Tag: military

Letter from a Marine in Iraq

IraqSlogger has linked to a letter from a US Marine stationed in Iraq — some excerpts:

Most Surreal Moment – Watching Marines arrive at my detention facility and unload a truck load of flex-cuffed midgets. 26 to be exact. We had put the word out earlier in the day to the Marines in Fallujah that we were looking for Bad Guy X, who was described as a midget. Little did I know that Fallujah was home to a small community of midgets, who banded together for support since they were considered as social outcasts. The Marines were anxious to get back to the midget colony to bring in the rest of the midget suspects, but I called off the search, figuring Bad Guy X was long gone on his short legs after seeing his companions rounded up by the giant infidels.

Coolest Insurgent Act – Stealing almost $7 million from the main bank in Ramadi in broad daylight, then, upon exiting, waving to the Marines in the combat outpost right next to the bank, who had no clue of what was going on. The Marines waved back. Too cool.

Best Chuck Norris Moment – 13 May. Bad Guys arrived at the government center in a small town to kidnap the mayor, since they have a problem with any form of government that does not include regular beheadings and women wearing burqahs. There were seven of them. As they brought the mayor out to put him in a pick-up truck to take him off to be beheaded (on video, as usual), one of the Bad Guys put down his machine gun so that he could tie the mayor’s hands. The mayor took the opportunity to pick up the machine gun and drill five of the Bad Guys. The other two ran away. One of the dead Bad Guys was on our top twenty wanted list. Like they say, you can’t fight City Hall.

Most Profound Man in Iraq – an unidentified farmer in a fairly remote area who, after being asked by Reconnaissance Marines if he had seen any foreign fighters in the area replied “Yes, you.”

Hizbullah at war

Frequent Arabist reader Andrew Exum has penned an interesting report for WINEP on Hizbullah’s military tactics and strategy in this summer’s war. Andrew eschews the politics of the war to focus on Hizbullah’s surprising military prowess, bringing the perspective of his experience with the US Special Forces in Afghanistan and Iraq. Most military accounts of the war have relied overwhelmingly on Israeli military sources — which is hardly surprising since they have made themselves much more available than Hizbullah’s military leaders, who probably prefer to lay low for obvious reasons — but Andrew did get some information from Lebanon. I particularly like his analysis of the impressive resistance encountered during Israel’s ground offensive:

Hizballah’s tenacity in the villages was, to this observer, the biggest surprise of the war. As has been mentioned already, the vast majority of the fighters who defended villages such as Ayta ash Shab, Bint Jbeil, and Maroun al-Ras were not, in fact, regular Hizballah fighters and in some cases were not even members of Hizballah. But they were men, in the words of one Lebanese observer, who were “defending their country in the most tangible sense—their shops, their homes, even their trees.”

All the same, the performance of the village units was exceptional. Their job—to slow and to bleed the IDF as much as possible—was carried out with both determination and skill. In Maroun al-Ras, nearby Bint Jbiel, and other villages, Hizballah made the IDF pay for every inch of ground that it took. At the same time, crucially, Hizballah dictated the rules of how the war was to be fought. Or as one observer put it, “This was a very good lesson in asymmetric warfare. This was not Israel imposing its battle on Hizballah but Hizballah imposing its battle on Israel.” The narrow village streets of southern Lebanon do not lend themselves to tank maneuver, so the IDF would have to fight with infantry supported by armor, artillery, and air power. This kind of fight negated many of the IDF’s natural advantages and forced the IDF ground forces to fight a very different kind of battle than the one for which they had trained.

So the heroes of this war were ordinary people — although probably with some past military/guerrilla experience — defending their villages. Elsewhere in the report Andrew posits that the most experienced Hizbullah fighters, further up country, did not even see that much action. In my mind this makes the Lebanese Army’s inaction even more shameful: once again, ordinary villagers in the south were abandoned into the hands of foreign invaders.

al-Yamama

The Guardian has an interesting backgrounder on the Saudi arms deal / Wafic Said / Maggie affair.

Update: Blair tries to explain why he is blocking the UK government’s inquiry into the BAE/Saudi scandal.

The prime minister, speaking to reporters in Brussels, said that allowing the inquiry to continue risked doing “immense damage” to UK interests. Britain has been accused of caving in to pressure from Saudi Arabia to stop the investigation into a multi-billion dollar defence deal with Riyadh. Shares in BAE have surged on the news.

Mr Blair appeared to concede that the threat to thousands of jobs from losing a prospective Saudi jet fighter contract had played a part in his thinking.

The prime minister’s official spokesman did not deny this was the case. However, he insisted that Lord Goldsmith, the attorney general, decided to end the inquiry on security grounds and because of uncertainty over whether the case would lead to a prosecution.

Call me a Saudi-basher if you will — I’ll gladly accept the title if you mean the al-Saud family — but it’s getting rather tiring seeing both Arab and Western governments being corrupted by Saudi Arabia’s wasteful spending.

Fish ‘n chips-eating surrender monkeys

This article from the NYT from Dec. 2 about a British initiative in Afghanistan’s Helmand province caught my eye. After fighting the Taliban in Musa Qala district, British forces “who had been under siege by the Taliban in a compound there for three months� brokered a ceasefire with Taliban forces and local government – and pulled out.

In the words of one Afghan lawmaker:

“The Musa Qala project has sent two messages: one, recognition for the enemy, and two, military defeat,” said Mustafa Qazemi, a member of Afghanistan’s Parliament and a former resistance fighter with the Northern Alliance, which fought the Taliban for seven years.

. . .

Some compare the deal to agreements that Pakistan has struck with leaders in its tribal areas along the Afghan border, which have given those territories more autonomy and, critics say, empowered the Taliban who have taken sanctuary there and allowed them to regroup.

What’s so interesting about this is that this is essentially what the British did in southern Iraq. They gave up. No one really likes to talk about it, and they are extremely difficult to embed with, but more and more people are starting to recognize that the one place coalition forces really suffered a defeat was in the south.

The Brits don’t patrol in Basra anymore, they largely just stay in their compound and get shelled every night. US bases get shelled too, but then they do something about it and the shelling stops.

Their most famous move was their abrupt withdrawal from Amara, capital of Maysan province, where they were rocketed every night by Mahdi militia. So with no warning to Iraqi authorities, they declared their mission in Amara complete, pulled out and “redeployed� to the Iranian border to conduct “World War II-style� desert patrol tactics. Somehow trying to turn a retreat into a evocation of the glories of the North Africa campaign.

The base in Amara, meanwhile was sacked by the Mahdi militia because Iraqi authorities hadn’t been given enough time to take control of it.

Since their departure, there have been pitched battles in Amara between Mahdi militia and police (who are controlled by the rival Badr Brigade Shiite militia).

Now don’t get me wrong, Iraq’s a tough place and each army has to make its decision about how to deal with it, but the British enjoy so much describing how they do everything better than the Americans.

In the beginning of their Basra occupation, they described how their years of experience occupying Northern Ireland made them expert at a light touch and winning the inhabitants’ trust.

Now, as they are talking about pulling out, the city is dangerous place awash in battles between rival militias and gangs making millions off the oil smuggling. The Brits just let them take over, and when it got too dangerous, they stopped leaving their base. And now they are leaving entirely.

In Afghanistan, when the fighting suddenly became hot. They appear to be doing the same thing.

So my question is, who are the real surrender monkeys?

More revolt among generals

It’s been a slowly growing movement for over three years now, but more and more recently retired military officers are speaking out in protest against US policy — and more specifically, about Iraq:

The dissenters include two generals who led combat troops in Iraq: Maj. Gen. Charles Swannack Jr., who commanded the 82nd Airborne Division, and Maj. Gen. John Batiste, who led the First Infantry Division (the “Big Red One”). These men recently sacrificed their careers by retiring and joining the public protest.

In late September Batiste, along with two other retired senior officers, spoke out about these failures at a Washington Democratic policy hearing, with Batiste saying Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was “not a competent wartime leader” who made “dismal strategic decisions” that “resulted in the unnecessary deaths of American servicemen and women, our allies and the good people of Iraq.” Rumsfeld, he said, “dismissed honest dissent” and “did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war.”

This kind of protest among senior military retirees during wartime is unprecedented in American history–and it is also deeply worrisome. The retired officers opposing the war and demanding Rumsfeld’s ouster represent a new political force, and therefore a potentially powerful factor in the future of our democracy. The former generals’ growing lobby could acquire a unique veto power in the future by publicly opposing reckless civilian warmaking in advance.

I keep hearing this kind of stuff more and more from people close to US military and foreign policy circles — but I’m afraid that the Nation hypes up exactly how much influence these people can have in a media news cycle much better handled by the White House than it was, say, in Nixon’s time.

Merchant of death

The Observer profiles Monzer al-Kassar, arms dealer extraordinaire. Someone needs to write a good book on arms dealers in the Middle East, some of the stories you hear are incredible. Said Aburish’s first book (unfortunately out-of-print, and considering its second-hand price now I can’t believe I’ve misplaced my copy) in the early 1980s was a very entertaining account of being a middleman in the region, but imagine what you could do if you added everyone since then. Khashoggi alone could be a book, and once you add all the Israeli, Egyptian, Syrian, etc. dealers you could basically have a parallel underground history of the Middle East. Of course not to forget their Western counterparts — people like Donald Rumsfeld who either facilitated arms deals as government defense officials or chairmen of corporations like Raytheon. Imagine that: an account of how Egyptian arms dealers with top government connections sold small arms to both sides of the Rwandan genocide, or Israeli arms dealers (including a very close friend of Ariel Sharon) sold weapons to South Africa’s Apartheid government and its various militias operating in southern Africa, or indeed how European companies, acting through Palestinian or Lebanese middlemen, sold all kinds of military systems to Saddam Hussein. This industry goes to the heart of virtually of every regime in the region.

Always look on the bright side of life

There’s a long article by Bob Woodward in the WaPo about the discrepancies between what the Bush administration knew was going on in Iraq from secret military reports and what was publicly being stated in upbeat presidential speeches and other public information. Here’s a bit from an interview with Jay Garner, the first military governor of Iraq:

On June 18, 2003, Jay Garner went to see Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to report on his brief tenure in Iraq as head of the postwar planning office. Throughout the invasion and the early days of the war, Garner, a retired Army lieutenant general, had struggled just to get his team into Iraq. Two days after he arrived, Rumsfeld called to tell him that L. Paul “Jerry” Bremer, a 61-year-old terrorism expert and protege of Henry A. Kissinger, would be coming over as the presidential envoy, effectively replacing Garner.

“We’ve made three tragic decisions,” Garner told Rumsfeld.

“Really?” Rumsfeld asked.

“Three terrible mistakes,” Garner said.

He cited the first two orders Bremer signed when he arrived, the first one banning as many as 50,000 members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party from government jobs and the second disbanding the Iraqi military. Now there were hundreds of thousands of disorganized, unemployed, armed Iraqis running around.

Third, Garner said, Bremer had summarily dismissed an interim Iraqi leadership group that had been eager to help the United States administer the country in the short term. “Jerry Bremer can’t be the face of the government to the Iraqi people. You’ve got to have an Iraqi face for the Iraqi people.”

Garner made his final point: “There’s still time to rectify this. There’s still time to turn it around.”

Rumsfeld looked at Garner for a moment with his take-no-prisoners gaze. “Well,” he said, “I don’t think there is anything we can do, because we are where we are.”

He thinks I’ve lost it, Garner thought. He thinks I’m absolutely wrong. Garner didn’t want it to sound like sour grapes, but facts were facts. “They’re all reversible,” Garner said again.

“We’re not going to go back,” Rumsfeld said emphatically.

Later that day, Garner went with Rumsfeld to the White House. But in a meeting with Bush, he made no mention of mistakes. Instead he regaled the president with stories from his time in Baghdad.

In an interview last December, I asked Garner if he had any regrets in not telling the president about his misgivings.

“You know, I don’t know if I had that moment to live over again, I don’t know if I’d do that or not. But if I had done that — and quite frankly, I mean, I wouldn’t have had a problem doing that — but in my thinking, the door’s closed. I mean, there’s nothing I can do to open this door again. And I think if I had said that to the president in front of Cheney and Condoleezza Rice and Rumsfeld in there, the president would have looked at them and they would have rolled their eyes back and he would have thought, ‘Boy, I wonder why we didn’t get rid of this guy sooner?’ “

“They didn’t see it coming,” Garner added. “As the troops said, they drank the Kool-Aid.”

There’s also some very interesting passages about the influence Henry Kissinger has had over Dick Cheney, notably pressing the argument that US troops should stick it out in Iraq and defeat the insurgency militarily before leaving. According to Woodward, Kissinger sees Iraq as another Vietnam, and thinks that Vietnam could have been won if the US had stayed longer. Senior military officials completely disagreed with this view, saying “we’ve got to get the fuck out.”

Finally, former White House Chief of Staff seems to have had a pretty accurate reading of the situation, even if he was unwilling to actually internalize it:

Card put it on the generals in the Pentagon and Iraq. If they had come forward and said to the president, “It’s not worth it,” or, “The mission can’t be accomplished,” Card was certain, the president would have said “I’m not going to ask another kid to sacrifice for it.”

Card was enough of a realist to see that there were two negative aspects to Bush’s public persona that had come to define his presidency: incompetence and arrogance. Card did not believe that Bush was incompetent, and so he had to face the possibility that, as Bush’s chief of staff, he might have been the incompetent one. In addition, he did not think the president was arrogant.

But the marketing of Bush had come across as arrogant. Maybe it was unfair in Card’s opinion, but there it was.

He was leaving. And the man he considered most responsible for the postwar troubles, the one who should have gone, Rumsfeld, was staying.

Even The Economist, which in 2002/2003 was largely pro-war and pro-Bush (and is now eating humble pie), had called for Rumsfeld to resign on its cover. One of the lessons of the Bush presidency will be that, as well as all the corruption, pork-barreling for big industry and ideological blindness, Bush’s personality will have been a key to his policy failures: he is a man unable to admit mistakes or consider that he may have been wrong. He confuses arrogance and groundless optimism with dogged resolve. You can imagine these meetings with the president, surrounded by his favorite yes-men, singing the Monty Python song “Always look on the bright side of life” in unison as they are delivered pessimistic report after pessimistic report from the uniformed professionals in Iraq. What a catastrophe.