On the Surge

It's a week late, but Walter Russell Mead's reflection on the 9th anniversary of 9/11 is still worth reading.  In particular, his commentary on the turning point in Iraq circa 2006 is spot-on:

[But] the Sunni Arabs of Iraq made a choice. They saw Al-Qaeda at its best — volunteer freedom fighters come from around the world to fight for them — and they saw America at its worst: incompetent, insensitive, vacillating and violent.  And they chose the United States... What those Sunni Arabs in Iraq came to understand is the basic truth of this conflict.  The war unleashed nine years ago is not a clash of civilizations between Islam and the west.  It is a clash between civilization and barbarism, and in that clash the Americans and true Muslims are on the same side.

The strategic realignment that occurred in the Iraq theater during 2006-2007 -- what was sold in the US media as "the Surge" -- laid a foundation for a far more momentous and far less heralded realignment of the Iraqi Sunni tribal leadership.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mead that the (self-)rehabilitation of Iraq's Sunni Arabs was more pivotal than any US Forces strategic decision.  Furthermore, I attest (from my own conversations with Iraqis themselves) that a significant element of that realignment was distinctly generational in nature.  The worst of the sectarian violence circa 2005-2006 was committed by Iraqis of my own generation, those with birthdates of roughly 1980-1990.  These young Iraqis came of age during Saddam's most desperate struggles to hold on to power by playing sects against one another, and after the US invasion were egged on by foreign extremists, primarily from Saudi Arabia and Iran among the Sunna and Shi'a, respectively, who both looked to a bountiful harvest in political influence and cold hard cash resulting from the bloody collapse of Iraq.  The violence finally ebbed when Iraqis of my parents' generation -- who fondly remember a long-ago era when nobody knew or cared who was Shi'i and who was Sunni -- stood up and said, "This is not the Iraq we remember, this is not the Iraq we hope for."

I, like Mead, am optimistic for the future of Iraq, and am guardedly so for the future of the Arab world as a whole, and that of the "Muslim World" beyond that. But it is worth remembering, with humility, how limited the American role in directing that future really is.

P.J. O'Rourke on Afghanistan

If you're having trouble pinning down exactly what exactly our involvement in Afghanistan is all about (and anyone who isn't is lying to himself), you could do worse than reading P.J. O'Rourke's turn as the 72-hour expert:

Afghans think Americans have sided with the wrong people. It’s not that Afghans think Americans have sided with the wrong people in a systematic, strategic, or calculated way. It’s just that we came to a place that we didn’t know much about, where there are a lot of sides to be on, and we started siding with this side and that side and the other side. We were bound to wind up on the wrong side sometimes.

This parallels my own experiences in Iraq, where our leaders were very much focused on determining which factions in the government, tribes, and security forces were "good guys" and which were "bad guys", when most of the time it was really just "these guys" and "those guys".  At the same time, our leaders genuinely didn't think of this good-guy/bad-guy categorization process as "picking sides" while the locals most certainly did. Whichever faction in a given area first figured out the rules of the game and presented themselves to the local US forces as the "good guys" thus won the support of the world superpower, who nonetheless maintained delusions of impartiality.  Has it been mentioned recently that counterinsurgency is really really difficult? Sure,  and foreign societies are awfully tricky to understand even when you're not dodging bullets. On the other hand, sometimes I get the impression that we really weren't trying that hard.

The Mud Times

It's been raining here in our corner of the Iraq. It does happen, for a few months of the year. And real long rains, too, not just the 10-minute mudstorms we'd get down in the southern desert last deployment. There's something that just feels a bit more momentous about rain in the desert. It feels like an event. All the plants are greener, and everything looks a bit more vibrant, now that the summer's worth of dust has been rinsed off. But there's a downside, because all the dirt that blows around as dust all summer has now turned into mud. Slippery, sticky mud that'll be with us until April or so. There's really only two seasons in the Iraq: the Hot Times and the Mud Times. Happy Mud Times, everyone.

photo by Flickr user KristenKing

Killing Time in Iraq

So I'm in Iraq now. I meant to just take a blogging hiatus while I was on block leave, but then after I got back from leave things were pretty busy getting prepped to deploy, so the hiatus got extended. It'll probably continue for a little longer, at least until I'm settled in where I'm supposed to end up. See, I'm currently in trans limbo, stuck in a place I was never supposed to be in the first place. A couple of us left early to escort our equipment that was being shipped by cargo plane, and while we normally would have just changed planes at the first base we landed at in Iraq and been on our way the same day, somehow we've been stuck here for a week, trying to beg our way onto any plane or convoy leaving this place with room for us and our equipment. For me and one other soldier, it could take almost another week yet to get to where we're going. Meanwhile, the rest of our unit, who were expecting to find us waiting for them, are now waiting on us. Go figure.

I'm not exactly complaining, since it's become a strange sort of vacation, just killing time around here, but we do still have a job to do, and at the end of the day I'd rather be doing it.

On Torture

Security guru Bruce Schneier blogs two pieces on the use of torture. Both begin with the same take on the pragmatic argument: the stories of American abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo have been Al-Qaeda in Iraq's most effective recruiting tool. I don't dispute that point, rather the conclusion drawn from it. Here's why: most of what the Muslim world believes about Guantanamo is complete fabrication, and the infamous abuse at Abu Ghraib was a "black swan", perpetrated in the dead of night by a handful of irresponsible lowlifes operating miles outside their job descriptions. Don't get me wrong here: I'm not arguing that there haven't been systematic violation of American principles at both locations. There have been abuses which people ought rightly be upset about, but those aren't the cases that have captured the jihadi imagination — or the U.S. public's, for that matter — and this is the great irony. Abu Ghraib = Lynndie England, and Guantanamo = flushed Korans, even though one was unforeseeable and the other never happened. I'm bringing all of this up to make the point that the number of foreign jihadists flooding to support Al-Qaeda in Iraq has had little to do with any particular torture or abuse of detainees; if Abu Ghraib hadn't happened, they would have made it up, as they have in other cases. So the "pragmatic argument" really doesn't take us anywhere.

Happily, both pieces move to the moral argument, which I find far stronger. And a lot simpler. Whether or not torture is a useful tool in counterterrorism (and the relative safety of such torture-happy places as Egypt attest it can't be wholly discounted) is completely irrelevant. Even if by aschewing torture we're fighting with one hand tied behind our back, it's still the right thing to do. We can still win that fight, and when we have, we will still be America.

Fickle Customers

The excellent milblogger S4 at War brings up an interesting point with regard to the economic consequences of the planned withdrawal of US forces from Iraq. Many areas of Iraq resemble a tourist economy, with heavy reliance on rich, spendthrift foreigners. Unlike (most) tourist economies, Iraq is facing the likely abrupt disappearance of her "tourists". The transition's going to be tough all around.

Another Advantage of an Obama Presidency...

...is that the AP will no longer have to tie themselves in knots spinning the successful completion of counterinsurgency milestones as US forces "abandoning Iraqi cities". Via James Taranto, this AP article takes a full five paragraphs to get around to admitting that US troops are pulling out of some Iraqi cities because they are secure enough to entrust to Iraqi security forces.

Welcome to the Iraq

A poster to the Donovan shares a touch of the surreality that is the Iraq:

• an Iraqi coming toward me with a drawn knife -- is looking to borrow my ceramic sharpener.

• one of my hootchmates chows down on kimchi and peppers drenched in hot sauce and then complains that the bottled water here gives him gas.

• an obscene period of time elapses between the *last* rockets smacking in and the “Take Cover” warble, but mere seconds elapse between a distant clap of thunder and the “Alarm Red” announcement.

• the same lizard that scrambles out of my way on the floor of the sim building won’t even hesitate to scoot up my pants leg the second I sit down at the console.

• right after I spent half an hour outside along the T-walls looking for a camel spider to show the new guy, I found one in the office -- under his desk.

• right after I spent twenty minutes explaining the importance of doing a polarity check on the 220-volt outlets in the office, the new guy fried his laptop because he stuck the adapter into the wall socket without checking the polarity.

• when something cat-sized runs between your legs after dark, it’s a fox -- if it’s fox-sized, it’s a cat.

• there’s a better chance I’ll be electrocuted in the shower than killed by an incoming rocket, mortar, or RPG.

• a twenty-two-year old Iraqi asked me why we’re hunting IED-planters over here when Bill Ayers is still walking loose in Chicago.

Jay Nordlinger in Iraq

If I have a blogging hero, that man is Jay Nordlinger, senior editor of National Review, who has been writing his stream-of-consciousness "Impromptus" since before anyone would have thought to label it a "blog". Well, for all of you who might be interested in an extremely well-spoken civilian's view of what is happening in Iraq these days, Jay has spent the last week there and has been kind enough to write about it. His Iraq Notes (in five episodes) are here, here, here, here, and here. Read the whole thing.

Walls

Good fences may make good neighbors, but there's still something that feels good about seeing walls come down.

Disturbing

Last week, Amir Taheri reported in the New York Post that Senator Obama had sought to negotiate his own foreign policy with the Iraqi government on his last visit there this summer, allegedly urging the Iraqis to hold off on the Strategic Framework Agreement until the next (presumably meaning his) administration. Here's the crux:

According to Iraqi Foreign Minister Hoshyar Zebari, Obama made his demand for delay a key theme of his discussions with Iraqi leaders in Baghdad in July.

"He asked why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington," Zebari said in an interview.

Obama insisted that Congress should be involved in negotiations on the status of US troops - and that it was in the interests of both sides not to have an agreement negotiated by the Bush administration in its "state of weakness and political confusion."

It's disturbing (and as far as I know, unprecedented) for a candidate to be out making foreign policy as self-assumed president-in-waiting. He's actively undermining the legitimacy of a sitting president, with a key foreign government, no less. Obama has apparently decided it's not enough to already act like president, he needs to prevent anything out of his power from happening in the meantime.

Now, this story been sitting quietly in an open browser window for a few days because I didn't want to blog on it until we got some verification. That came today with the Obama campaign's masterful non-denial:

But Obama's national security spokeswoman Wendy Morigi said Taheri's article bore "as much resemblance to the truth as a McCain campaign commercial." In fact, Obama had told the Iraqis that they should not rush through a "Strategic Framework Agreement" governing the future of US forces until after President George W. Bush leaves office, she said.

Which is completely different from "[asking] why we were not prepared to delay an agreement until after the US elections and the formation of a new administration in Washington". That's quite a denial: "It's all dirty lies. Our candidate most certainly did not do x. Rather, he did x." Huh? The only difference is in the wording, which sounds even worse in Morigi's account. At least Zebari had Obama making a suggestion; Morigi says he simply told them what to do.

The Face Of Hope

Meet Sheikh Ahmad Fatah Khan al-Rishawi. He and his late brother Sheikh Sittar (assassinated by al-Qaeda last fall) have been architects of the "Awakening" movement that since summer of 2007 has seen Sunni tribes in Anbar province join with each other and with coalition forces to rid their lands of al-Qaeda, and which has become the archetype for American counterinsurgency efforts throughout Iraq. Now he's offered to send his tribesmen as advisors to Afghanistan.

Remember hearing how Iraq's tribes were going to be such a stumbling block? We don't know anything about their relationships, it's a dangerous wildcard, we told ourselves. Seems nobody had the optimism to believe that a social institution that has provided a coherent framework for Iraqi life through millennia of upheaval just maybe could turn out to be a stabilizing force.

Basrah, After

In March the Iraqi Army and Iraqi Police, with limited support from American and British forces, took back control of the port city of Basrah from assorted bands of smugglers and puritanical thugs under the aeges of the Jaysh al-Mahdi (Mahdi Army) and Iranian-supported "special groups". While Prime Minister al-Maliki's new-found willingness to confront Shi'a extremist groups closely tied to his political base was a welcome development, at first the rather slapdash execution of the operation rightly made concerned observers a bit nervous. I stated back in April (a bit boldly, in hindsight) that the IA had proven the naysayers wrong, and it seems the center continues to hold as IA and government-aligned civilian militias keep the peace. Basrah joins the majority of Iraqi cities on the path toward a semblance of normalcy, something even the Washington Post can celebrate with a photoessay of life cautiously coming out of the shadows. At the start of the Basrah operation, I called these "dangerous but hopeful times for Iraq". The danger is most certainly not past, and any progress is reversible. But these pictures speak to the power of hope.

Camel Spider

I have now truly been to Iraq. I have seen the quasi-mythical camel spider. I say quasi-mythical because the creature soldiers tell stories about and the actual beast are pretty much two separate things. The one I saw was just scuttling alongside the path to the bathroom the other night. It was pretty creepy, but I managed to refrain from stomping it. And I'd still prefer that to a scorpion. Haven't seen any of them yet, surprisingly. I would have imagined this place to be crawling with them.

So let me let you in on a little secret, should you ever find yourself out here in the desert. I haven't actually needed this advice, due to the aforementioned lack of scorpions and seeming rarity of camel spiders in this area, but I figure I'll pass it along. Apparently some soldiers like to pull a fast one over on the new guy by taking bets on a staged battle between a camel spider and a scorpion. After all the horror stories he's heard about them, the new guy will always bet on the larger, more fearsome-looking camel spider. But here's the secret: scorpion always wins. There. I just saved you 5 very hypothetical bucks.

Working with the Locals

The other day I got a break from my usual job for a few hours by doing "escort" duty while some local nationals (i.e. Iraqis) did some construction work on our building. It's entertaining working with the LNs. The smalltalk always takes the form of an interview following the same pattern:

• "How many kids do you have?"
• None
• [intrigue] "You're married, though?"
• No, not yet.
• [surprise] "How old are you?"
• Twenty-four.
• [shocked indignation] "Twenty-four and no wife, no kids?" [astonished Arabic muttering]. "But you have a girlfriend, right?"
• ...[sigh]

I guess it goes to show you the value these people place on family. That doesn't even express it right, because it's not just that they value family ties more than modern Westerners generally, but that they truly value themselves less as individuals. A person's whole identity is defined by their family, and a man's worth in particular by the number and stature of his children. European family names began as patronymics (witness the proliferation of Andersons, Christiansens, Nelsons, Olsons, and Thorvaldsons with whom I attended college), but Iraqis proudly go through their adult lives being addressed by reference to their children: Abu (father of) Haydar, Abu Miriam, Umm (mother of) Marwan, Umm Zaynab etc. etc. etc. Apparently there's even an unfortunate nickname for an unrepentant bachelor: Abu Gha'ib, father of the absent. And I thought my family's hinting was bad.

But I digress. Apart from being heckled for my childlessness and bachelorhood, hanging out with the LNs is always rewarding. I experienced the legendary Iraqi hospitality when -- despite being right across from the chow hall -- the four workers insisted on sharing their meager lunch with me: a tiffin of boiled chicken, heated up with a cutting torch; another of lumpy sour something's milk; and of course, the flat local bread. Not particularly good, but not bad, and worth it for the cultural sensitivity points.

Weather Report

So it's getting a bit warmer around here. Right now it's sort of a typical summerlike temperature. It'd be pretty hot for comfort if you had to work outside, but it'd be fine for lounging in a hammock or a day at the beach. Trouble is, right now it's midnight; sun went down five hours ago. This afternoon was moderately hellish, around 115, and the wind feeling like God's own blowdryer off the desert. Can't wait to see what 130 feels like. Today we fell again into one of the classic Iraq conversations: don't even mention that there are people willing to fight over this place, it's amazing just that there's anyone still here at all. You could just start walking, pick a direction, eventually you'd end up someplace better. Except South, I guess, because then you'd end up in Yemen. I don't hear good things.

Michael Yon on Iraq

Michael Yon has an awesome interview with Kathryn Jean Lopez of National Review. If you read one link of mine, make this the one. As I've said before, nobody else who is free to talk about it is in a better position than Michael Yon to understand the realities of Iraq.

Is anyone out there making "Petraeus '12" bumper stickers yet? Because I'd love to slap one on our HMMWV.

Basrah Recap

I stopped following the 'mainstream' news out of Basrah once things calmed down over here, so I hadn't realized that the press has been painting the recent skirmishes as a strategic defeat. I was a bit stunned to hear it actually, and happy to see David Frum's excellent rebuttal to the idea that the battle of Basrah was a step back. Here, on the ground, I never would have believed that story could have been sold in the first place. Here, everyone's wishing they could go to Basrah, to consolidate and exploit the success, the success of the Iraqi operation. Everyone's congratulating the Iraqi Security Forces, marveling at their performance, so much better than the somewhat dismal expectations. Jaysh al-Mahdi are wounded, scattered, and thoroughly disenheartened. This was supposed to be JAM's great last stand, and it fizzled in a heartbreakingly undramatic fashion.

And really, what exactly would it have taken for this to be called a victory by those determined to see defeat? The Shatt-al-Arab flowing red with the blood of JAM and their supporters? Any victory decisive enough to be named a victory would have been decried as an atrocity. The biggest stumbling block to understanding this part of Iraq is identifying JAM and its loosely associated militias solely as a religio-political movement, when their day-to-day activities are far more concerned with good old Mammon. Basrah is (and has forever been) a smugglers' den. Will there continue to be well-armed, politically connected gangs operating organized crime rings in the Basrah area for generations? Probably. They've been there for centuries. That doesn't mean there's no road forward; Italy manages, after all.

Moving

There's a bit of a housing crunch on our base right at the moment, so the garrison command has changed the housing policy to help consolidate rooms in some living areas (LAs) that were well below capacity. As the KBR billeting employee put it, "there's a lot of people who thought they were somebody finding out that now they're somebody who's got a roommate". Heh heh. The upshot is that I'm moving a few rows down the LA, so it might be a few days before I can get internet set up over there. We'll just have to see.

PSA-TV

My roommate finally found the correct cord to connect the cable feed to our tiny TV, so we can now enjoy the 11 channels of the Armed Forces Network. It's really not bad, there are two movie channels, sports, news, two 'prime' TV channels, etc. And all the programming is perfectly normal TV, just licensed and cobbled together. So AFN News, for example, will switch between CNN, Fox, MSNBC, and others over the course of the day. I believe this is supposed to be based on the popularity of various shows by timeslot, but I know it gets more political than that. The most interesting part of AFN, however, is not the programming, but the commercials. See, network programming doesn't come with commercials; those are added by the local broadcaster. But AFN, being an agency of the Department of Defense, doesn't need the sponsorship, so the commercial breaks are filled with in-house Public Service Announcements covering just about every aspect of military life. Practice Fire Safety. Call Your Family. Get Tax Help. Respect Local Cultures. Mind Portion Size. Maintain Operational Security. Wear Your Bike Helmet. And my absolute favorite, a PSA about respecting local mores by dressing conservatively which carries the tagline, "because dressing appropriately is always in style".