns were all "Freedumb Frieeeees!" and not, "Hey, Iraq had nothing to do with 9/11". I should have known the Rill Murkkuns never saw it coming that destabilizing an entire region would be Bad.

  • c u n d gulag says:

    Iraq is the America's desert version of Vietnam.

    President Johnson and his administration cooked up the excuse for escalating troops in Vietnam – the Gulf of Tonkin Incident(s) – much like W & Cheney created a ton of bullshit to get us into Iraq.

    We armed and trained the South Vietnamese military for over a decade, and after we left, a few years later, North Vietnam went through South Vietnam's military like a chainsaw through balsa wood.

    And that's not even where we started this crap!
    "Remember the Maine" got us into a war with Spain – which netted us Cuba, the Philippines, and other countries.

    So, American has a long history of doing things like starting wars.

    No good ever comes from doing that, as we should have learned by now.
    But, we never seem to learn from our mistakes.
    George Santayana was right, but we never ever listen to him…

  • defineandredefine says:

    Major Kong, re: the Turks flying missions against the Kurds –

    Considering how much that has escalated recently, along with that fucking saudi style religious fascist thin-skinned asshole currently running things in Turkey, it's a wonder we haven't started seriously questioning our alliance with that country.

  • Kevin Dowd says:

    It is the Iraqi special forces division that in fighting outside Fallujah. They are perhaps the only effective force they have. They cleared the villages outside and took Hit. They are stalled now, but are also concerned with civilian casualties.

    This is also a problem in Mosul. A few hundred martyrs willing to blow up the city and kill 10,000 civilians is going to be a hard road for the attacking Kurds.

    And, the USA refused to support a Shi'a Militia dominated counterattack, because they would most likely kill or molest any Sunnis they "liberated". Also we hate Iran. So we demanded that the Iraqi army take the lead and they find some Sunni tribal partners, neither of which are easy tasks.

  • Sour Kraut says:

    Major Kong,

    Except we didn't just purge the Baathists; we disbanded the entire Iraqi Army, making instant enemies of thousands of Iraqi combat veterans with AK-47s at home. Genius.

    If anyone wants to understand the fustercluck that was the Dubya administration's management of Iraq, read "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" by Rajiv Chandrasekaran, who was there to witness it firsthand. It's…eye-opening, to put it mildly.

  • Robert says:

    I remember in the lead up to Operation FUBAR, some pundit predicting that Iraq would either be the Arab East Germany or the Arab Yugoslavia.

    I.e., once the tyrannical regime was removed, the Iraqis would either join the community of sane, functional nations *or* descend into a morass of fratricidal murderdeathkills. It occurred to me at the time that knowing which way it was likely to go before invading would have been prudent; but I was a fifth columnist in a decadent coastal enclave, so what did I know?

  • Gerald McGrew says:

    Talisker nailed it. The Iraqi army is Shiite. ISIS is Sunni. The parts of Iraq controlled by ISIS is populated by Sunnis.

    The Shiite Iraqi army is not going to die trying to "liberate" Sunni towns from their fellow Sunnis (ISIS). For many of the residents there, ISIS is preferable to being under the control of the Shiite Iraqi gov't.

    As far as the Kurds, they're willing to take back their own areas, but they don't have any interest either in kicking Sunnis out of Sunni towns. Not only that, a unified, functional Iraq isn't in their interest. This is a good read on that:

    http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2016/05/kurds-mosul-battle/484775/

  • Katydid says:

    @Major Kong; that was YOU? I didn't know you then from here, but I do read DKos and I did read what you wrote. How funny–like bumping into someone you know on vacation.

  • piratedan says:

    and for reasons unknown, no one still wants to toss out the old maps and set up governing entities by ethnicity or religion which would at least help define the players and their interests. To be fair, it's like we're telling the Sunni's and Shia's to get along.. why? They hate each other, perhaps making them responsible for their own folks would be a bridge too far somehow? Granted, it's not any more perfect than what currently exists but cripes, how many generations of killing each other somewhat indiscriminately is enough?

  • RP says:

    @ c u n d gulag:
    "George Santayana was right"

    Santayana?

    I'm sorry, I seem to have forgotten…

    Sincerely,
    America

  • ConcernedCitizen says:

    Nice post, Ed. I'd just like to voice my skepticism that Iraq would be better off today if Saddam Hussein's psychopathic crime family still controlled it. I also think it's worth evaluating the war from a longer historical perspective in order to spot a silver lining.

    By now it seems obvious that, much like Yugoslavia, the century-old state of Iraq is doomed to partition along ethnic/tribal/sectarian lines. This may not be such a terrible thing. Like most people, I have trouble seeing any downside to greater Kurdish autonomy; they represent one of the primary bulwarks against the violent ideology of revolutionary Salafism, which animates mainly Arab Sunnis.

    So does Iran. Saudi Arabia will practice retrograde Islamism until the end of time, but I don't think it's implausible to expect Persia to step back from that kind of theological commitment and gradually modernize–or at least, return to the path it was pursuing before its Islamist revolution in the 70s. That normalization process was surely helped along by the removal of its fascistic Sunni-Baathist neighbor, which is now under representative control of the majority Shi'a there. Now there's a Shi'a power bloc in the region, and I think this is a good thing.

    With that said, CPA orders 1 & 2 were fucking stupid, and everyone is reaping the whirlwind for them.

  • HeidiB says:

    So many problems date back to post-WW I political decisions. It's pathetic that people in the U.S. have to take a special-topic college course to learn about the political decisions that are still f**king over millions of people. And American arrogance lives on….

  • Chicagojon2016 says:

    Is there a 4th option where a pallet of cash and weapons arrive, but the soldiers don't/barely get paid at all?

  • April says:

    @ Dave Dell – There is a course called "Human Geography" which is, as described by one student "A course about everything." It's a fascinating amalgam of history, geography, economics with a bit of science and literature thrown in. Everyone should have to take it.

  • Kevin says:

    "and for reasons unknown, no one still wants to toss out the old maps " no Pirate Dan… there are many many good reasons.. same as in Africa.. do you really want to see a dozen border wars?

  • Nate says:

    @Major_Kong Dan Carlin did an amazing 6 part podcast history series on WWI a few years ago called "The Blueprint for Armageddon". It's super indepth and really fascinating. Most of the parts clock in around 4 hours. Really amazing work and wow, WWI was one of the worst things that mankind has done to itself.

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