THE WORLD FROM WASHINGTON
Michael Hirsh
The Basra Model
The tough stand of Iraq's army, with U.S. air support, could be America's way out. But will we give them the munitions and armor they need?
The outcome of the Battle of Basra is still unclear. But as things stabilize in that critical city—the southern gateway to Iraq's oil wealth—Basra may well turn out to be Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki's Kasserine Pass. That notorious battle, which took place in Tunisia in late February 1943, marked the first large-scale encounter between untested American troops and the battle-hardened Germans. The Americans, to put it mildly, did not do well. But they quickly fired incompetent commanders, adjusted in tactics, and never lost another major battle. In Basra the nascent Iraqi Army—also riddled with incompetence and self-doubt—actually came out looking better against Iraq's well-established militias than the American Army had 65 years earlier against the entrenched Nazis, says retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey. "At Kasserine we got our asses kicked. These people didn't," McCaffrey says.
Despite a spate of early grim assessments of Basra in the U.S. media, U.S. military observers on the ground in Iraq are more sanguine, says McCaffrey, who has long been a critic of the war. Yes, Moqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army militia has held on to its weapons and much of its turf. But Iraqi forces appear to be largely in control of the city and its ports, and Basra is still mostly calm. Even more important, the Iraqi security forces have remained mostly intact. Rather than bolting or deserting in droves, as happened so many times in the past, only in relatively small numbers did some Iraqis desert to the other side, McCaffrey told me. That's a big step forward. "On balance it appears as if the Iraqi security forces for the first time stepped up, largely independently of the United States, and tried to establish law and order in the most important city in the country save Baghdad," says McCaffrey, who recently canvassed top U.S. military commanders in Iraq.
If McCaffrey's assessment of the Battle of Basra holds—and we won't really know for months whether it does—it suggests something even more important. With proper equipment, artillery, armor and medical evacuation (medevac) units—and the United States acting as its air force—the Iraqi Army could actually begin to develop enough competence to permit a larger drawdown of American ground forces soon. If so, the Iraqi security forces will need a lot more help. Currently they have only a handful of light armored vehicles, three C-130 transport planes, and none of their own medevac units. Washington, for understandable reasons, has been reluctant to fully equip an army that for a long time was thought to be a cover for Shiite militia sympathizers or a breeding ground for civil war. But a success in Basra—a Shiite-dominated national army willing to bloodily suppress Shiite militias—might put many doubters in Congress and in the Pentagon over the threshold. As Meghan O'Sullivan, who recently retired as President Bush's deputy national security adviser, told me Thursday, "This is a bit where we'd like to see things go in the future. A year and a half ago we'd be talking about [the Iraqi government] sending a force from somewhere in the north and them not showing up."
There is another lesson here as well. If the Iraqi Army proves to be somewhat able to act on its own, and the central government gains the legitimacy it has been so sorely lacking, an actual U.S. exit strategy could begin to emerge. Indeed, it is even possible to imagine a bipartisan consensus on bringing the country to stability—and leaving. Currently the Democrats in Barack Obama's camp and the Republicans led by John McCain could not be further apart. Obama has decided Iraq is a lost cause and called for a pullout of one to two brigades a month. McCain has indicated he would stay indefinitely.
Much of the reason for that huge divide—apart from the politics of getting elected president—is the fact that post-surge U.S. troops remain on the front lines in Baghdad. Even with the planned drawdown to pre-surge levels of 140,000 troops or so, whoever becomes president in 2009 will find that the political will in this country for maintaining such a large U.S. ground force in Iraq is extremely limited. With 4,000 dead and counting, our nation can't stomach many more casualties. And the strain on the U.S. Army in terms of long deployments is almost unbearable. But if the U.S. role could quickly devolve to air support, equipping, advising and training, then we could achieve both Obama's goal of a swift ground pullout and McCain's goal of a long-term U.S. stabilizing presence.
The U.S. air support role has been emerging for some time. Washington has little intention of allowing the Iraqi national government to create a full-scale air force. According to the Congressional Research Service, the Bush administration asked for more than $1.7 billion for new military construction in Iraq in fiscal '07, a huge jump from the $200 million it requested for fiscal '06. Much of that money is being spent on U.S. air bases like Balad, north of Baghdad. "One of the issues of sovereignty for any country is the ability to control their own airspace. We will probably be helping the Iraqis with that problem for a very long time," the then-base commander, Brig. Gen. Frank Gorenc, told me when I was last there two years ago this month. Whatever you think about the start of the Iraq war, if the Iraqi Army starts performing, a practicable bipartisan pullout strategy could start to take shape.
© 2008
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Posted By: The_epoch_point @ 05/20/2008 10:19:06 PM
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Posted By: getzel @ 04/11/2008 11:22:05 PM
Comment: War ends We win: when we pass a law that makes the minimum price of gasoline at the pumps: $1.75/gallon.
The ethanol investors do not build ethanol distilleries because monopoly OPEC would lower the price of crude/gasoline to rust out the billion dollar/million barrel a day ethanol stills.
Brazil is energy independent: ethanol; All their cars come built running on ethanol; The gas station fills the tanks with ethanol, no gasoline.
Archer Daniel Midland made millions in the USA selling $1.00 gallon ethanol in the 1990s;
That trumps any canard/invalid objection to ethanol. Use Cellulose ethanol, not corn ethanol.
Cellulose Ethanol energy independence in the USA, will balance the trade deficit, create full employment, bring down the price of fuel, break the monopoly on the pricing of fuel, balance the USA government budget, create less pollution, make the USA energy independent, and end the war because we will stop funding the bad guys everyday at the gas pumps.
With all the cars running on ethanol; the price of oil will collapse and the radical Moslem hordes will no longer have the funds we used to give them from gasoline sales to finance the war against us.
I built a distillery and converted my GM car to 160 proof ethanol by 1982; and tried 25 years to get the USA off of gasoline. Unless the strategy I am outlining is adopted, the war that is coming, regardless of who is elected, will make Vietnam look like a cake walk.
Sharia people are at war with The West because Sharia people believe Islam can not survive against: a free market economy with free speech to criticize Islam.
International law, has defined a set of war rule parameters that guarantee no war can be won by good guys and that guarantee nice long lasting wars with lots of weapons sales.
Generals: Patton. Eisenhower, Marshall , Sherman et al would all be war criminals under international law and Europe would be under Hitler; the American civil war would not be over if fought under the current rules; which, intentionally or unintentionally, are designed for a hundred year terror war.
Cut off terrorist infested countries/areas: no phones, no lights, no motorcars not a single luxury. No food, no water, no ships/airplanes in and out, no trucks cross their borders; nothing till they give up the terrorism. Better the terrorist should die right there than have a war where the world is terrorized for 100 years.
The leadership that sponsors these terrorist suicide murders are the Heads of state in Tehran, Riyadh, and Damascus.
Intelligence analyst: Getzel
Posted By: getzel @ 04/11/2008 11:09:22 PM
Comment: War ends We win: when we pass a law that makes the minimum price of gasoline at the pumps: $1.75/gallon.
The ethanol investors do not build ethanol distilleries because monopoly OPEC would lower the price of crude/gasoline to rust out the billion dollar/million barrel a day ethanol stills.
Brazil is energy independent: ethanol; All their cars come built running on ethanol; The gas station fills the tanks with ethanol, no gasoline.
Archer Daniel Midland made millions in the USA selling $1.00 gallon ethanol in the 1990s;
That trumps any canard/invalid objection to ethanol. Use Cellulose ethanol, not corn ethanol.
Cellulose Ethanol energy independence in the USA, will balance the trade deficit, create full employment, bring down the price of fuel, break the monopoly on the pricing of fuel, balance the USA government budget, create less pollution, make the USA energy independent, and end the war because we will stop funding the bad guys everyday at the gas pumps.
With all the cars running on ethanol; the price of oil will collapse and the radical Moslem hordes will no longer have the funds we used to give them from gasoline sales to finance the war against us.
I built a distillery and converted my GM car to 160 proof ethanol by 1982; and tried 25 years to get the USA off of gasoline. Unless the strategy I am outlining is adopted, the war that is coming, regardless of who is elected, will make Vietnam look like a cake walk.
Sharia people are at war with The West because Sharia people believe Islam can not survive against: a free market economy with free speech to criticize Islam.
International law, has defined a set of war rule parameters that guarantee no war can be won by good guys and that guarantee nice long lasting wars with lots of weapons sales.
Generals: Patton. Eisenhower, Marshall , Sherman et al would all be war criminals under international law and Europe would be under Hitler; the American civil war would not be over if fought under the current rules; which, intentionally or unintentionally, are designed for a hundred year terror war.
Cut off terrorist infested countries/areas: no phones, no lights, no motorcars not a single luxury. No food, no water, no ships/airplanes in and out, no trucks cross their borders; nothing till they give up the terrorism. Better the terrorist should die right there than have a war where the world is terrorized for 100 years.
The leadership that sponsors these terrorist suicide murders are the Heads of state in Tehran, Riyadh, and Damascus.
Intelligence analyst: Getzel