And now a word from our soldier...

I sent the questions below (in italics) to Ed with the hope of posting his responses for the five year anniversary. He's been pretty busy, but finally got back to us. Just a reminder, these are Ed's personal opinions and do not in any way reflect official DOD thoughts or policies. It's a pretty long post, so without further ado, let's hear from our guy in the desert....

Before going to Iraq you read a lot of books about the errors made during the run-up to war (Fiasco, Cobra II, Bush's War, etc). Having served with the military for seven months in Iraq do you feel that there is a better understanding now, five years on, among the military and/or war architects in Washington of the Iraqi culture and the challenges inherent in building democracy in a country without a tradition of civil society?

In some ways that’s a tough question to answer, in other ways it’s pretty easy. Among people in the military I’d say there is a much better understanding of, at the least, how important understanding the culture is to our efforts. As to whether we actually do understand their culture, well, we understand it better than we did 5 years ago but certainly not as well as I would like. Also, there is definitely a growing realization that this is going to take “a long time." No quick fix, no easy victory, none of the other BS that was used to sell this thing in the beginning.

As for the architects of the war, I can’t answer for them but it doesn’t seem like they really know what to do any better now than they did in late 2002. Incidentally, it was easy to see how little understanding the knuckleheads that got us into this mess had of what they were doing when Wolfowitz poo pooed Shinseki saying it was “… hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and to secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.”

Defeating Saddam’s army was never in doubt, they were using tanks that in some cases were 40 to 50 years old, could only shoot about a kilometer and couldn’t shoot accurately and move at the same time. Our M1 Abrams tank can shoot about 3km and can shoot accurately while doing about 50mph. They had no air force really to speak of, so we had air superiority from the get go, and the array of weapons we have available on air platforms to blow things into little pieces is simply mind boggling. In a sense the invasion wasn’t really a fight, it was a slaughter. Beer math for the conventional fight coming in: our 3 divisions in the invasion were “worth” roughly 9-10 of Saddam’s in a straight fight, but we took out the command and control capacity for his army so they were never able to function as a single unit, it more degenerated into a series of engagements where all of our forces were able to gang up on his a little at a time and chew his army up piecemeal. Plus we weren’t seeking to destroy his army, only to push through the part that was standing between us and Baghdad so we could take the capital and the seat of government. Thus the 160K or so we invaded with was plenty to defeat S.H.’s army.

Insurgencies however are completely different. They take away many of the advantages stronger armies have for conventional fights: air power, long range weapons, sheer numbers, etc which is why outmatched armies often resort to them rather than go toe to toe and get killed. Beer math for counter insurgency (COIN in military speak) in general: 1 trained insurgent can keep about 10 conventional soldiers occupied. Beer math over here: 25 million people, if only 1/10 of 1% are insurgents, that’s what 25,000 insurgents which means we’d need what 250,000 soldiers JUST TO PURSUE INSURGENTS.

It’s not like the possibility of an insurgency rising from the ashes of post Saddam Iraq was anything unknown in the military. A retired marine Colonel was commissioned in the 90’s to conduct a study of “what future conflicts might look like” and his conclusion was that since our conventional army could basically beat the poo out of any other army on the planet, no one was going to be stupid enough to engage in a conventional fight with us, and so any fight we got involved in would devolve into an insurgency. Plus when in history has a western power occupied an Arab country and NOT had an insurgency develop? Yeah, Wolfie was right, that was pretty hard to imagine… (yes that was my sarcastic voice).

Oh, another gem from Wolfowitz: “There are other differences that suggest that peacekeeping requirements in Iraq might be much lower than historical experience in the Balkans suggests. There's been none of the record in Iraq of ethnic militias fighting one another that produced so much bloodshed and permanent scars in Bosnia, along with a continuing requirement for large peacekeeping forces to separate those militias.” Thankfully this particular knucklehead has been moved to someplace where he doesn’t have an army to play with.

On February 28th of this year, Angelia Jolie wrote in the Washington Post of the humanitarian crisis facing the Iraqi people, particularly the millions of people internally displaced or who are refugees in countries like Jordan and Syria. She argued that we, meaning the United States, "not only have a moral obligation to help displaced Iraqi families, but also a serious, long-term, national security interest in ending this crisis." Despite opposing the initial invasion, you volunteered to serve because you felt similarly. Do you still think we have a moral obligation and/or a national security interest to stay in Iraq?

The national security question is easy to answer: we most definitely have a national security interest in stability in the Middle East. IMHO, stability in the Middle East is better served by us staying in Iraq. To be sure, staying sucks, but leaving I think would suck more. As far as a “moral obligation” I think we do but only to the extent that we actually can do anything. To paraphrase, we are only morally obligated to help if there is actually something we can do that will in fact help. In the end, we can’t force these people to get along and stop killing each other, so if it turns out that ultimately they are unwilling to do so, we should leave and do what we can to contain the mess. The best thing I think we could do to help right now tho would be to stabilize their country so they can come home.

You arrived in Iraq during the deadliest months of 2007 - both for Iraqi civilians and American soldiers. Aside from the decline in violence, what are some of the other changes you have seen or heard about from other soldiers during your seven months in Iraq?

The first obvious change is that there is something of a (small but real) feeling of hope among people who have been here one or two (or three…) times before, that we’re starting to get the COIN fight right and that given time we actually might be able to stabilize the country enough to keep it from exploding/imploding when we leave/drawdown. Unfortunately, there is also a growing recognition that we probably don’t have the time to do so. Or, more to the point, we won’t be able to keep enough soldiers here for long enough to actually do the things we need to do. Which leads me to another growing realization: while we won’t have 140K soldiers in Iraq for much longer, many people in the military think we’ll have a presence here of maybe 30-40K for about the next, oh, 50 years or so. Sort of like Korea. People make jokes now about their kids and grandkids serving over here. Further, we have acknowledged reality to an extent in that we realized (gasp!!) Iraq is regionally and tribally oriented so we should work within that system and work politically from the bottom up instead of deciding to impose stuff from the top down.

Finally, I hope that the military at least has realized the danger of deferring too much to ideological nutbars when it comes to military matters. Granted, the lines of authority between civilian and military are pretty clear in the Constitution, but the next time some political hack wants to prove how smart he is by second guessing professional military men (or professional diplomats, or professional intel analysts, or professional interrogators, or military lawyers, or scientists, or, well, you get the idea), my expectation (blind unfounded hope???) is that the generals will successively resign rather than go along. Most of the problems we are having now are a direct result of not invading with enough forces to establish security from the get go, and what can’t be attributed to having too few forces can generally be attributed to putting ideological knuckleheads in positions of authority instead of people with, I don’t know, maybe actual qualifications.

As an example of what I’m talking about (but by no means the only example), FRONTLINE did a special on the invasion/early occupation of Iraq and they interviewed an Army Colonel who was put in charge from the military side of standing up a new Iraqi Police force. This man had ~ 30 years of experience in the military, in project management, in positions of responsibility and leadership. You know, someone actually qualified to take on a project of this magnitude. His civilian counterpart (boss actually, since the civilians were in charge) - a 22 year-old college student whose only “qualification” was that he was in his local college Republican Party. As he explained to the Colonel tho, it was ok that he didn’t have much experience because he brought along a few of his frat brothers to help, and they were all very close and worked well together. Well I certainly feel better knowing that. (Again, that was my sarcastic voice) I still shake my head in awe of the sheer arrogance, idiocy, and hubris of the …people…who got us into this.

Of course, some are also starting to realize that, even if we can “stabilize” the country and can open the way for representative democracy, that may not necessarily be a good thing. Hamas coming to power in Gaza, Hitler, Bush, Ahmadinejad, Musharraf, they all were to varying degrees products of democracies. To paraphrase a certain SECDEF we all know and love, free people are free to do bad things, and I’ve got a gut feeling that the first few govt’s that are elected here without our interference/involvement/presence are not going to be govt’s we’re going to like. There is simply no moderating vast squishy middle class here as there is in the US (and even with that vast moderating middle class we still manage to elect unqualified nutbars), and it seems like the population is dividing into more extreme, sectarian, fundamentalist groups as time goes by.

It will take a great deal of discipline on our part to not make things worse by meddling when/if the day comes that someone like Moqtada Sadr comes to power, as we did when Hamas was elected in Gaza. In the end, I can imagine what the Iraqis want almost more than anything right now is just to feel safe, and they’ll probably accept any govt that can give them that. In my more pessimistic days I think all we’re going to get for our efforts will be to trade a secular distasteful dictator who nevertheless served as a convenient buffer for Iran, for a fundamentalist Shi’a theocracy with strong ties to Iran, a stronger (probably nuclear) Iran in general, an oppressed (maybe violently so) Sunni minority, with further destabilizing implications for the Middle East, and a more dangerous situation for Israel.

But then I look a little more long term and think, if the Iraqis get used to representative govt, if it actually lasts for a few decades w/out falling to a military or religious coup, and they get their economy up and running which will help them develop that moderating vast squishy middle, 30 or 40 years from now Iraq could actually be a decent place. (Of course it’s still annoying to think that, if we were willing to spend 40 years and several trillion dollars on a nation building/democracy spreading experiment when there are any number of places where we would have had much better chances of success than here, but that isn’t really helpful in figuring out what to do now). The challenges in getting this right are mind boggling: there is practically no banking system, not much of an economy and what there is is fragmented regionally. Security remains, uh, problematic, Iraq will need massive investment in its education system to help develop that moderate middle class, there still hasn’t been much in they way of sectarian reconciliation, corruption is practically a way of life, the infrastructure reconstruction needs are incredible, I could go on but I think you get the idea.

Also, while we are starting to get some things “right” with respect to counterinsurgency, some things we continue to muck up. For example, our own COIN doctrine calls for a ratio of 1 soldier for every 20 civilians, which would mean something like 1.25 million soldiers running around Iraq. The only way to do that would be to mobilize everyone and send them over here for the duration or to bring on a draft. Neither is going to happen, so we’ll keep plodding along without enough troops to really do the job right (there are places in Iraq where, 5 years into this, US soldiers have still never been) even tho one of the things the surge did that no one seems to have picked up on was prove the equation “more troops = better security”. So instead we play whack –a–mole and come up with nifty new doctrines to explain what we’re doing: Clear, Hold, Build; the Inkblot Theory; etc etc. Another example, people in my profession (Public Affairs) continue to think you guys actually still believe everything (anything??) we say. My boss put together an editorial that not only had as its first sentence “We have reached a turning point in Iraq” but also included such favorites as “The brutality of AQI’s latest attacks demonstrates their desperation as they are defeated in Iraq.” Uh, yeah. I thought I’d convinced them that saying stuff like that makes us look like utter nincompoops, apparently I was wrong.

You are missing one of the most exciting primary seasons in recent U.S. history. Regardless of which Democratic candidate wins, it will be a first. Voters are turning out in record numbers, because they are excited about the candidates and because, for the first time for many, their votes in the primaries actually count! Are you sad, happy, or indifferent to be missing out on this event? You missed voting in the California primary, but are you following the primary close enough to have a preferred candidate?

Not really following the primary. Honestly, I’m actually glad to be missing it. Don’t have to listen to the latest mud slinging on the news or be subjected to 57,000 political ads every day. If I want to learn more about a candidate I can look into them on my own w/out being force fed their latest talking points (crafted, as luck would have it, by someone like me working for the campaign). Just to point out tho, regardless who wins, this will be a race for the record books. We’ll either get the first woman, the first black, or the oldest president. I do find it interesting that Florida and Michigan were told their delegates wouldn’t count if they moved their primaries, they went ahead and did it anyway, and now they are whining about their delegates not counting. This certainly won’t do anything to alleviate the perception among many independent voters that liberals are a bunch of whiners who can’t be bothered to follow the rules.

Your unit is scheduled to be home in a little less than two months. What are you most looking forward to?

Two things immediately come to mind: being able to eat what I want instead of what comes up in the meal rotation, and not having to hear and smell other people taking a crap in the morning when I’m brushing my teeth. Also, I’m interested to see how long it takes me to go from thinking working “only” a 40 hour week would be a vacation (normal is 12+ hours/7 days a week) to being a drag. Mostly tho I’m looking forward to not having to write guidance for what to tell reporters when our soldiers die. Right now I’m working on putting together some hypothetical Q&As for an incident where one of our soldiers accidentally shot one of his own men in the ass in the middle of a firefight at night. In the movies that might have been something they could have laughed about in 20 years or so. Unfortunately, due to a huge measure of extraordinarily bad luck that one shot severed both the guy’s iliac arteries and one femoral artery so he bled out, in the dark, in a ditch, alone (he got separated from his buddies). Like many other things about the last 5 years, the only thing I can think to say is: tragic.

You went over because you wanted to help. Although that's not a particularly well-defined or measurable goal, do you feel that going over there has made a difference - either for you, for your unit and/or to the larger war effort?

That’s not exactly true. I picked this job in particular because I wanted to help tell the story of the soldiers over here. I couldn’t quite get behind the war effort enough to put myself into a position to kill for it, but I wanted to “do something”. This was the compromise I came up with. In the sense that I’ve done what I set out to do I was successful, but looking back I’m not sure I made the right choice. I think I would have been happier and felt like I’d accomplished more if I’d taken a job that had more of a direct impact, although that would have put my ass in danger more often so I’m sure my family would have liked it a whole lot less.

Anything else?

The situation over here is neither as bad as the left seems to think nor as rosy as the right believes. The surge did work to an extent, security has improved, markets are reopening, life in many places is getting somewhat back to “normal”, but it also failed in that the Iraqi gov’t didn’t take advantage of the decrease in violence to make any meaningful political progress (as if a couple months of “only” 50 or so people dying every day vs 100 was really going to be enough to jumpstart the political process, especially after 30 years of violent oppression during Saddam). The real problem, from the Iraqi side of the equation, as it has been from the beginning, is getting these people to voluntarily agree to stop killing each other and to work together to form a country, without a dictator forcing them to. The problem from our side is that we have never committed the resources necessary to do this right, in terms of soldiers, diplomats, or national will, and that of course can be laid at the feet of the guy what got us into this mess in the first place.

Last thing I’d like to say: My replacement will be here in 3 weeks. (Big Shit Eatin’ Grin)