Mid-East Meets Midwest

Three Iraqi cattle herders were killed today after wandering into the middle of a U.S.-Iraqi mortar training exercise north of Baghdad.

U.S. troops were conducting a live-fire training exercise with Iraqi forces near Taji, a city about 12 miles north of Baghdad, when the three men walked onto the artillery range, a military spokesman said. An 11-year-old boy was also injured in the incident.  He was evacuated to a U.S. military hospital where he is in stable condition.

The incident comes as the U.S. military shifts its primary role in Iraq from combat to training Iraqi security forces with exercises like these.

Col. Timothy Reese (courtesy of Antiwar.com)

A senior military adviser in Iraq, issued an internal memo urging the US to significantly speed up its pullout from Iraq.  In this memo leaked to the New York Times, Col. Timothy Reese pushes for the U.S. to simply “declare victory” and have announce that all troops will be out of the nation by August 2010.

Bluntly, Col. Reese says keeping US troops in Iraq “isn’t yielding benefits commensurate with the effort and is now generating its own opposition.” He asserts that America has overstayed it’s welcome, saying, “guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.” Read more…

Violence interrupted the celebrations of National Sovereignty Day (photo courtesy of Iraq Solidarity Campaign)

One month ago today, celebrations filled the streets of Baghdad as Iraqis marked “National Sovereignty Day,” commemorating the official withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities.  But in Kirkuk, just 150 miles north of Baghdad, the cheers and high spirits were replaced with screams and panic when a car bomb exploded in a crowded market, killing at least 34 people.

This incident caused me to take a step back and ask, ‘Is Iraq ready to stand on its own two feet?’

Over the last six years American troops, advisers and diplomats have been working to establish a stable Iraq, combating violence, training Iraqi soldiers and police, and planting the seeds of democracy for the first time in Iraq’s history.  What more can the United States do to help this war torn nation?

Perhaps the answer is to stop helping. Read more…

Iraq is certainly exercising its sovereignty over the last week.

With a new reading for the U.S.-Iraqi security agreement (the same document which set a deadline for the American troop withdrawal from Iraqi cities) the Iraqi government has sharply restricted the movement and activities of American forces. This control has rubbed many U.S. commanders the wrong way, who have become increasingly concerned with the safety of their men and women.

The Washington Post reports:

In a curt missive issued by the Baghdad Operations Command on July 2 — the day after Iraqis celebrated the withdrawal of U.S. troops to bases outside city centers — Iraq’s top commanders told their U.S. counterparts to “stop all joint patrols” in Baghdad. It said U.S. resupply convoys could travel only at night and ordered the Americans to “notify us immediately of any violations of the agreement.”

In an e-mail obtained by the Post, Maj. Gen. Daniel P. Bolger, commander of the Baghdad division, wrote “Maybe something was ‘lost in translation.” He continued, writing, “We are not going to hide our support role in the city. I’m sorry the Iraqi politicians lied/dissembled/spun, but we are not invisible nor should we be.” He indicated that U.S. troops intend to continue to engage in combat operations, even in urban areas, in order to avert or respond to threats, with or without help from the Iraqis.

“This is a broad right and it demands that we patrol, raid and secure routes as necessary to keep our forces safe,” he wrote. “We’ll do that, preferably partnered.”

These new guidelines are a reflection of rising tensions between the American and Iraqi governments. Iraqi leaders are using this agreement as an opportunity to show their countrymen that the are in charge and that Iraq’s dependence on the U.S. is decreasing.

Throughout the war in Iraq, comparisons have been drawn between the current occupation and America’s military intervention in Vietnam.  As troops withdrew from Baghdad, blogger George Berkin referred back to this comparison once more.

Berkin says believes a withdrawal from Iraq will be completely different than the American withdrawal from Vietnam because:

• “…in Iraq, unlike in Vietnam, the U.S. will depart having won the military conflict. A powerful dictator was overthrown, the cities have been secured, and the insurgents are not in control in Iraq.”
• The US learned from its mistakes in Vietnam and has since improved the way the military trains local police forces.
• Iraq has a larger size and greater potential wealth to play to its favor, unlike Vietnam.  Berkin said in his article, “For all the blood and treasure invested in South Vietnam, it was (and is) a small and poor country, and police forces were underfunded.”
• Berkin says the task faced by the local security forces in Iraq is very different than the task faced by South Vietnamese forces.  He stated, “In the Vietnam War, the South Vietnamese faced an enormous army. For the North Vietnamese to gain control of all of Vietnam, it was simply a matter of overrunning what remained of the decimated South Vietnamese forces.  The battle for an independent South Vietnam was a standoff when the Americans bolstered the weak South Vietnamese army. When the U.S. left, North Vietnam’s advantage in forces was overwhelming.” Whereas in Iraq, security forces face pockets of resistance and attempting to “quell violence aimed at pitting factions in Iraq – Shiite, Sunni and Kurds – against each other.”

See full article: Iraq and Vietnam

As our troops pulled out of Iraqi cities last week, the American armed forces are now playing a completely different role in Iraq than they have played over the last six years.  Moving away from the days of armed conflict, soldiers focus on civil affairs, helping local governments and fulfilling their roles as advisers, training Iraqi security forces.

This shift has also required a shift in how the Army trains its soldiers.  Now troops are expected to not just help stabilize Iraq, but to transition their duties to their Iraqi comrades by the end of 2011.

The Associated Press reports:

The 3rd Infantry Division, headed by Maj. Gen. Tony Cucolo, will lead all U.S. military operations in Iraq’s volatile north. Since January, the Georgia-based division has been training at Fort Stewart to defuse potential conflicts before they flare up — largely with the help of Iraqi forces or through diplomacy.

Training to leave a war, however, is a delicate mission.

Retired Gen. John Hendrix, who used to command the 3rd Infantry Division and the Army’s Forces Command, said military planners probably did not have a good idea of what would happen when U.S. troops pulled out of Saigon in April 1975, months before the North Vietnamese takeover.

Military historians say the Army’s overall strategy during the Vietnam War failed precisely because it did not understand the nature of the society. It’s not a lesson the Army wants to repeat in Iraq, with its rich oil fields and strategic location in the Mideast that will be an important U.S. interest for years to come.

“We never got at the strategic problem in Vietnam. We were not nearly as prepared then as we are now,” Hendrix said in an interview. “When that decision was made, we didn’t have nearly as good a plan as how we were going to come out. These guys do have a little bit more of a challenge — they’ll do the last handshake and the Iraqis will look around and there’ll be no one there.”

…”To secure a victory, you send in your closers,” Cucolo said. “I said [to my unit], ‘Gentlemen, ladies, we are the closers. We’re going there, and we’re going to leave it all on the field because this is the decisive moment.’”

To read full article: Army ‘closers’ train for new mission: leaving Iraq