Iraq: Reluctant to Set Benchmarks?
Even as President Bush asked Americans to brace themselves for sacrifices yet to come in Iraq, U.S. commanders on the ground are questioning the commitment of the Iraqi government itself–and the apparent disconnect between the wishes of the White House and the will of Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki.
That disconnect was brought into sharp relief this week as U.S. Ambassador to Iraq Zalmay Khalilzad issued assurances that, at Washington's urging, Maliki had agreed to set goals for confronting militias and reforming the militia-infiltrated Ministry of Interior.
Maliki promptly responded that he had done no such thing.
"This government represents the will of the people," he said, "and no one has a right to impose a timetable on it."
The White House fired back with a statement refuting the notion of any reluctance to set benchmarks, saying Maliki's comments had been taken out of context. It was clearly a sensitive subject. At a press conference Thursday Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld snapped that people should "just back off" calls for specific goals from a government still getting its bearings.
But in a month during which America has so far lost 96 troops–the most in a year–U.S. military officials on the ground in Iraq are beginning to think otherwise. What's more, they express growing frustration at the willingness of the Iraqi prime minister to talk tough–but only to Washington.
"We have every right to put a damn timeline on some stuff," says one senior military official in Baghdad. "If nothing else, it should create a sense of urgency–that's what I would hope."
All the discussion in Washington over "benchmarks," "timelines," and "timetables"–the political-linguistic battlefield–has only a distant relationship to what is going on in Iraq, where Maliki has yet to show he has the ability or the will to rein in even his ostensible allies.
One major issue is the reluctance of Maliki to confront Moqtada al-Sadr, the powerful anti-American Shiite cleric who has pledged to support the fledgling Iraqi government yet maintains his Mahdi Army, a militia that recently took over a town south of Baghdad and de facto controls Baghdad's Sadr City slums in the northeastern part of the city.
"Those kinds of contradictions need to be resolved," says Lt. Col. James Gavrilis, an Iraq planner who commanded a Special Forces unit there. "You cannot have someone say, 'Yes, I support your government,' then subverting it–or forcefully taking control."
Yet Maliki's leverage against Sadr is limited, to say the least. Sadr was instrumental in making Maliki prime minister, and the young firebrand cleric now controls five ministries and the largest voting bloc in the parliament. Expecting Maliki to crack down on Sadr may represent a misunderstanding of the power relationship. Officials point to a recent incident in which members of the Mahdi Army assassinated 13 Iraqi Army soldiers in Sadr City. Shortly afterward, a spokesman in the Ministry of Defense praised Sadr for his patriotism and the settling effect he has on Sadr City.
"I'm thinking, holy crap," says the U.S. military official in Baghdad. "I'd rather see Maliki make a choice and fail because it was a bad choice," he says. "It's just such a political minefield–it's really aggravating."
Maliki decried a raid conducted this week by American soldiers in Sadr City to search for a death squad commander–particularly since the prime minister has promised Sadr autonomy in exchange for political support. At his press conference, Bush seemed almost apologetic about the tensions stirred by the raid.
"The idea that we need to coordinate with [Maliki] makes sense to me," he said. "There's a lot of operations taking place, which means that sometimes communications may not be as good as they should be."
But such clarity is hard to come by in the broken city of Baghdad, where American officials are increasingly concerned about the slow pace with which Iraqi security forces are developing. Lt. Gen. James Thurman, commander of the 4th Infantry Division, responsible for security in Baghdad, has said that weeks after a request to bring 3,000 Iraqi troops to the capital to reinforce the security initiative, only a few hundred have arrived. Many Iraqi soldiers openly disobey orders to deploy to Baghdad, which has seen a 43 percent rise in violence since the summer and the death of some 2,660 Iraqis last month alone. Much of that violence–and the reluctance of Iraqi security forces to head to Baghdad–has to do with militias settling sectarian scores and what many see as the underequipping of Iraqi soldiers.
"If Iraqi security forces aren't as powerful as they guys that they're fighting, they're going to be squeamish," says Gavrilis.
The Ministry of the Interior's Shiite-dominated police units are infiltrated with death squads and need far more supervision than they're getting, says a senior Pentagon officer. American officials will soon be expanding the current program of some 3,600 embedded U.S. military advisers in Iraq, who work and live with Iraqi soldiers and police. The program has been criticized for not properly preparing U.S. soldiers and marines to train their Iraqi counterparts–and for not providing enough military personnel to do the job.
"Greater numbers of embeds would make a difference," says Gavrilis. "Supervision is one of the critical things in police training to stem militias."
To that end, Gen. George Casey, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, signaled this week that he may call for more troops to head to Baghdad—a move that may also involve increasing the overall level of U.S. troops in the country, currently at some 145,000, to build up Baghdad's basic infrastructure and security.
"Now, do we need more troops to do that?" said Casey. "Maybe."
Rumsfeld today rejected the notion that such a statement constituted a call for more troops.
But the deteriorating condition of the country raises the equally politically sensitive question of calling upon more National Guard and reserve soldiers–on the heels of the November elections–to bolster an Army and Marine Corps stretched to their limits. Such a call may include changing the rules by which guardsmen deploy, which currently involve two-year deployment caps.
"We would expect that shortly after elections the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] will come up with some kind of proposal that could run the gamut from the tolerable to the intolerable," says retired Brig. Gen. Stephen Koper, president of the National Guard Association of the United States. Such changes fall within the purview of the secretary to make, adds Koper, but could result in a "significant impact" on rates of volunteerism.
And that's a significant consideration for a president pushing Americans to support a war that is increasingly unpopular on the home front. As he made his case to the American people this week, Bush reiterated that Maliki has his support–as long as he has the stomach to make the tough choices. The United States is looking to establish benchmarks in a number of areas–including constitutional reform, sharing oil revenues, training of security forces–but Bush did not say what consequences would flow from failure to meet such goals.
In the meantime, U.S. military officials in Iraq express private frustration that Maliki continues to ride the fence–and country suffers the consequences.
"He's losing civilian support–it's a steady decline, partly because of inaction," says the American military official in Baghdad. And there as here–both in the streets of Baghdad and on American soil during an election year–the people are the prize.