Uncertain Future of Iraq
Keith_Indy on Apr 02 2008 at 12:04 pm | Filed under: Foreign affairs, Keith's Page, Military Matters
Fred and Kimberly Kagan have a decent analysis of what we do and don’t know about the situation in Iraq.
Just the highlights (as I see them)
Sphere: Related ContentDo Know
* The legitimate Government of Iraq and its legally-constituted security forces launched a security operation against illegal, foreign-backed, insurgent and criminal militias serving leaders who openly call for the defeat and humiliation of the United States and its allies in Iraq and throughout the region. We can be ambivalent about the political motivations of Maliki and his allies, but we cannot be ambivalent about the outcome of this combat between our open allies and our open enemies.
* The Sadrists and Special Groups failed to set Iraq alight despite their efforts–Iraqi forces kept the Five Cities area (Najaf, Karbala, Hillah, Diwaniyah, and Kut) under control with very little Coalition assistance; Iraqi and Coalition forces kept Baghdad under control.
* Sadr never moved to return to Iraq, ordered his forces to stop fighting without achieving anything, and further demonstrated his
dependence on (and control by) Iran.Don’t Know
* What was his (Maliki) precise aim? He continually spoke about fighting “criminal elements,” but then issued an ultimatum for the disarmament of all JAM (a task clearly beyond the means of the forces he sent to Basra).
* Did Maliki accept a deal with Sadr in return for his stand-down order and, if so, what was involved? We know what Sadr’s demands were (at least publicly), but he ordered his forces to stop fighting before Maliki publicly accepted his terms.
4 Responses to “Uncertain Future of Iraq”
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The Kagans are not reliable sources on Iraq. That they broke down the fighting in Basra to US/Good Guys vs. Iran/Bad Guys says as much. Both sides receive various levels of funding and support from Iran. They’re too simplistic.
Violence war is pretty simple. It is fog and friction that makes it seemingly very complex. People that study complexity will never be able to smooth the chaos of war into order. Studying complexity inevitably creates more of it.
The object towards dealing with complexity is to break it down to its fundamental orderly parts and principles. Sometimes you get it wrong, and then your side loses and gets hacked apart, but sometimes you also get it right.
In fact, amateurs when they look at violence or war, expect it to be complex and confusing. They think something is wrong if it isn’t. But nothing is wrong. When things are kept to the simplest model, via the KISS principle, things are going quite well actually.
Keith, you might be interested in reading Wolf Howling’s post on the same subject.
http://wolfhowling.blogspot.com/2008/04/assumptions-conclusions-about-sadr.html
I don’t think Wolf Howling is a very authoritative voice on the subject either. Ignore the rest of the partisan boilerplate, but look at this survey of coverage of the offensive in Basra: if the Iraqi army was facing, at the very best, a 4% desertion rate before the cease-fire was moderated by a man we consider an international terrorist, it’s tough to spin it in a really positive direction (he also admits to some other biases that I think fatally undermine his argument, like withdrawal carries infinite cost while continued occupation carried infinite benefit).
In fact, the more I read of it, the more I think Basra is demonstrating the stranglehold Iran already has on Iraqi politics: they go east, not west, when looking to settle their internal squabbles. That doesn’t bode well for us.