Basra Relief
Britain plans to fire the entire 25,000-man police force in Southern Iraq and “replace it with a new military-style unit capable of maintaining law and order,” according to Defense Minister John Reid as reported in an excellent roundup item by Tom Regan of the Christian Science Monitor.
I have no love to spare for the Basra police. They are, as the Brits would say, rotters. However. Some things that seem pretty clear:
1. Iraqi sovereignty is a joke. The Brits appear to claim the authority to dissolve an entire branch of Iraqi government without veto by any Iraqi authority.
2. If firing the Iraqi Army was a mistake, as so many (not me) claim, because it put a large number of trained fighters into disgruntled unemployment, won’t the Basra move do the same?
3. What other real “ticking bomb scenarios” are out there? For two years, Basra and environs were universally reported as a success story. Remember the “fourteen of eighteen provinces are calm” days? All that time, local authority in Basra was rotting into a theocratic mafia. What other “good news” is going to become bad news?
4. The structural situation hasn’t changed. As a senior British officer quoted in the roundup put it:
“For far too long now we have been struggling to contain the situation with a brigade-sized force which is farcically small for the task it’s been given. We’ve done some bloody good things, but the truth is that we’ve also had to turn a blind eye to an awful lot of iffy behaviour from the militias – assassinations, graft, vote-fixing and so on.â€
Will the British Army be less farcically small going forward? No. Will the balance of power in Iraq be less in the hands of the militias and their chaplains than it has been? No. Do we have any reason to believe the second or third attempt to construct a professional security force for Southern Iraq will be more successful than the first? No.
Every now and then the fact that the war has gone pretty much as I predicted three years ago and I’m still, according to the official version, supposed to be this big crank grates a little.
Comment by matthew hogan —
September 27, 2005 @ 9:11 am
Reiterating my belief that all necesary political truths can be found somewhere in Orwell’s Notes on Nationalism, here’s the explanation of why one is a crank, or rather why the other side’s prognosticators are not considered such:
“It is curious to reflect that out of all the “experts” of all the schools, there was not a single one who was able to foresee so likely an event as the Russo-German Pact of 1939. . . . Political or military commentators, like astrologers, can survive almost any mistake, because their more devoted followers do not look to them for an appraisal of the facts but for the stimulation of nationalistic loyalties.”
http://www.resort.com/~prime8/Orwell/nationalism.html
Comment by Hesiod —
September 27, 2005 @ 10:17 am
Hey Jim,
Did you see that we (yet again) have killed/captured/incapacitated Zarqawi’s top deputy in Iraq?
Zarqawi goes through more Number 2’s than Patrick Magoohan!
Comment by Anodyne —
September 27, 2005 @ 12:45 pm
Hesiod,
.
After the third (or was it the fourth?) number 2 was reported killed I started to check for any references to the person identified in earlier articles or think tank papers. The searches usually came up empty. However, in this case it appears that Abdullah Abu Azzam was known well in advance and identified as a major player (see fourth paragraph):
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http://www.frontpagemag.com/Articles/ReadArticle.asp?ID=14568
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As always, there could be some confusion over the name (compare, e.g., to Abdullah Yusaf Azzam) but in this case, if this is the guy they got, it looks as if he was a significant target. What it all means, who knows – the article suggests maybe not much in the grand scheme of things.
Comment by Davebo —
September 27, 2005 @ 10:28 pm
Frontpagemag.com??
Seriously?
Comment by ahem —
September 28, 2005 @ 1:26 am
There was, indeed, apparently a $50k bounty on the guy’s head. And there were $50k bounties on lots of other Zarqawi ‘lieutenants’. No-one’s ever described him as a #2 or top deputy, though. All very Patrick McGoohan, no?
Comment by Jason Kuznicki —
September 28, 2005 @ 8:10 am
I have often thought that disbanding the Iraqi army was a mistake. I doubt it mattered a whole lot, but I do think it was a small mistake atop a much larger one.
If I may, why do you think that it wasn’t a mistake? Have you written anything on the subject that you could recommend?
Comment by Anodyne —
September 28, 2005 @ 9:55 am
Jason,
.
I don’t know Jim’s complete thoughts on the question, but this might give you a head start:
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http://highclearing.com/index.php/archives/2005/09/01/4583
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Davebo,
.
The original story is from the Weekly Standard, linking it through frontpage.com was just for fun.
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ahem,
.
I hadn’t heard about the 50k bounties, do you have a link?
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Btw, I don’t know from lieutenant, deputy, number 2, or number 3. The story I linked referred to Azzam as a regional “emir†in August of 2004. The region was western Anbar at the time. The reporting today indicated he was active in Baghdad. Your guess is as good as mine as to whether this is the same guy, whether he is really dead, how important he is/was and where he was operating. I am a Prisoner to reporting we have, not a beneficiary of the reporting I would like to have.
Comment by Iain Coleman —
September 28, 2005 @ 12:43 pm
An amusing bit of American bowdlerisation:
The Christian Science Monitor article quotes the following passage from Scotland on Sunday: “General Anthony Walker, a former Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, told Scotland on Sunday: “The soldiers should have said to the politicians ‘forget this, we are not going into this conflict until you tell us how you are going to deal with this country once we have won you the war’.”
But the original article says “General Anthony Walker, a former Deputy Chief of the Defence Staff, told Scotland on Sunday: “The soldiers should have said to the politicians ‘f*** this, we are not going into this conflict until you tell us how you are going to deal with this country once we have won you the war’.”
Are asterisks now considered obscene in the USA?
Comment by Jason Kuznicki —
September 28, 2005 @ 3:40 pm
Anodyne–
Thanks for the link. I’m not sure I entirely agree with this position, since I can’t say with certainty how things would have worked out in the face of such a huge counterfactual. On balance, I thought invading Iraq was a bad idea from the beginning, not because I was certain that it was unwinnable, nor even because I thought it was too risky, but merely becuase I believe that war is unjustified in the absence of a direct and specific threat.
(Of course, with such a threat, the entire populace will support you–so too even the populace of the defeated country, in many cases. Without such a threat, well, you see what we get, a big nasty mess.)
Iain Coleman,
“The soldiers should have said to the politicians ‘f* this, we are not going into this conflict until you tell us how you are going to deal with this country once we have won you the war’.”
Yikes. As bad as I find the Iraq war, one thing that I would find even worse would be if the military ceased taking orders from the civilian elements in government. I can’t help but say that I condemn the sentiment expressed here, with profanity or without.
Comment by Iain Coleman —
September 30, 2005 @ 10:37 am
Justin,
Soldiers should not refuse to carry out the direct legal orders of their civilian government, of course they shouldn’t. The General wasn’t talking about mutiny. He was expressing his view that the soldiers should have robustly argued against stupid ideas of politicians, which is a valuable public service carried out by government officials, both military and civilian.
Comment by dsquared —
September 30, 2005 @ 7:08 pm
just a point of information for American readers; the English phrase “according to Defense Minister John Reid” is roughly equivalent to the American phrase “in a hog’s eye”.
meanwhile, if Zarqawi can regenerate legs in such a short time, presumably it is child’s play for him to regenerate seconds-in-command? I really seem to be the only one left who cares about the Zarqawi how-many-legs issue.