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| Interviewer: | Bernard Gwertzman, Consulting Editor |
|---|---|
| Interviewee: | Anthony H. Cordesman, Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy, the Center for International and Strategic Studies in Washington |
June 30, 2005
Anthony H. Cordesman has just returned from a two-week fact-finding trip to Iraq. He reports that there has been “a great deal of progress” in improving Iraqi military capabilities, but argues that much more emphasis must be placed on political and economic areas. “I think what we’re talking about is an inclusive government that finds a way to share power so that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds feel secure and find ways to distribute the nation’s oil wealth.”
Asked about President Bush’s June 28 speech, Cordesman says, “What the president did not touch on at all is the fact that the economic effort is an almost total failure. We talk about the number of projects we started and we brag about a few completions, but we’ve had almost no real impact on the overall economy.”
Cordesman, who holds the Arleigh A. Burke chair in strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington, was interviewed by Bernard Gwertzman, consulting editor of cfr.org, on June 30, 2005.
You’ve just returned from a two-week trip to Iraq. What is your impression of the progress being made toward an Iraqi military force that’s capable of stabilizing the country?
I think a great deal of progress is being made. But one issue, which people who are not familiar with the military need to understand, is that this takes time. The effort didn’t really begin until July 2004. There were no meaningful efforts made under the CPA [Coalition Provisional Authority], and the police efforts, which are just as important as the military efforts, have lagged behind.
Put this in perspective. There was one operational regular army battalion in July 2004. Now, with the reorganization of the assistance effort, they were up to 27 battalions by January and 37 battalions by June. You had a handful of useful National Guard and special police battalions last summer, and now you’re up to more than 27 battalion equivalents. You’ve created things like SWAT teams, personal-protection forces, and many of the advanced police elements that are needed, but most of these are going to require at least a year or more to fill out in terms of proper training and gaining some kind of experience.
When we talk about the total forces here, we’re talking well over 100 battalion equivalents. Those are about 700 men each. That’s a large force, but most of that force is just beginning to acquire mission capability, and only about 20 percent of it has significant, though limited, mission capability for more demanding roles.
What is the force level now?
Whenever anybody talks about total manpower in the military, unless they’re talking manpower in policy and recruiting, it’s a sure sign they haven’t the faintest idea of what they’re talking about. If you look at this on paper, there are about 160,000 people who can be described as trained and equipped. That doesn’t tell you anything about mission capability. Out of between 100 and 130 battalion equivalents, you probably have something on the order of 10 battalion equivalents with significant mission capability—but they don’t have artillery, they don’t have armor, they don’t have support, and they don’t have air power. So obviously, these are not units who can take on first-line missions without coalition help.
You have another 20 to 30 battalions that can play a very significant security role and that over time are going to reduce the strain on U.S. forces and coalition forces and allow some of those to be withdrawn. But we’re talking about a process that isn’t going to really be critical mass, in terms of deployed forces, until sometime in 2006. For it to be completed, we’re talking about sometime in 2007. And then it isn’t going to have all the fire power, support, and air power to deal with a major insurgency, if this continues.
Does that presuppose the U.S. force level will remain about what it is now?
No, not at all. As Iraqi forces come on line, in many areas they should be able to replace coalition forces, which obviously are dominated by U.S. forces, with British, Italian, and Australian forces involved in significant numbers. You also aren’t just talking troops. A lot of what’s needed in counterinsurgency is to have Iraqi government elements, such as Iraqi police, that can protect areas and provide day-to-day security with lighter special police units so people don’t constantly see military forces in the field.
Where it’s at all possible, you want Iraqi troops because they speak the language, they know the culture, and they will help make the government inclusive and legitimate in Iraqi eyes. Those troops will probably move in over time, but nobody, at this point, can tell you when those numbers will be enough to start to reduce U.S.-Coalition forces by 10,000-to-20,000 troop [increments]. There is no way to establish any kind of calendar or deadline, and any effort to do so isn’t going to motivate anybody. It’s simply going to break up the effort of improving the Iraqi forces’ quality. We’ll go back to having Iraqi force quantity without capability.
That’s basically the administration view. The other night, the president essentially said, “We’re in there until we don’t need to be there,” right?
The president made two other peculiar statements. One, he focused on foreign insurgents, which are probably about 5 percent of the problem, although the most bloody and visible part of the problem. This is a national insurgency. Ninety percent or more of the people involved are Iraqi, and they’re not Islamist extremists or terrorists. There has to be a political solution. No matter what happens, neither our forces nor the Iraqi forces could win in terms of sheer force; that means there has to be an inclusive government. It means finding ways to deal with the economic and political dimension, not just the military. The other thing he implied was that the three new measures he outlined—embedding U.S. advisers in Iraqi units, having Iraqi units fight along with coalition units, and organizing counterinsurgency resources --were new. In fact, most of those measures were at least a year old, and embedding U.S. advisers in Iraqi units was a result of the General [Gary] Luck mission in January. Nothing the president described as new was actually new.
But his general strategic policy agrees with yours?
No, it doesn’t. The president tied all of this to 9/11, to outside threats, and to Islamists. He didn’t say a word about the problems of the risk of civil war between Shiite and Sunni, or Arab and Kurd, which everyone in Iraq sees as the critical problem at this point. He talked about the level of effort and he talked about total withdrawal of U.S. forces. But at this point, there really aren’t any plans to accomplish that, because you aren’t going to be providing the heavy weapons or the air power or the level of support for Iraqi forces under current demands to make a total withdrawal possible.
Did you find on your visit to Iraq that senior American and Iraqi officials recognize the need for a political settlement?
I think what we’re talking about is an inclusive government that finds a way to share power so that Sunnis, Shiites, and Kurds feel secure and find ways to distribute the nation’s oil wealth. And yes, the senior political leaders and the new government understand that, and the U.S. Embassy is making a major effort to support this. You’ve had visits from the secretary of state, the secretary of defense, the deputy secretary of state, who tried to encourage this kind of inclusiveness, to have the constitutional process be inclusive, and all of these efforts are having a very major effect.
But the problem is that the Iraqis who have this kind of vision at the top, and they include key religious figures like [Grand Ayatollah Ali] al-Sistani, are not always the people who are out in the field. There are certainly Shiites who want revenge, there are Kurds who want independence, and there are Sunnis who don’t want to give up the power and influence their minority has had throughout Iraq’s existence. There is violence going on, there probably are Shiite elements killing Sunnis. There are certainly Sunnis killing Shiites and Kurds, trying to stop the government from operating and breaking up the political process. One of the key targets of the Islamist extremists is the kind of car bombing and suicide bombings, which are deliberately designed to provoke something approaching civil war. Now this is a real risk, even though these insurgents are fairly limited in number. Do people at the top have the right goals? Yes. Is it clear that Iraq can avoid civil war, or certainly the kinds of internal violence that will make a constitution and election very difficult? No. That’s at least the 50/50 risk.
Who are the leaders of the Sunni insurrection? Do the people in Iraq know who these people are?
No. And one of the problems here is that the most visible groups are the Islamist extremists, particularly the ones under [Abu Musab] al-Zarqawi. About 50 Sunni groups have claimed to have an identity in the insurgency. There are other Sunni groups, which are in association with the clergy—which is not supporting the insurrection but has at least some claim to being the leader of the Sunni community. You have secular Sunnis who are in the government, and it’s important to note that about a third to 40 percent of the commanders of Iraq’s forces—particularly the top commanders—are Sunnis. This is not a Shiite and Kurdish force versus a Sunni force, although some of the dominant battalions are largely Kurdish or Shiite.
One problem we have is, because this is so complex and unstable, because so many of these movements rely on cells or groups that are almost franchised, we keep looking for easy dominant themes that really don’t exist in the field. There is definitely a very dangerous element supported by [Osama] bin Laden, supported by other religious extremists, largely neo-Salafist, that rejects the legitimacy of Shiites as Muslims and the West and secular values. There is certainly a group of ex-Baathists, some of them tied to Saddam’s [Hussein] inner circle and even his family, that have some kind of sanctuary, or at least a source of money and operations in Syria. But a lot of this is basically a matter of cadres, which have somewhat different goals and objectives, supported by financers and organizers that don’t have a clear central direction. But very large numbers of sympathizers, with some kind of support from Sunni criminal elements, often have the ability to buy young men in areas where unemployment is 40 to 60 percent of the population of Iraqis under 25.
What is your suggestion on how to proceed?
The effort to move toward an inclusive government, to have the elections, to make the constitution work, is absolutely critical. At this point, we can’t reinvent that process. All we can do is try to help the Iraqis make it work. Their success is fundamentally up to them. In terms of force-building, I think the key message—the one the president didn’t give—is that we still have several years before the Iraqis will be ready. There are going to be thousands more Americans killed and wounded and tens of thousands more Iraqis. We’re going to be spending $4 billion to $7 billion a month for at least another year on average, so there’s a major financial sacrifice, and most of that money has to go to the police and security.
What the president did not touch on at all is the fact that the economic effort is an almost total failure. We talk about the number of projects we started and we brag about a few completions, but we’ve had almost no real impact on the overall economy. There’s profiteering, there’s money flowing in from the aid process, but probably only 40 percent of that aid, at most, is getting to the Iraqis, and most of it in the wrong areas, where there’s profiteering rather than real success. We haven’t seen progress in creating an effective oil industry.
Basically, there is so much effort going into defending the existing structure that no real improvement has been made; renovation hasn’t taken place. We’ve demonstrated rather conclusively that the United States has almost no real capability for nation-building in terms of an effective aid effort, whether it’s run by the State Department or the military. One of the most important [goals] is to take money out of the hands of the U.S. government in Washington, out of the hands of U.S. and foreign contractors and put it into the hands of the Iraqi government so it takes responsibility for its actions and does the planning. We should vet it, and we should worry about corruption. But the clear warning here is that we don’t know what we’re doing with something this large in a country of 27 million people. Whether the Iraqis do or not, putting the money in their hands will at least do something to stabilize Iraq.
You seem rather gloomy about the prospects.
I’m not gloomy. I think the problem is that there this is a major ongoing counterinsurgency campaign. A lot of the measures we’re taking are early on. We don’t know how well the Iraqi political process will do, although we can influence it and there’s a good chance of success. We’ve corrected most of the problems in the military, the special police, and police effort. The U.S. military has done an outstanding job.
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