Who is US kidding?
US LEADERS continue to kid Americans about Iraq, and Americans kid themselves. General John Abizaid says the United States needs to get the violence under control in the next four to six months. Aside from the Vietnam-like repetition of a deadline for every US failure to date, followed by the next promise, his proposal for security in Iraq is flawed and unrealistic.
Abizaid wants to embed US trainers and military operators in the Iraqi security force to increase their effectiveness. Of course, that sounds familiar from Vietnam days. Don't we learn anything from history?
Problem one: timing. By the time the right US troops are found to embed and begin to be effective, if they can be, the four-to-six-month clock is up.
Problem two: cultural and linguistic knowledge (which has been a policy flaw for nearly four years). There aren't enough Arabic speakers in the military, so the military has to rely on translators. Time is lost as people simply try to understand each other. Worse, when the US military doesn't understand what is being said, it doesn't understand what is happening. And when what is happening in Arabic is in the hands of people who may work for the other side, the US military has permanently lost the edge. We are not inside the adversary's decision loop; he is inside ours.
Problem three: lack of experience. What do we know that we can teach to the Iraqi security forces? The Army has learned painfully, in Iraq and Afghanistan, that it is unprepared and untrained to fight irregular warfare. It has forgotten every lesson about the subject it learned in Vietnam. The new US military guidance on this subject is only just being finalized. Then the Army has to train forces to be able to train anyone else. Otherwise, it is just inventing tactics on the fly. Time's up before the United States has any effect on the Iraqi security forces.
Problem four: intelligence. The United States doesn't own intelligence in Iraq, and, with only a few specialists and linguists, it is challenged to develop it. So the United States depends on the Iraqi security and intelligence capabilities, not all of whom can be trusted to say what is really going on. Like the language problem, the United States depends on the kindness of strangers, in a very unkind setting.
Problem five: Who are the Iraqi security forces with which the military would be embedded? The problem is that the Iraqi security forces themselves are not a cohesive force, able to take on the militia. In too many cases, they are militia masquerading as a national security force, with, at best, divided loyalties. What is at risk for US forces if the regular warriors by day turn out to be the irregular warriors by night?
Abizaid's solution for Iraq is no solution at all. It sounds like a rhetorical Band-aid, designed for domestic political consumption, so Americans will think the United States is doing something in Iraq that can work. It is the triumph of hope, maybe deception, over experience. The fundamental problem is that the invasion and overthrow of the Iraqi government, distasteful as it was, unleashed forces in and around Iraq that the United States no longer controls, if it ever did. By disbanding the military and the governing bureaucracy, we let go of the very tools that might have ensured security.
The United States thrust itself into the security breach, with severe handicaps on its ability to provide that necessary ingredient of stability. It started training Iraqi military and security forces too late and executed that training as a crash program. That allowed the military to claim large numbers of trained Iraqis, many of whom were ghosts, or walked away from the job at the first sign of trouble. Many of the rest were militia -- the only semi-trained, semi-military force available.
Today, the forces in Iraq unleashed by the US invasion and inept occupation are driving events. Whatever is proposed in Washington has minimal hope of being implemented successfully in Iraq. The United States may be kidding itself, but it is not fooling the Iraqis, whether they are militia, insurgents, outside terrorists, or the government. Assertions by the administration that Americans need to "support our troops" or continue to seek "victory" are not solving the problem.
Hopefully, the Baker-Hamilton working group can produce policy and strategy ideas that allow the United States to make the prettiest and most successful picture of a withdrawal, before too many more Americans (and Iraqis) have paid the price.
Gordon Adams is a fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars and a professor at George Washington University. 
