http://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/20/magazine/20iraq.html?_r=1&oref=sloginThe rules posted on the wall of the Marine base in Barwana concisely summed up the American predicament in Iraq: Be polite, be professional, have a plan to kill everyone you meet.
Barwana was a way station for a joint Iraqi and American convoy as it traveled to a stretch of hard-packed sand overlooking the Euphrates in the Haditha triad, one of the more challenging areas in Anbar, the most dangerous province in Iraq. The convoy’s goal was to inspect a company of Iraqi soldiers who had been involved in an American-directed operation to round up insurgents. With Iraq engulfed in bloody turmoil, any prospect of establishing a modicum of order depends heavily on the new Iraqi Army and the small cadre of Americans that is training it. The rules at Barwana hinted at one rationale. For all of the U.S. military’s fighting skills, the Iraqi troops are better able to differentiate among the welter of tribes, self-styled militias, religious groupings, myriad insurgent organizations and militant jihadists who populate Iraq. But there are other important rationales as well. With American forces stretched perilously thin, the development of Iraq’s armed forces is the best hope for putting more boots on the ground. Fielding an Iraqi military — along with the parallel effort to build up the Iraqi police — is also the closest thing the Bush administration has to an exit strategy.
Before arriving in Iraq earlier this summer, I got the basic facts from Pentagon briefings. There is, American officials said, to be a 10-division Iraqi force. The effort to raise and train the troops, they stated, is 85 percent complete. Statistics like these convey a sense of measurable progress in a region that otherwise appears to be a caldron of violence. “The hope of the Americans, the hope of the troops, is that the Iraqis will continue to take over responsibility for the security in their country — and that over time we’ll be able to draw down our forces as conditions permit,” Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said earlier this month.
What I saw in more than three weeks in Anbar Province was not reassuring. Dogged efforts were being undercut by a dysfunctional Iraqi bureaucracy in Baghdad. The American advisers were able and extremely dedicated, and the Iraqi troops under their tutelage were making strides toward becoming an independent fighting element. But Iraq’s Ministry of Defense has been slow to issue promotions for the new soldiers and to distribute proper pay. A goodly number of the Iraqi soldiers have voted with their feet and gone AWOL — or left to join the Iraqi police, so they could live close to home.
In the Haditha triad, Col. Jebbar Abass, a beefy man with a drooping mustache, commanded an Iraqi battalion that started out with about 700 soldiers in the fall of 2005. It was now down to about 400 troops. Since almost a third of his battalion is on leave at any one time, that means that Colonel Abass can field about 270 soldiers on any given day, a useful supplement to the Marine forces in and around Haditha but hardly enough to enable the Americans to draw back.
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...counterinsurgency operations have taken on the quality of a whack-a-mole arcade game.
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