Kenneth M. Pollack's Blog, page 6

March 26, 2015

Why U.S. airstrikes in Tikrit are good for the U.S. and Iraq

The Sukhoi Su-25 aircraft loaded with bombers at an air base in Baghdad (REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily).

The start of American air operations against Da'ish forces in Tikrit has generated a lot of concerns that this is another foolish move by which the United States is empowering Iran and its allied Shi'ite militias in Iraq. 


In this one case, however, the exact opposite is true.


What is critical to understand about the Tikrit offensive is that it was meant to discredit the United States. Two weeks ago, an extremely high-ranking Iraqi official—a senior cabinet minister—told me that the operation was presented by Abu Mahdi al-Mohandis, Iran's most important cat's paw in Iraq, to the Iraqi government six days before the start of the operation. At the time, he indicated that the various Shi'ite militias were going to launch the offensive against Tikrit with Iranian support, and he asked if the Iraqi government was interested in participating. He also made it clear that he and his compatriots did not want the United States to participate.


In other words, the Shi'ite militias and their Iranian backers devised this operation on their own; they intended to carry it out regardless of what the Iraqi government did and simply gave Baghdad the option of participating—but only at the price of excluding the Americans. It was an operation designed to demonstrate that the Shi'ite militias (and the forces at the disposal of the Shi'a-dominated government more broadly) were fully capable of liberating even core Sunni cities without the United States. It was intended to demonstrate that Iraq needs Iranian help, while American help was of secondary importance at best.  


This seems to be why the offensive caught the United States by surprise—the Iraqi government did not know about it until the last minute and they were forced to keep the Americans in the dark or be shut out of the operation altogether. This was too dangerous for Prime Minister Haider al-Abadi, who could not afford to have the Shi'ite militias and Iran liberate Tikrit from Da'ish WITHOUT Iraqi Security Force (ISF) participation. Doing so would have demonstrated that he is not fully in control of Iraq or the military campaign to liberate Iraq. Given his own problems with Iran and its Iraqi allies, that was something he just could not afford, and so he agreed to participate, rushed some ISF units north to take part in the offensive, and gave a send-off speech to the troops—all to try to take ownership of an operation conceived by the Shi'ite militias and Iran.


The great danger in all of this is that if the operation was a success, it would reinforce the narrative that Iran was Iraq's only real ally and the United States was both diffident and not terribly important. It would have further increased Iran's already extensive influence in Iraq and further diminished America's already damaged reputation. And early on, when the offensive seemed to be succeeding, this was exactly what Iraqis were saying. Indeed, the Shi'ite militias distributed all kinds of sophisticated media materials showing them feeding liberated Sunni children to demonstrate that they were welcomed by the Sunni populace and thus did not need the Americans even to reach out to the Sunnis.


Now, the sudden stalemate and the request for American airstrikes has given the United States the chance to reverse that narrative: to convince Iraqis that the Shi'ite militias cannot do it all on their own—or only with Iranian help—and that Iraq needs the United States because the United States has unique capabilities critical to Iraq's future security. It is also important for Prime Minister Abadi in giving him some room to maneuver and not reducing him to subservience to Iran and its allies among the Shi'ite militia leadership. What's more, if Tikrit is now liberated, Iraqis will all say that the Iranians failed, but the Americans succeeded. 


Nothing could be more useful in starting to restore American influence. Indeed, that is precisely why the Shi'ite militias closest to Iran—Asaib ahl al-Haq, Khataib Hizballah, the Peace Brigades, and possibly the Badr Organization—all have either announced that they won't participate in the fight anymore or are considering withdrawing. They do not want to see the United States succeed where the Iranians alone failed, and they know that their own role could be crucial to the fighting. So rather than do what is best for Iraq, they are doing what is best for themselves and for Iran, even at the expense of what is best for Iraq. 


And that is a golden opportunity for the United States.



Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Image Source: © Stringer . / Reuters


             
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Published on March 26, 2015 13:00

The dangers of the Arab intervention in Yemen

Followers of the Houthi movement shout slogans during a gathering to show support to the movement outside the Presidential Palace in Sanaa (REUTERS/Khaled Abdullah).

The news that the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) states along with Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Pakistan, and Sudan have launched air strikes against Houthi forces in Yemen should give every American pause. Yes, the Houthis are Shi'a who receive some degree of backing from Iran, but this is a very dangerous escalation that is unlikely to improve the situation in Yemen and risks the stability of Saudi Arabia over the medium to long term. Moreover, the Iranian role has been greatly exaggerated in what is first and foremost a Yemeni civil war.


Even with U.S. assistance, the GCC and its coalition partners lack the capacity to break Houthi ground operations the way that American air power has been able to smash ISIS ground operations in Iraq and Syria. With enough American help, they could certainly inflict some harm on the Houthis, but they are unlikely to be able to materially shift the balance of power. If the airstrikes fail, as seems more likely than not, there is a real danger that these same states will decide to intervene on the ground—and that intervention will be largely composed of Saudi forces.


As I warned in a previous post on Yemen co-authored with the highly-regarded scholar of civil wars, Barbara Walter, a compelling body of scholarly research on civil wars has found that interventions into civil wars on behalf of the losing side rarely produce a rapid, negotiated settlement. Instead, they typically prolong the conflict, producing more death and devastation. Of greatest importance in this case, they also have a bad habit of overstressing the intervening state—especially when that state has limited capabilities and internal problems of its own.  


Saudi Arabia remains the leader of the Arab world, an important American ally, and one of the most important oil producers in the world. But it is also a country with significant internal challenges, financial problems, and now a dramatic shift in government power as a result of the death of King Abdullah and the accession of King Salman. The Kingdom lacks the military capacity to intervene decisively in Yemen, and if it tries by sending in large numbers of ground troops, the most likely outcome would be a debilitating stalemate that will drain Saudi military resources, financial reserves, and political will. It could also easily enrage key segments of the populace: some furious that after spending so much on defense the Kingdom has so little capability, others equally enraged that so much money is being wasted on a senseless quagmire in Yemen instead of being spent on critical domestic problems.  


(As an aside, I would note that the Egyptians have stated that they are ready to send ground troops to Yemen if airstrikes prove inadequate. This, in and of itself, is curious given the painful history of Egypt's failed involvement in the Yemeni civil war of 1961-1967. But it is no more comforting than if the Saudis were to go in alone. The Egyptians are not likely to improve the chances of success, and Egypt is also a fragile state struggling to deal with enormous domestic political and economic problems. It does not need a potentially debilitating and divisive foray into Yemen any more than the Saudis do.)


Which brings me to the American role in this intervention. One could posit a wide variety of American rationales for supporting this move: a desire to shore up the U.S.-Saudi alliance after the many quarrels of the past decade, a hope that American support for the GCC in Yemen will translate into greater GCC support for American efforts in Iraq and Syria, and/or the belief that this will allow the United States to direct GCC assets against al-Qa'ida in the Arabian Peninsula to make up for the loss of al-Anad as an American Special Forces counterterrorism base. From my perspective, these are all mistaken rationales that place short-term needs ahead of far greater long-term interests. Such reasons suggest that the United States will encourage and even enable greater and greater Saudi/GCC/Arab involvement in Yemen—exactly the thing that the United States should be seeking to dampen.


Instead, I would argue that the only good reason for the United States to support the Saudi/GCC/Arab intervention in Yemen is to gain situational awareness into their operations and leverage to prevent them from getting more deeply involved. This is one of those situations where the United States needs to restrain its allies for their own good. The long and well-examined history of civil wars offers a clear warning that greater Saudi intervention in Yemen is unlikely to improve the situation and could easily undermine the Kingdom's own security and stability over the medium to longer term. For Saudi Arabia's sake and our own, the best thing that we can do is also the hardest: convince them to cash in, rather than double down and bust.



Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Image Source: © Khaled Abdullah Ali Al Mahdi


             
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Published on March 26, 2015 06:44

Brookings experts on Yemen

Markaz: Middle East Politics & Policy

The Center for Middle East Policy (CMEP) recently hosted an event titled “Yemen and Libya: The Middle East’s Other Civil Wars.” The event brought together a panel of experts on Yemen, Libya, and the broader region to discuss the rising violence and chaos in those two countries. Listen to what they had to say or read a transcript of the conversation .


Pakistan is listed as one of the non-GCC countries that has joined in the coalition against the Houthis in Yemen. , director of The Intelligence Project at Brookings, wrote a piece for Al-Monitor explaining Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s decision less than two weeks ago not to send troops to Saudi Arabia to help the Kingdom confront the rising Houthi threat on its southwestern border.


In February, Markaz featured a post from Riedel of the Yemeni capital city of Sana’a. 


And following the death of Saudi Arabia’s King Abdullah earlier this year, which came on the heels of the resignation of Yemeni president Abed Rabbo Mansour Hadi, Riedel declared in an op-ed in Al-Monitor that Yemen would be the “first priority for Saudi’s new King Salman.”  


In January, , senior fellow at CMEP, and Barbara F. Walter of U.C. San Diego argued that the real threat Yemen posed to the United States came not from terrorism, but from Yemen’s potential to destabilize Saudi Arabia—presciently warning that “the Saudis are obsessed with Yemen and have found it impossible to resist meddling in Yemeni affairs.” Earlier this week, Pollack , and he addressed the civil war in Yemen, as well as broader regional turmoil.


, deputy director of the Brookings Doha Center, outlined how U.S. counterterrorism efforts in Yemen, and specifically its use of drones to target al-Qa’ida-linked terrorists, has contributed to Yemen’s instability in a recent interview on NPR.



Authors

Jennifer R. Williams



             
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Published on March 26, 2015 06:36

March 24, 2015

U.S. policy in the Middle East: What went wrong and how to fix it

Obama Thinking

 testified this afternoon before the Senate Armed Services Committee on U.S. policy in the Middle East. In his prepared remarks, Pollack explains that although the United States is not entirely to blame for the current dismal state of affairs in the region, the fact is that over the past 30-40 years, successive U.S. administrations have favored short-term solutions to crises in the region over long-term strategic planning; the result is that numerous opportunities to help move the region in a better direction have been squandered. 


Pollack argues that the current turmoil in the Middle East is the product of two concurrent forces: the breakdown of the internal order established after World War II and the withdrawal of the Middle East’s “traditional great power hegemon”—that is, the United States.  Washington disengaged from the region at the same time that the dysfunctional dictatorships that had come to power in the post-WWII era collapsed, creating a power and security vacuum into which the forces of extremism and chaos eagerly stepped.   


In order to begin moving down the path toward stability in the Middle East, Pollack asserts that the United States must resist the temptation to pursue short-term solutions and instead begin to think strategically about the United States’ long-term interests in the region and the policies that can be implemented to help guarantee those interests in a way that will last beyond just the next conflagration.


Read Kenneth Pollack’s prepared testimony and watch video of the hearing here



Authors

Jennifer R. Williams


Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters


             
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Published on March 24, 2015 14:01

June 23, 2014

Oil and the Iraqi Civil War: How Security Dynamics May Affect Oil Production

REUTERS/Mushtaq Muhammed - An Iraqi soldier checks for identification papers at a checkpoint during a patrol looking for militants of the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), along the border between Iraq and Saudi Arabia, June 23, 2014.

It should be obvious that a key consideration for the United States arising from the revived civil war in Iraq is its potential to affect Iraqi oil production. Iraq is now the second largest producer in OPEC. And although Americans are ecstatic about fracking, energy experts have been warning that future oil prices are more dependent on increasing Iraqi production than North American shale. In October 2012, the International Energy Agency stated that, “The increase in Iraq’s oil production in the Central Scenario of more than 5 [million barrels per day] over the period to 2035 makes Iraq by far the largest contributor to global supply growth. Over the current decade, Iraq accounts for around 45% of the anticipated growth in global output.”


Consequently, any significant disruption of current Iraqi oil production or long-term diminution in its expected growth could have major repercussions for the U.S. economy. As former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan pointed out back in 2002, “. . . all economic downturns in the United States since 1973, when oil became a prominent cost factor in business, have been preceded by sharp increases in the price of oil.” Greenspan’s observation came before the 2007-2009 “Great Recession,” which was also preceded by a tripling of oil prices.[1]


Iraqi Oil in the Near Term

The vast majority of Iraq’s oil production comes from southern Iraq, and primarily from fields far from the current frontlines. It is nearly 200 miles from Muqdadiyah—which is as far as the southward Sunni militant advance has so far gotten—to the northernmost of Iraq’s major southern oilfields. It is 220 miles from Fallujah—which is as far as the eastward Sunni militant offensive has gotten—to those same fields.


It is true that the ISIS offensive that kicked off around June 5 did cover roughly 250 miles from the Syrian border down to Muqdadiyah, but the conditions that made that possible have abated if not evaporated. Then, the ISIS fighters benefited from tactical (if not strategic) surprise, which is always an enormously important advantage in warfare. Moreover, the Iraqi security forces collapsed after about four days of fighting in Mosul for a variety of reasons. Since then, Prime Minister Maliki’s forces have regrouped, they are more homogeneously Shi’a, they have been reinforced both by hardened Shi’a militiamen and large numbers of new recruits, and they are defending the largely Shi’a cities of central Iraq. In addition, the Iranians and Americans are providing Maliki’s forces with assistance, although the U.S. support is modest and the full extent of Iranian support is unknown. Nevertheless, both can only help the Shi’a coalition forces militarily in the immediate future.


For all of these reasons, it is not surprising that the Sunni militant drive has stalled. The Sunnis are themselves regrouping, recruiting new personnel and striking alliances with other Sunni militias and tribes to try to get their offensive going again, but it is likely to prove far more difficult for them to take Baghdad and the other Shi’a cities of central Iraq than it was for them to overrun Mosul, Tikrit and the other mostly-Sunni cities of northern Iraq.


We should always remember that war is highly unpredictable, and it is exceptionally difficult to assess a dynamic balance of combat forces with such limited information. Nevertheless, the evidence we have suggests that it is more likely that the Iraqi civil war will settle into a vicious stalemate roughly along current lines for the foreseeable future than it is that the Sunni militant fighters will be able to swiftly overrun Baghdad and drive south into Iraq’s main oil fields.


If this most likely scenario is borne out, it would mean that there would be relatively little near-term impact on Iraqi oil production. Iraq’s oil exports come overwhelmingly from these southern fields and they flow southward, to the Persian Gulf, where they are exported from terminals at the southernmost tip of Iraq (indeed, from offshore). The loss of Baghdad could affect that export infrastructure if the Sunni militants were able to tamper with water flows southward (which are important for oil production and power generation) or with the power grid itself, although both would be difficult. In addition, the loss of the seat of government in such a heavily-micromanaged state would certainly create some short-term problems in the management and administration of Iraqi oil production. However, over the longer-term, it seems likely that Iraq’s oil industry could recover even from the fall of Baghdad.


The battle for Bayji, where Iraq’s largest oil refinery is located, is important because that refinery supplies much of Iraq’s domestic petroleum needs, and the town also controls important power, water, communications and transportation nodes. However, it means little for current Iraqi oil production, which largely stopped flowing northward to Turkey over the past 18 months because of repeated sabotage by Sunni militant groups. The one exception to that is the Kurds, who have been exporting northward to Turkey, but not through Bayji.


All of this suggests that it is unlikely that the revived civil war will cause a near-term collapse in Iraqi oil production.


Looking Down the Road

Looking out toward the medium- and longer-term horizons, however, the security situation has the potential to create greater problems for Iraqi oil.


Shifts in the Balance of Power. First, there is the military balance itself. Although a scenario of protracted, bloody stalemate appears most likely at present, that could change.


Historically, intercommunal civil wars such as Iraq’s (and Syria’s, which is steadily merging with Iraq’s) often bog down into a deadlock along the internal ethno-sectarian divisions of the country. That is what has happened in Syria, and what happened in Lebanon, Afghanistan and Sudan before that. It is much easier for ethno-sectarian militias to hold terrain populated by their own identity group than to conquer terrain populated by their rivals’—which is one impetus to ethnic cleansing whenever a militia can conquer a rival’s territory.


But that does not meant that every civil war will grind on forever. One thing that can dramatically change the military balance is the emergence of one or more highly competent commanders. Because civil wars tend to be waged by relatively small and unorganized light infantry formations, a stand-out military commander can have a disproportionate impact on the fighting. Ahmed Shah Masood in Afghanistan in the 1980s and ‘90s is a good example of this. Masood frustrated every Taliban assault on the Tajik enclave in the Panjshir valley from 1994 until his death on September 9, 2001 at the hands of al-Qa’ida assassins. Hassan Djamous in Chad in the late 1980s comes to mind as another, similar example of a battlefield commander whose abilities helped rout both indigenous rival militias and their Libyan allies.


Because military geniuses are rare, it’s more often the case that one side receiving disproportionately greater external support than its adversary is what tips the balance in a civil war. The Shi’a in Lebanon, the Serbs initially in Bosnia, the Croats and Bosniaks later in Bosnia, the Pashtuns in Afghanistan, all made major advances in part because they had more potent assistance from a foreign backer than their adversary.


It’s hard to know how this will play out in Iraq—or Syria as some have started to refer to the mingling conflicts. Maliki’s increasingly Shi’a coalition obviously has some backing from Iran. The longer the civil war drags on, the deeper Iranian involvement with the Shi’a will become. (And the Russians are also now talking about supporting Maliki too.) Of course, the Iraqi civil war takes place against the wider Sunni-Shi’a and Saudi-Iranian tensions that have been growing since the first embers of the Iraqi civil war started to glow in 2004. The Saudis and their Gulf allies have been providing support to the Iraqi-Syrian Sunnis for some time, both indirectly through Saudi private donations and directly by covert Saudi government assistance to the Syrian opposition. The more Iran aids the Shi’a, the more that Saudi Arabia and other Sunni Arab states will aid the Sunnis.


Whether one state or the other will provide the kind of disproportionate support that will allow its allies/proxies to make more than local gains remains to be seen. For instance, Iran and Russia have been providing very extensive support to the Asad regime in Syria, and this has allowed the regime’s forces to make some important local gains in Aleppo, Homs and elsewhere, but (1) these gains have so far not changed the strategic picture in Syria where the battle lines still largely conform to the internal sectarian divide; and (2) they have already caused the Gulf to respond with stepped up support to the Syrian Sunni militias which threatens to stalemate the fighting again.


The final thing to watch for over the longer term is the direct intervention of one or more neighboring states. This too is a frequent occurrence with long-running civil wars and can dramatically shake things up. Without going into too much detail, it is often the case that neighboring states begin to support one or more of the militias waging the conflict both to minimize spillover from the civil war onto their own country (in the form of refugees, terrorists, secessionist movements, etc.), to placate popular demands to assist co-religionists or co-ethnics in the country in civil war, and/or to prevent other neighboring states from gaining too much influence in the state in civil war. If their allies/proxies begins to lose ground, they face the choice either of folding or doubling down by sending in their own forces. Too many choose the latter: Syria in Lebanon, NATO in Bosnia, seven different countries in Congo, etc.


It can often get worse, because when one of the neighbors invades, other neighbors may follow suit to protect their own interests and/or to prevent the other neighbor from conquering much or all of the target state. The Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 1982 was as much about driving the Syrians out (despite having welcomed Syrian intervention in 1976) as it was about halting the terrorist spillover that Israel was facing. Likewise, many of the seven different African states that have invaded Congo did so in response to the moves of one another. In the Iraq context, we heard the Saudis threaten to intervene militarily in 2006 if the U.S. did not get the situation under control. And in the past week, the Saudi foreign minister has again publicly warned against excessive Iranian involvement in Iraq.


Given Iraq’s strategic importance, over time we are likely to see greater and greater involvement by both Iran and the Sunni Arab states. We could see direct armed interventions by either or both, despite the fact that none of them currently has any interest in doing so. Neighboring states that intervene militarily in civil wars typically only do so after many years of resisting the urge. If they do intervene directly, that could radically alter the military dynamics, but in ways that are impossible to gauge today.


Direct Problems for the Iraqi Oil Industry. Regardless of what happens with the balance of power in a protracted Iraqi civil war, the longer the war goes on, the greater the potential for it to affect Iraqi production from the southern fields. There are at least three problems that are likely to crop up:



Terrorism/Sabotage. ISIS and other Salafi Jihadist groups have been trying to curtail Iraqi oil production by attacking the southern Iraqi oil infrastructure for years. As I noted above, they have had considerable success with the northern infrastructure, but so far have not had the same impact in the south. Now that they are locked in a full-scale, conventional war with their Shi’a adversaries, they are likely to redouble those efforts. After all, Iraq’s oil production is now the revenue stream funding the Shi’a coalition forces. Just as Baghdad and Tehran tried to cut each other’s oil exports for the same reason during the Iran-Iraq War, so the Sunni militants will make the same effort this time around. Moreover, now that they control a huge swath of northern Iraq, their ability to do so may improve.
A Distracted Bureaucracy. Even before the civil war re-ignited, Iraq was experiencing various problems ramping up oil production. The Iraqi government is inefficient, corrupt and badly overcentralized. Oil companies (and other Western firms) have had problems obtaining visas and licenses, moving personnel and equipment, and securing resources that the Iraqis were expected to provide. Some huge projects of critical importance to Iraq and its hydrocarbon industry have encountered numerous bureaucratic SNAFUs that have delayed their completion. These include crucial ventures to capture flared Iraqi natural gas and bring sea water up for injection into the southern oil fields to substitute for Iraq’s diminishing fresh water flows. With an all-out civil war to fight (as well as what is likely to be a series of internal challenges), the Iraqi government is going to be even more distracted and probably less efficient than it was before the events of the past two weeks.
Lawlessness. Over the past 6-8 months, the Iraqi government had been pulling Iraqi Army and police formations out of southern Iraq and sending them west to Anbar to fight the ISIS offensive that had captured Fallujah and threatened Ramadi, Abu Ghraib, and Samarra. The removal of so many security personnel from the south (for instance, 11 of 17 Iraqi army battalions had already redeployed from Basra province) was already complicating the security situation in the south. There were increasing reports of tribal violence, expanding organized crime rings, local political violence, and just more criminal activity overall. Since then, Baghdad has pulled even more troops and police from the south and sent them north to fight the new Sunni militant offensive. Over time, it may be able to stand up new security units for the south, but it will always face competition for more troops along the frontlines as long as the civil war goes on, and historically it is the latter that gets priority over policing rear areas.

All of this will increase the costs of doing business in Iraq for the major oil companies and make it harder for Iraq to reach its full oil-export potential.


One possible mitigating factor is whether Baghdad would use the opportunity presented by the new civil war to revise its approach to oil contracting. So far, Baghdad has insisted on terms for its contracts with foreign oil firms that have significantly diminished their profitability. Many of the major oil companies signed these contracts only in the hope that they would later be able to secure more lucrative contracts if they demonstrated their commitment to Iraq. Some of these became so frustrated with Baghdad’s stubbornness that they pulled out of the south and began to shift their operations to Iraqi Kurdistan instead. Although Baghdad has been remarkably stubborn on this matter, the demands of waging the civil war might force it to reconsider as the only way to keep the major oil companies in Iraq and pumping the oil that is now vital to its war effort.


Tentative Conclusions Regarding Iraqi Oil Production and the New Civil War

Obviously, there is a lot more to be said on this topic. I have purposely not dealt with the Iraqi Kurds here; that is a sizable topic deserving of its own analysis. In addition, their situation is still too uncertain right now to say more than the obvious point that there is a high probability that they will declare independence in the near future as long as the Iraqi civil war roils on.


Nevertheless, even this limited analysis indicates that while Iraqi oil production is unlikely to collapse in the near term, or even in the foreseeable future, over the longer term it may be difficult for Iraqi oil exports to continue to expand as previously projected. Indeed, Iraqi oil production might even begin to decline over time depending on a variety of military and political factors. At the very least, it calls into question whether Iraqi oil production will continue to expand at the pace needed to conform to the projections of soft oil prices over the longer term.


[1] Jad Muawad, “Rising Demand for Oil Provokes new Energy Crisis,” The New York Times, November 9, 2007.



Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Image Source: © STRINGER Iraq / Reuters

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Published on June 23, 2014 08:00

June 20, 2014

Three Questions About the Deployment of American Advisors to Iraq

REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque - U.S. President Barack Obama speaks about the situation in Iraq in the briefing room of the White House in Washington June 19, 2014.

At first blush, President Obama’s decision to deploy 300 American special forces soldiers to Iraq seems to be a small, but smart step to take in the current, exceptionally challenging circumstances. It may well be. There are unquestionably intelligent and positive aspects to it.


However, because it is a small step, any value it will have will be limited—although there is value in that too. Perhaps of greater importance, there are some very important aspects of this move that remain unknown, at least outside the U.S. government. Indeed, to come to any more meaningful judgment about this move, either positive or negative, the public would need to have several critical additional questions answered. Without that information, it is ultimately impossible to judge it properly.


This is not a criticism of the Administration’s decision per se. Washington may have already addressed all of these questions and may have good answers to them. The Administration may also have good reason to keep those answers secret for now. It is simply to note that these questions are among the most important in trying to assess just how beneficial or detrimental this move might be.


The Known Knowns


We should start with what we know, or at least can reasonably assume. First, there will be benefits to the deployment almost regardless of other considerations. These include:



The presence of American advisors will probably help solidify the defense of Baghdad and other cities in central Iraq that have not yet fallen to the Sunni militant coalition. 
They will provide some greater insight into the situation in Iraq, and particularly the situation with the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) and its new Shi’a coalition partners. (The extent of this may vary widely, however. See below.)
They may help to counterbalance Iranian influence. The commander of Iran’s Quds Force, Qasim Sulaymani, arrived in Baghdad last week and there are reports that he brought Iranian advisors with him. While the United States may or may not be able to engage in tacit cooperation with Iran in Iraq, and it is unlikely that 300 advisors can outweigh Iranian support to the Maliki government, it is important not to cede the field to Iran altogether, and these U.S. soldiers will be a visible symbol of Washington’s continued interest in Iraq.
In a similar vein, having American advisors present may remind the Maliki government’s officials and officers of how helpful and powerful U.S. military support can be. That could serve as an incentive to Prime Minister Maliki to agree to the kinds of political changes that Washington has been rightly demanding as a condition for broader American military assistance. It may well be a vain hope, but that is pretty much what we have left at this point.

All that said, the impact of 300 American advisors is inevitably going to be limited. That is especially so since the worst problems that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) have experienced since the start of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) offensive last week have been at the tactical, not the strategic level where these advisors will be employed. The ISF experienced similar problems at the tactical level during the six-months prior to the ISIS offensive, during which it was fighting Sunni militants in Anbar. Like Iraqi military forces throughout the state’s modern history, the ISF has suffered from poor junior officering. In addition, its formations in northern Iraq disintegrated as a result of demoralization and poor unit cohesion, both likely caused by the prime minister’s politicization of the ISF over the past three3 to-four4 years. Having 300 American advisors sprinkled among the government’s joint operations centers and brigade and division headquarters will have little, if any, impact on these tactical problems.


The counterargument to that is that any sign of American commitment may bolster ISF morale, and the problems of demoralization and poor unit cohesion may already have been ameliorated by the deployment of Shi’a militias and the regrouping of the ISF. The Shi’a militias are every bit as vicious and committed to the fight as their Sunni counterparts. They will doubtless help stiffen the spines of the residual ISF units. Moreover, what is left of the ISF is increasingly Shi’a soldiers and officers (although not entirely) and these men are likely to fight much harder in defense of their homes and families in Baghdad and the other Shi’a cities of central and southern Iraq than they did for the mostly Sunni cities of the north.


The Known Unknowns




What kind of access will the American advisors have—and did the government of Iraq request them?

So far, all that we have heard is the President say that he is sending them. We don’t know how that came about. Presumably the Iraqi government agreed to take them. What we don’t know is whether Prime Minister Maliki and his lieutenants wanted them, let alone asked for them.


That is important because if Baghdad wanted them, then the U.S. advisors are far more likely to have both access and authority, which are critical to their impact. On the other hand, if Maliki really wanted airstrikes and only grudgingly agreed to take the advisors instead, their impact may be marginal. In that case, Baghdad might keep the U.S. personnel isolated from its intelligence and command staffs. It serves no purpose of ours to have an American advisor cooped up in some antechamber while the Iraqi personnel (and perhaps Iranian advisors) are making all of the decisions somewhere else. One way of knowing whether that is likely to happen is to understand the circumstances in which Maliki accepted the advisors, and what kind of access he has agreed to grant them.




What kind of authority will American advisors have over Iraqi soldiers?

A related issue is that of the advisor’s authority. Technically speaking, advisors advise, they do not command. Of course, since the beginning of time, trusted (or simply powerful) foreign advisors have often served as de facto commanders, issuing orders directly to the troops or through the mouthpiece of the nominal indigenous commander. In contrast, there are also plenty of historical examples of foreign advisors being ignored by their indigenous charges. Given the Maliki government’s (understandable) suspicion regarding U.S. motives, what role these U.S. advisors will be able to play in guiding Baghdad’s military operations is a critical question.


The issue of the authority of these advisors also speaks to the question of culpability. According to the Administration, the American advisors will be attached to various headquarters in central and northern Iraq—the Joint Operations Centers (JOC) that the Prime Minister uses to directly control Iraqi security operations, as well certain division and brigade commands. At least the JOCs, but probably the brigade and division headquarters as well, now appear to command both ISF formations and Shi’a militia bands.


As I noted above, these Shi’a militias are every bit as vicious and determined as their Sunni counterparts. Like their Sunni counterparts, they may commit all kinds of atrocities—from killing or torturing enemy prisoners to slaughtering rival civilians in pursuit of ethnic cleansing. If there are American officers attached to ISF headquarters that control Shi’a militia units that engage in such atrocities, it may be very hard to avoid being seen as complicit in those atrocities under any circumstances. But that will be especially the case if the American advisors have actual command authority of some kind.


Of course, the more command authority they have, hopefully the less likelihood that Shi’a militias under their command will engage in such behavior. Moreover, without such authority there would be much less of a rationale for committing these American troops and putting them in harm’s way.




What is the political-military strategy that the American advisors are intended to implement?

This brings up the last unknown, which is the goal and strategy that these troops will be sent to implement. I will put it this way. The United States and the Maliki government (and the Iranian regime, for that matter) clearly share an interest in defending Baghdad and the other cities of central and southern Iraq from conquest by the Sunni militant coalition. However, Prime Minister Maliki is also determined to reconquer the rest of the Iraqi territory lost to the ISIS offensive last week. That would seem to run counter to the Administration’s (entirely correct) insistence that the United States should not choose sides in the Iraqi civil war, nor help either to militarily crush the other (and jeopardize the safety of its civilian populace). That is why Washington has, again rightly, insisted on a political strategy that would reconcile Iraq’s warring communities and ensure the safety of all.


Has the Obama Administration agreed that these American advisors would support Prime Minister Maliki’s objective of retaking all of Iraq? If so, will American advisors advise/lead/accompany Maliki’s forces (ISF and Shi’a militias) if they are able to fulfill the Prime Minister’s goal of counterattacking into the Sunni-populated regions of Iraq where the potential for ethnic cleansing and atrocities against civilians will increase dramatically? If not, does the Iraqi government understand this? Have we made clear to Baghdad that our advisors will only assist with defensive operations and not with any counteroffensives to retake the Sunni-populated regions of Iraq? Is Baghdad comfortable with that? (And if not, will it lead to the very exclusion of our advisors from Iraqi intelligence collection and command decisions entailed in the first question above?)




Again, Washington may have had all of these conversations with Baghdad already and may have received definitive, satisfactory answers to all of them. Let’s hope that they have. If they have, and they can reassure the American people—or at least our elected representatives in the Congress—that they have, then we should have much greater confidence that this represents a small, but intelligent step to start to deal with the massive problem of Iraq. If they have not, then this can only undermine our confidence in the viability and even utility of this deployment. Until we know the answers to these questions, we simply do not have the information necessary to reach a full conclusion one way or the other.



Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Image Source: © Kevin Lamarque / Reuters

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Published on June 20, 2014 08:30

June 19, 2014

Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does Washington Have?

REUTERS - A man walks past near remains of burnt vehicles belonging to Iraqi security forces in the northern Iraq city of Mosul, June 13, 2014.

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June 19, 2014
9:00 AM - 10:30 AM EDT

The Brookings Institution
Falk Auditorium
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As ISIS militants continue their push towards Baghdad, Iraq is facing its most serious security crisis since the withdrawal of U.S. troops in 2011, and the United States finds itself once again debating the use of force as sectarian tensions threaten an all-out civil war. Can the Iraqi government roll back the ISIS advance and retake control of the north? What are the consequences for Iraq and the region if the conflict becomes protracted? How closely will the United States work with Iran to pursue the shared objective of quelling the violence?


On June 19, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings examined the deteriorating situation in Iraq and offer recommendations on how the United States should respond. Panelists included Brookings Senior Fellows Suzanne Maloney and Kenneth M. Pollack; and Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, director of research in Foreign Policy. Brookings Senior Fellow Tamara Cofman Wittes, director of the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.


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Iraq in Crisis: What Options Does Washington Have?

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Published on June 19, 2014 06:00

June 14, 2014

Iraq Military Situation Report

The following is meant to provide an overview of the military situation in Iraq for non-experts.


Caveat. It is exceptionally difficult to understand the dynamics of ongoing military operations. Oftentimes, the participants themselves do not know why they are winning or losing, or even where they are in control or where their troops are. For non-participants, it is often equally difficult to gain more than a rudimentary sense of the combat without access to the sophisticated intelligence gathering capabilities—overhead imagery, signals intercepts, human reporting, etc.—available to the United States and some other governments. As one of the CIA’s Persian Gulf military analysts during the 1990-91 Gulf War, I noted the difficulty that many outside analysts had in gauging the capabilities of the two sides and following the course of operations because they did not have access to the information available to us from U.S. government assets. Consequently, readers should bring a healthy dose of skepticism to all such analyses of the current fighting in Iraq, including this one.


Likely Next Steps in the Fighting

What appears to be the most likely scenario at this point is that the rapid Sunni militant advance is likely to be stalemated at or north of Baghdad. They will probably continue to make some advances, but it seems unlikely that they will be able to overrun Baghdad and may not even make it to the capital. This scenario appears considerably more likely than the two next most likely alternative scenarios: that the Sunni militants overrun Baghdad and continue their advance south into the Shia heartland of Iraq; or that the Shia coalition is able to counterattack and drive the Sunnis out of most of their recent conquests.


It is not a coincidence that the Sunni militants made rapid advances across primarily Sunni lands. That’s because it is not surprising that the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) would crumble in those areas. As Baghdad has (rightly) observed, several of the divisions in the north were disproportionately composed of Kurds and Sunni Arabs, many of them frustrated and alienated by Prime Minister Maliki’s harsh consolidation of power and marginalization of their communities. They were never going to fight to the death for Maliki and against Sunni militants looking to stop him. Similarly, the considerable number of Shia troops in the north understandably saw little point to fighting and dying for principally Sunni cities like Mosul, Tikrit, Bayji, etc.


Baghdad could be another matter entirely. First, it is a vast city of almost 9 million people compared to Mosul with less than 2 million. Moreover, the Sunni militants only secured the western (Sunni Arab) half of Mosul, leaving the eastern (Kurdish-dominated) half alone. Conquering a city the size of Baghdad is always a formidable undertaking when it is defended by determined troops.


After the battles of the 2006-2008 civil war, Baghdad is also now a more heavily Shia city—probably 75-80 percent of its population, although it is very difficult to know for certain. While it is understandable, even predictable, that Shia troops would not fight and die for Sunni cities, many are likely to find their courage when they are defending their homes and families in Baghdad and the other Shia-dominated cities of the south.


In addition, as has been well-reported, the (largely-Shia) remnants of the ISF are being reinforced by Shia militiamen and bolstered by contingents of Iranian Revolutionary Guards. Although many of the Shia militiamen will be new recruits answering Ayatollah Sistani’s call to defend their community, others are hardened veterans of the fighting in Iraq in 2006-2008 and Syria since 2011.


Thus, the Sunni militants are likely to come up against a far more determined and numerous foe than they have confronted so far. The most likely outcome of that fighting will be a vicious stalemate at or north of Baghdad, basically along Iraq’s ethno-sectarian divide. That is also not surprising because it conforms to the pattern of many similar intercommunal civil wars. In Syria today, in Lebanon in the 1980s, Afghanistan in the 1990s, and elsewhere, that is where the frontlines tend to stalemate. They can shift here and there in small ways, but generally remain unchanged for years. That’s because militias in civil wars find it far easier to hold territory inhabited by the members of their identity group than to conquer (and hold) territory inhabited by members of a rival identity group. It’s one reason they typically try to “cleanse” any territory they have conquered of members of the rival identity group.


If military developments in Iraq conform to this most likely scenario, they could lead to a protracted, bloody stalemate along those lines. In that case, one side or the other would have to receive disproportionately greater military assistance from an outside backer than its adversary to make meaningful territorial gains. Absent that, the fighting will probably continue for years and hundreds of thousands will die.


Watch Anbar. So far, the Sunni militants in Anbar are the dog that hasn’t barked, at least not yet. Obviously, the Sunni militants have significant strength in Anbar, including considerable numbers of ISIS fighters. It is militarily obvious that they should seek to develop a complimentary offensive out of Anbar. Doing so would allow them to (1) open another axis of advance against Baghdad and catch it in a classic pincer movement, or (2) develop a direct advance against the great Shia religious cities of Karbala and Najaf (the most sacred sites in Shia Islam), and/or (3) force the Shia to divert military assets away from the north-south Sunni advance and potentially overstretch their manpower and command and control.


Consequently, the fact that no such offensive has yet materialized is noteworthy. It may be that Sunni militant forces in Anbar were so badly beaten up in the fighting with the ISF around Fallujah and Ramadi that they are not capable of mounting such an attack. Alternatively, they may be preparing to do precisely that.


In short, Anbar bears watching because a Sunni offensive there will further stress the Shia defenses. It is a key variable that could undermine the Shia defense of Baghdad. So if you are looking for something that would push Iraq from the most likely scenario (a bloody stalemate in or north of Baghdad) to the second most likely scenario (a continued Sunni advance through and beyond Baghdad) a successful Sunni offensive from Anbar would be one such variable.


Watch Iran. Given the various problems on the Shia side (demoralization, fragmentation, politicization of the ISF), the variable that would be most likely to advantage the Shia and push Iraq from the most likely scenario (a bloody stalemate in or north of Baghdad) to the third most likely scenario (a Shia counteroffensive that eliminates most of the Sunni gains) is Iranian participation. On their own, it is unlikely that even the larger and more motivated Iraqi Shia forces now assembling to defend Baghdad would be able to retake the Sunni-dominated north. What would make that far more possible would be much greater Iranian involvement, particularly much larger commitments of Iranian ground combat formations.


So far, Iran appears only to have committed three battalion-sized groups of Quds force personnel. Quds force personnel are typically trainers and advisers, not line infantrymen. They are the “Green Berets” of Iran, who help make indigenous forces better rather than fighting the fight themselves. That would make sense for the current situation in Iraq, and those personnel will help stiffen the Shia defense of Baghdad. However, they are unlikely to improve Shia capabilities to the point where they can develop a major offensive to take back the North. Only the commitment of large numbers of Iranian line formations—infantry, armor and artillery—could do that. Consequently, were we to see a large Iranian commitment of such ground combat units, it would signal that the third-most likely scenario was becoming far more likely.


The Combatants, Part I: The Sunni Militants

It is important to understand a few key points about the Sunni militant side of the new Iraqi civil war.


It’s a Coalition, not a Single Group. First, ISIS (the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria) is essentially the “lead dog” of a larger Sunni militant coalition—hence my preference for the latter, more accurate description. ISIS has been fighting in conjunction with a number of other Iraqi Sunni militant groups. Effectively the entire rogue’s gallery of Sunni militias from the 2006-2008 civil war have been revived by Prime Minister Maliki’s alienation of the Sunni Arab community since 2011. AQI, the Naqshbandis, the Ba’th, Jaysh al-Muhammad, Ansar al-Sunnah, and all of the rest are back in operation in Iraq, in at least tacit cooperation with a number of Sunni tribes.


These groups are key members of the Sunni militant coalition. They have done a great deal of the fighting, dying and occupying. Often they are indistinguishable from one another to outsiders or even Iraqis who are not themselves Sunni militants.


It’s an Iraqi Entity, not a Foreign Invasion. While the Iraqi government has emphasized the foreign elements in ISIS, their indigenous, Iraqi component is of far greater importance. ISIS has been part of the violence in Iraq for over a year. Many of its personnel are Iraqis. Even before last weeks operations, it had an extensive network in Iraq which both conducted terrorist attacks across the length and breadth of the country, and has been engaged in a conventional battle for Ramadi and Fallujah with the ISF for over six months. Moreover, it is busily engaged in recruiting and training additional Sunni Iraqis which is simply reinforcing the Iraqi nature of the group. Finally, as noted above, ISIS is only one piece (albeit, the central piece) in a larger array of Sunni groups that are overwhelmingly Iraqi.


This is important because Prime Minister Maliki and his apologists have tried to paint ISIS as a group of foreigners who were waging the Syrian civil war and suddenly decided to launch an invasion of neighboring Iraq. If that narrative were true, it would suggest that a pure (and immediate) military response were warranted since such a group would have a great deal of difficulty holding territory conquered in Iraq. It would obviate the need for far-reaching political changes, which Maliki seeks to avoid.


Consequently, it is critical to understand that ISIS is as much an Iraqi group as it is Syrian or anything else, and its success is largely a product of its ability to capitalize on Iraq’s political problems and to be accepted (if only grudgingly) by many Iraqi Sunnis as a champion in the fight against what they see as an oppressive, partisan Shia regime.


These are Militias First and Foremost, Terrorists only a Distant Second. Here as well, Prime Minister Maliki and his apologists like to refer to the Sunni militants as terrorists. Too often, so too do American officials. Without getting into arcane and useless debates about what constitutes a “terrorist,” as a practical matter it is a mistake to think of these groups as being principally a bunch of terrorists.


The problem there is that that implies that what these guys mostly want to do is to blow up building or planes elsewhere around the world, and particularly American buildings and planes. While I have no doubt that there are some among the Sunni militants who want to blow up American buildings and planes right now, and many others who would like to do so later, that is not their principal motivation.


Instead, this is a traditional ethno-sectarian militia waging an intercommunal civil war. (They are also not an insurgency.) They are looking to conquer territory. They will do so using guerrilla tactics or conventional tactics—and they have been principally using conventional tactics since the seizure of Fallujah over six months ago. Their entire advance south over the past week has been a conventional, motorized light-infantry offensive; not a terrorist campaign, not a guerrilla warfare campaign.


And right now, they are completely consumed with continuing to wage this conventional offensive against the Shia forces arrayed against them. That is likely to remain their pre-occupation for some time to come. Somewhere down the road, they probably will begin to mount terrorist attacks against other countries from their secure areas in Iraq and Syria, precisely as the intelligence community warned. But that will be an adjunct to their waging of the new Iraqi civil war.


That is important because defining the Sunni militants as terrorists implies that they need to be attacked immediately and directly by the United States. Seeing them for what they are, first and foremost a sectarian militia waging a civil war, puts the emphasis on where it needs to be: finding an integrated political-military solution to the internal Iraqi problems that sparked the civil war. And that is a set of problems that is unlikely to be solved by immediate, direct American attacks on the Sunni militants. Indeed, such attacks could easily make the situation worse.


The Combatants, Part II: The Shia Coalition

A few points are also in order regarding the other side of the fight, the Shia.


Of greatest importance, we need to recognize that the Iraqi Security Forces are fast becoming little more than a Shia militia. This trend began 3-4 years ago when Prime Minister Maliki began to push Sunni and Kurdish officers out of the armed forces, to replace them with loyal Shia officers. As a result, even before the current debacle, the ISF had become far more Shia than it had been, with fewer and fewer Sunnis and Kurds. Even before the dramatic events of last week, most Sunnis and Kurds referred to the ISF as “Maliki’s militia.” Since last Tuesday, we have seen large numbers of Sunni Arab and Kurdish soldiers desert the ISF, leaving an even more homogeneously Shia force. There are still Sunnis and Kurds in the ranks and in the officer corps, but that seems likely to dissipate over time.


This is a trend that is common to these kinds of intercommunal civil wars. The “Syrian Armed Forces” of today are nothing more than the Asad regime’s militia, heavily comprised of Alawis and other minorities aligned with the regime. All throughout the Lebanese civil war, there was an entity called “the Lebanese Armed Forces” (LAF) that wore the uniforms, lived on the bases and employed the equipment of Lebanon’s former army. But they had become nothing but a Maronite Christian militia (after all of the Muslims and Druse deserted in the late 1970s), and their commanders nothing but Maronite Christian warlords. The same is already happening with the ISF and that trend is likely to continue.


This is important because one of the worst mistakes the United States made in the 1980s was to assume that the Lebanese Armed Forces were still a neutral, professional armed force committed to the security of the entire state. That was a key piece of the tragic U.S. mishandling of Lebanon. When the Reagan Administration intervened in Lebanon in 1983, one of its goals was shoring up the LAF so that it could stabilize the country. Everyone else in Lebanon—and the Middle East—recognized that the LAF had devolved into a Maronite militia and so they saw the U.S. intervention as the (Christian) United States coming to aid the (Christian) Maronite militia. That is why all of the other warring groups in Lebanon immediately saw the American forces not as neutral peacemakers, but as partisans—allies of the Maronites—and so started to attack our forces. It led directly to the Beirut barracks blast and the humiliating withdrawal of our troops.


There is the same danger in Iraq. If we treat the ISF as an apolitical, national army committed to disinterested stability in Iraq, and provide it with weapons and other military support to do so, we will once again be seen as taking a side in a civil war—even if we are doing so inadvertently, again. Everyone else, including our Sunni Arab allies, will see us as siding with the Shia against the Sunnis in the Iraqi civil war. That perspective will only be reinforced by the ongoing nuclear talks with (Shia) Iran. It is why any American military assistance to Iraq must be conditioned on concrete changes in Iraq’s political structure to bring the Sunnis back in and limit the powers of the (Shia) prime minister, coupled with a thorough depoliticization of the ISF . That is the only way we may be able to convince the Sunnis that we have not simply taken the side of Maliki and the Iranians.


What happened to the ISF? Many have been asking what happened to the Iraqi Security Forces that brought them from the successes of 2007-2008 to the collapse of their units in northern Iraq last week. Obviously, a definitive answer to that question will only be provided by historians at some future date, but a number of factors have been known about the ISF for some time and these undoubtedly caused the collapse in part or whole.


First, it is important to recognize that the ISF built by the U.S. military in 2006-2009 had only very modest military capabilities (primarily in counterinsurgency/counterterrorism/population control operations). Throughout the modern era, Arab militaries have never achieved more than middling levels of military effectiveness and on most occasions, their performances were dreadful. Iraq was no exception. (Those looking for additional information on this may want to read the chapter on modern Iraqi military history in my book, Arabs at War.) This was largely a product of factors inherent in Arab culture, education and economics. With enormous exertions, a small number of Arab militaries overcame these problems to perform at a mediocre level. However, whenever Arab regimes politicized their armed forces to try to prevent a military coup against themselves, the performance of their armies dropped from bad to abysmal.


American military trainers and advisors were able to marginally improve the military effectiveness of the ISF by introducing rigorous, Western-style training programs and partnering closely with Iraqi forces in ways that allowed U.S. personnel to get to know their Iraqi counterparts. As a result of this familiarity, over the course of many months, the Americans figured out who were the good Iraqi soldiers and who were the bad. Who was connected to the terrorists or militias, who was connected to organized crime, who was smart and brave, who was lazy or cowardly. And the U.S. military then went about systematically promoting the best Iraqis, and pushing out the bad ones.


The greatest impact of these American efforts with the ISF in 2006-2009 were to depoliticize it, both to modestly increase its combat effectiveness and to make it professional, apolitical and therefore accepted as a stabilizing force by all Iraqis. Again, this was largely performed by promoting professional, patriotic Iraqi officers and removing the sectarian chauvinists. The U.S. also pressed Baghdad to accept more and more Sunni and Kurdish officers and enlisted personnel into the ranks. As a result, the ISF became a far more integrated force than it had been, led by a far more apolitical and nationalistic officer corps than it had been before. Indeed, in 2008, when Prime Minister Maliki sent heavily-Sunni brigades from Anbar down to Basra to fight the Shia militia, Jaysh al-Mahdi, the Shia of Basra welcomed the ISF brigades and fought against the Shia militiamen.


Unfortunately, despite the boost it gave him, Prime Minister Maliki saw this largely apolitical and professional military as a threat to himself. He feared that it was overrun by Ba’thists (he sees far too many Sunnis as closet Ba’thists), unwilling to follow his orders (despite the fact that it had always done so), and looking to oust him at the first excuse. So, beginning in 2009-2010, he began to remove the capable, apolitical officers that the United States had painstakingly put in place throughout the Iraqi command structure. Instead, he put in men loyal to himself, often because they had been the ones passed over or removed by the Americans. The result was a heavily politicized and far less competent officer corps.


Perhaps not surprisingly, Maliki’s officers saw little need for the rigorous training programs the Americans had put in place. They closed many of the training facilities we built and allowed training to fall by the wayside. Not surprisingly, when these formations got into action again—both in some skirmishes with the Kurds and more bloody fights against Sunni militants—they did very poorly, undercutting morale.


Finally, beginning in 2011 immediately after the departure of the last American soldiers, Maliki began to use his new, politicized ISF to go after his political rivals, many of them leading (moderate) Sunni leaders. This was a critical element in his alienation of Iraq’s Sunni community, and further demoralized the Sunni Arab, Kurdish, and other minority personnel in the ISF. It also disappointed many of the Shia soldiers and officers who preferred to be part of an apolitical, national military and had never wanted to become part of “Maliki’s militia.”


Not surprisingly, when this force came under tremendous stress, it fractured. As noted above, it is now being rebuilt, but not as a national army; as a Shia militia. And the U.S. should only be providing it with aid if we are given the right and the ability to turn it back into an apolitical, national army.



Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


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Published on June 14, 2014 18:17

April 4, 2014

Iraqi Elections, Iranian Interests

Iran's Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei meets with Iraq's Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki in Tehran (REUTERS/Khamenei.ir).

A major event for Iran is barely a month away, though few in Washington seem to be paying attention.  On April 30, Iraq will hold national elections.  A lot is riding on these elections, including the future stability of Iraq.  And that is of no small concern to Tehran, which seems determined both to preserve (and expand) its influence in Iraq and to avoid another Sunni-Shi’a civil war in the region, especially one in Iraq because Iraq is so politically, economically and socially tied in to Iranian society.


Americans often either over-or understate Iran’s influence in Iraq.  Iran wields considerable influence in Iraq, unquestionably more than any other foreign country and far more than the United States.  It was Iran that ultimately engineered Nuri al-Maliki’s re-election as prime minister in 2010 by strong-arming the Sadrists to back him.  It was the Iranians who preserved his rule in 2012 by convincing Jalal Talabani to refuse demands to call for a vote of no-confidence—a vote that Maliki seemed likely to lose.  There are myriad other ways in which Iran wields influence and has demonstrated that sway in Iraq.


However, Iranian influence in Iraq is ultimately limited.  It cannot be said often enough that Maliki himself is NOT an Iranian puppet.  He dislikes and distrusts the Iranians, and sees himself as a nationalist who would like to free Iraq from Iran’s clutches.  The most important thing Nuri al-Maliki ever did as prime minister was to order (against American advice) Operation Charge of the Knights in the spring of 2008, by which American-backed Iraqi forces smashed Sadr’s Iranian-backed Jaysh al-Mahdi and drove it from Iraq.  At the time, it was a crippling blow to Iranian interests in Iraq. 


Nor do the Iranians seem particularly enamored of Maliki.  A senior Iraqi oppositionist told me that IRGC Qods Force Commander Qasim Sulaymani had told him that when Sulaymani was in Najaf earlier this year, Ayatollah Sistani asked him to ensure that Iraq gets a different prime minister, to which Sulaymani reportedly replied, “your words are my order.”  Indeed, a wide range of sources report that both in 2010 and in 2012, the Iranians looked hard for an alternative candidate to back instead of Maliki, but ultimately (and very reluctantly) felt they had to back him because they could not identify a viable alternative. 


So Iran wants to preserve its own influence, preserve Shi’a dominance of the country, avoid civil war and find an alternative to Maliki.  The problem is that Iraq’s elections could easily produce the opposite.


First, Maliki is likely to win a plurality of seats in the next parliament, and he might win a very big plurality.  Following the departure of the last U.S. troops in 2011, Maliki’s moves against various Sunni leaders have frightened an already wary Sunni Arab community.  In turn, they have, re-embraced various terrorist/insurgent groups such as al-Qa’ida (AQ), the Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL), the 1920 Revolution Brigade, Jaysh al-Islam, Ansar al-Sunnah, etc.  The terrorist attacks perpetrated by these groups have only inflamed Shi’a sentiment against the Sunnis, pushing the government to crack down harder on the Sunnis in a vicious cycle. 


Maliki has benefitted from this situation simply by being the incumbent and because his Shi’a rivals have allied themselves with the main Sunni political parties, who cannot denounce the violence for fear of alienating their constituency.  As a result, when the worst violence began in western Iraq in January and February, Maliki’s two main Shi’a rivals—ISCI and the Sadrists—shilly-shallied because of their alliance with the mainstream Sunni leaders.  This discredited both in the eyes of many Shi’a, who have been incensed by the Sunni terror attacks on their community and want “the government” to crack down as hard as possible.  Although Maliki has so far refrained from moving into Fallujah and Ramadi, he has nevertheless been the beneficiary of this Shi’a outrage because he at least talks tough about extirpating the Sunni terrorists. 


In addition, Muqtada al-Sadr’s bizarre and unexpected decision to disband his political party and withdraw from politics has further benefitted Maliki.  Many former Sadrists are expected to sign on to Maliki’s SoL coalition. 


As a result, Maliki’s SoL is likely to emerge as the single largest vote-getter in the election and could win anywhere from 60 to 110 seats.  It is still far too soon to make strong predictions, but the various factors noted above all suggest that Maliki will do quite well, and the possibility of his winning 100 or more seats is not at all far-fetched.  (It takes 167 seats to get a majority and form a government).


The most frequently discussed scenario in Baghdad is one in which Maliki secures 60-90 seats and then uses both that plurality and the powers of incumbency (his control over the judiciary, Iraqi election commission, the military, oil revenues, etc.) to prevent any other coalition from forming and naming a new government.  As he did in 2010, he would simply drag out the process of government formation until eventually all sides recognized that only he could be prime minister of Iraq.  During this time, he would continue to rule the country as caretaker prime minister.  As a result, most Iraqi political leaders expect government formation to last even longer than in 2010—with estimates of 18-24 months common. 


However, if Maliki is able to secure a commanding plurality (say 90 seats or more), it is also possible that government formation could happen much faster.  In these circumstances, it is likely that virtually all of Iraq’s political leaders would recognize that Maliki will inevitably remain prime minister, and therefore they would have enormous incentives to join his coalition quickly to secure key ministries before others do so.  Even the Kurds may conclude that they cannot prevent Maliki from remaining prime minister in these circumstances, and so instead would focus on what they could extract from him for their support.


Both of these scenarios could be problematic for Tehran, but the latter is potentially far more dangerous than the former.  In the first scenario, political paralysis would likely breed frustration on the part of a wide range of Iraqi actors, and those with guns will undoubtedly be tempted to use violence to energize and direct the political process.  It is a recipe for a slow, descent toward greater violence and if, in the end, Maliki were returned to power as prime minister, it would ultimately discredit the moderate Sunni political leaders who have been urging patience on their constituents in expectation that they can achieve Sunni aspirations peacefully and politically.  The silver lining for Tehran is that, in this scenario, Maliki would probably have to rely on Iranian help once again to help him put together a governing coalition.


In the second scenario, however, in which Maliki wins big, the Iranians could face two bigger concerns.  First, the government’s top officials might well see a big victory as a mandate to crush both the Sunni extremists/terrorists and their moderate political leaders, removing them as sources of violence and impediments to their political agenda.  That would doubtless discredit the moderate Sunni leadership and drive Iraq’s Sunni community into the arms of the extremists and terrorists, potentially pumping up the risks and accelerating the onset of a new civil war.  In addition, the government’s senior leadership might well see such a victory as liberating them from Iranian influence since they probably would not need Tehran’s support to put together a governing coalition.


As a final, disquieting thought for Tehran (and Washington), the greatest source of restraint in Iraq today is the election itself, with political figures on all sides arguing for caution before the vote in the expectation that a successful election will enable them to carry through their plans either without violence or with a popular mandate.  Once the election is over, it will no longer serve as a disincentive for greater violence or other extreme courses of action that could provoke violence.


Iraq is one of those places that contradicts the popular notion that Iranian and American interests constitute a zero-sum game.  There, what is bad for Iran is often just as bad for the United States—and what they want to see is often what we want to see as well.  Let’s hope that after the Iraqi elections, all sides can work to help force a new power-sharing arrangement and political compromise that is the only plausible way to avoid either a slow or rapid move to greater instability and violence in Iraq.



Authors

Kenneth M. Pollack


Image Source: © Ho New / Reuters

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Published on April 04, 2014 07:30

February 6, 2014

The Arc of Crisis: Beirut to Baghdad

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February 6, 2014
10:00 AM - 11:30 AM EST

Falk Auditorium
Brookings Institution
1775 Massachusetts Avenue, N.W.
Washington, DC 20036


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The nearly three year old civil war in Syria shows no sign of slowing, despite the start of official talks between the Syrian government and opposition forces. Over 100,000 Syrians have died, and millions are internally displaced or have become refugees. The conflict is also destabilizing the neighborhood, with terrorism and civil strife surging in neighboring Iraq and Lebanon and radical voices becoming stronger throughout the region. Can Syria’s neighbors avoid civil wars of their own? Is the United States doing enough to reduce the risk of a broader conflagration?


On February 6, the Saban Center for Middle East Policy at Brookings examined the rising tension and violence kindled by the Syrian war and offered recommendations on what the United States can do to counteract these trends. Panelists included Brookings Fellow Salman Shaikh, director of the Brookings Doha Center, who participated via videoconference from Doha; Senior Fellow Kenneth M. Pollack; and Roger Hertog Senior Fellow Michael Doran. Brookings Senior Fellow Michael O’Hanlon, director of research for Foreign Policy, provided introductory remarks and moderated the discussion.


[image error] Join the conversation on Twitter using #SyriaCrisis.


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The Arc of Crisis: Beirut to Baghdad

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Published on February 06, 2014 07:00

Kenneth M. Pollack's Blog

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