ISG Report Runs Counter To Military Assessment

Count me among those who aren't surprised at all by the fact that members of the military find the Iraq Study Group recommendations run counter to their experience and own assessments.

Military experts say there are several difficulties with the panel’s recommendation. First, it underestimates the challenge of building a capable Iraqi security force. After several years of desultory efforts, the United States has taken steps to upgrade and better prepare the teams of American advisers who are assigned to Iraqi units. But training the Iraqi Army is more than a matter of teaching combat skills. It requires transforming the character of the force.

“The new Iraqi Army will need years to become equal to the challenge posed by a persistent insurgency and terrorist threat,” Lt. Col. Carl D. Grunow, a former military adviser, wrote in a recent issue of Military Review, a journal published by the United States Army.

One big problem, Colonel Grunow notes, is that the Iraqi military is not proficient in counterinsurgency operations or sufficiently sensitive to the risk of civilian casualties.

“They are still fighting their last war, the high-intensity Iran-Iraq war of the 1980s, a war with clear battle lines fought with mass military formations, and one in which civilians on the battlefield were a nuisance, and not a center of gravity,” he wrote. The Iraqi military, he added, “must learn to fight using strategies and tactics far different than those used in the past.”

One could expand this to note that the Left in this nation is fighting the war in Iraq as though it is Vietnam, though the consequences of failure will be just as devastating as cutting and running from Vietnam (more than 2 million killed, millions more displaced, and harsh imposition of Communist policies that only 30+ years later are being reversed).

The ISG lacked military input, despite having some military advisors providing some input. There were no generals in the group, which was dominated by diplomat and lawyer types. The document they produced was a diplomatic paper, which could provide political cover, and even there it falls short considering that it manages to piss off the Iraqis who are trying to get things straightened out under fire.

Another problem is that withdrawing troops could accelerate attacks - a feedback loop between attacks and US withdrawals, resulting in the terrorists and insurgents achieving a victory without having conquered the field of battle. The media and political dimensions of this conflict have been seriously distorted. The consequences of failure are not sufficiently tangible for people to recognize what would happen.

Yet, the ISG does not provide a template for victory. Indeed, the document doesn't even mention the term victory. That's curious in and of itself.

The situation remains quite fluid and the media has done a poor job reporting on successes and changes in the situation - including in the restive Anbar province.

Meanwhile, the media continues to refer to the ISG as a realist manifesto, which is utter bunk. This is not realism, but a psuedorealism that does not take into account the Iranian and Syrian endgames. Nor does it deal with the fact that negotiations will not deter either nation's designs for Iraq or the region at large.

Further, McCain and Giuliani both dispute the need to link the Iraq situation with the Palestinian-Israeli conflicts. They are separate and should not be linked unless you are willing to concede that the state sponsors of terrorism - Syria and Iran must be held to account for their trechery and their leaders deposed because of the violence spawned by their terror proxies. Since the ISG report has no intention of inflicting punishment on those who actually oppose the US and threaten US interests and those of our allies, it should be a nonstarter.

UPDATE:
These are the members of the ISG - not a general among them: James A. Baker, III, and Lee H. Hamilton, Co-Chairs, Lawrence S. Eagleburger, Vernon E. Jordan, Jr., Edwin Meese III, Sandra Day O’Connor, Leon E. Panetta, William J. Perry, Charles S. Robb, Alan K. Simpson. Former senators, a former supreme court justice, and a former secretary of defense. That's the closest you get to someone with military experience in the bunch. That is wholly inadequate and insufficient if you are trying to deduce a strategy to win the conflict in Iraq. This is why so many on the right would say that this is a document designed to cut and run gracefully or that it is a complete nonstarter because so many of the recommendations are predicated upon negotiating with the very entities that are the cause of so much of the violence in the region and who have no reason to fear the consequences a US response to their actions.

UPDATE:
As if to reinforce my point about the uselessness of the ISG report for anything other than for Democrat and terrorist talking points, TF Boggs offers up his view from Mosul (that's in Iraq and yes, he's military):

We cannot appease our enemies and we cannot continue to cut and run when the going gets tough. As it stands in the world right now our enemies view America as a country full of queasy people who are inclined to cut and run when things take a turn for the worse. Just as the Tet Offensive was the victory that led to our failure in Vietnam our victories in Iraq now are leading to our failure in the Middle East. How many more times must we fight to fail? I feel like all of my efforts (30 months of deployment time) and the efforts of all my brothers in arms are all for naught. I thought old people were supposed to be more patient than a 24 year old but apparently I have more patience for our victory to unfold in Iraq than 99.9 percent of Americans. Iraq isn’t fast food-you can’t have what you want and have it now. To completely change a country for the first time in it’s entire history takes time, and when I say time I don’t mean 4 years.

Confederate Yankee distills the point further: Either you kill the terrorists or you appease them. The ISG manages to claim to do both, but in reality pushes us closer to the latter through negotiating with the very regimes that sponsor the terrorism in the first place.

The New York Post doesn't mince words either. They call the ISG report and Baker/Hamilton nothing more than surrender monkeys. "Peace with honor" and all that crap is nothing more than putting a cheery slogan on a defeat for want of willpower to see a difficult task through to completion. The Post's lede sums things up:

The Iraq Study Group report delivered to President Bush yesterday contains 79 separate recommendations - but not one that explains how American forces can defeat the terrorist insurgents, only ways to bring the troops home.

Donald Sensing takes a closer look at the Baker/Hamilton presser and notes that their desire to produce a uninamous report shows a lack of critical thinking and that the report is riddled with contradictions, not the least of which is that Baker is simply trying to resuscitate his old Middle East plans, which worked out so well the last time. The same problems are there, and Israel is in as bad or worse a position as it was then. Meanwhile, one of the critical assumption of the report - linking the Israel situation to Iraq is demonstrably false because if the situation in Israel suddenly disappeared (Israel destroyed and Palestinians running the show) the situation in Iraq would not change one iota - except that it might actually be worse as the jihadis would be emboldened to take even more harsh action than they are currently.

Ralph Peters also takes the ISG to task for not getting the motivations of those that are causing the violence and what withdrawing would mean. Lorie Byrd comments on the President's presser with British PM Tony Blair. She notes:

President said the violence in Iraq is not by accident or the result of faulty planning, but rather is a deliberate strategy of those in Iraq wishing to gain control by creating chaos.

Who is supporting those creating the chaos in Iraq? Syria and Iran.

For those who lambasted Rumsfeld and were happy to see him dispatched, here's an analysis that shows Rumsfeld to have been proven quite right on a number of fundamental issues and here (via Instapundit).

Also blogging: Wizbang, JammieWearingFool, Don Surber (and here), Wake Up America, and Flopping Aces.



Technorati: iraq, isg, iraq study group, bush, baker, terrorism.