At stake in Iraq is the future of the entire region Michael Jansen

Opinion, September 2003, www.aljazeerah.info

At stake in Iraq is the future of the entire region

Michael Jansen

Jordan Times, Thursday, September 25, 2003

DURING HIS address to the UN General Assembly, US President George Bush made no mention of the many mistakes made by his administration since it took the wrong-headed decision to wage war on Iraq. Instead of standing humbly before the world body and admitting his administration's failings, Bush kept his head high and demanded the assistance of countries who opposed not only his decision to go to war but also the policies adopted by his occupation regime. Unless Bush admits that major mistakes were made and corrects his errors there is no hope for Iraq.

The decision to go to war, the ultimate cause of Iraq's current difficulties, was totally wrong because the US did not have the military manpower to commit to the Iraqi theatre for both war and occupation, the ineluctable outcome of the military campaign.

US official figures reveal the US military situation at the time Bush decided to launch his military campaign, and today.

The US has a total of 1.4 million men and women under arms, including those in the National Guard and reserves. Of this number, only 480,000 are full-time professionals on active duty. According to Global Security, an authoritative defence research institution, 128,568 soldiers from the Reserves and National Guard are also serving at present. This means that the total current pool of military manpower is 608,568.

Global Security says that 243,000 US soldiers, sailors, Marines and Coast Guards are deployed in combat, peace-keeping and deterrence operations.

There are also 121,000 US military personnel permanently based in Germany, Italy, Britain and Japan, boosting the number of deployed troops to 364,000, 61 per cent of the total. This leaves 244,568 troops at home and available for rotation. The fact that one-quarter of this figure consists of reservists makes it clear that US forces are severely stretched.

The figures reveal that US Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's doctrine of “lite” deployment was born of necessity not of choice. Rumsfeld was correct in assuming that his “lite” deployment of US forces, bolstered by some 20,000 British combat troops on the ground in Iraq, could defeat the Iraqi army, its weapons seriously depleted by two wars over the past 20 years and a dozen years of sanctions. But Rumsfeld was totally wrong when he assumed that only 30,000 US troops would have to remain in Iraq after September. The number of troops currently in Iraq and the Gulf is estimated at 180,000, six times Rumsfeld's projection.

The troop commitment to Iraq alone is said to be between a high of 150,000 and a low of 132,000, of whom 20,000 are reserves.

Before the war, Rumsfeld refused to listen to the advice of Army Chief Eric Shinseki who said that “several hundred thousand” troops would be needed to stabilise the country after a war. Shinseki called for a deployment of 300,000-500,000 troops, the latter figure being in line with the ratio of troops to the populace used when dispatching peace-keeping forces to Kosovo and the former Yugoslavia.

For the US to reach the levels recommended by Shinseki, who was forced into early retirement by Rumsfeld, it would have had to double or treble its commitment of troops. Since the pool of available manpower was — and is — only 244,568 troops, this was, and is, clearly impossible. Without issuing a mass call-up of reservists or recruiting and training thousands of new troops, Rumsfeld simply did not — and still does not — have the soldiers required to do the job.

To make matters worse, the Congressional Budget Office reported that after March 2004 the US could maintain only a force of 38,000-64,000 in Iraq on an indefinite basis. On the one hand, US troops now serving in Iraq have been told they will be going home in April, the majority after a year's deployment.

An extension would be met with a sharp decline in morale and, perhaps even, disaffection. Soldiers' families are becoming increasingly vociferous, dimming Bush's prospects in the 2004 presidential race. On the other hand, the administration is spending nearly $4 billion a month on troops in Iraq, rather than the $1.2 billion a month Congress budgeted for this purpose. While the funding problem has been overcome by Bush's $87 billion appropriations bill for Afghanistan (where the US has 10,000 troops) and Iraq — of which $66 billion goes to the military rather than reconstruction — the shortage of manpower has not, so far, been seriously addressed, except by Bush when he appealed to the UN for troops from other countries to help stabilise the situation in Iraq.

However, the Bush administration seeks to raise fresh foreign troops to replace, rather than bolster, its own soldiers. This means that Rumsfeld and his civilian buddies in the Pentagon fully intend to maintain at the current level the troop commitment to the Iraqi theatre of low-level conflict and chaos. If this is the case, Baghdad has little chance of imposing law and order on criminal elements and resistance fighters who are destabilising the country.

Having allowed Rumsfeld to make the fundamental miscalculation of waging war with “lite” forces, the Bush administration has compounded its errors by leaving the conduct of the occupation in Rumsfeld's hands. This is a recipe for disaster.

The decisions taken by Rumsfeld and his team, including Iraq's chief administrator, L. Paul Bremer III, in the following four areas show why this is so.

On the military plane, the occupation began with anarchy and the wholesale pillage and destruction of Iraq's ministries and civilian, military and oil sector infrastructure. US troops, too few to take on the looters, stood by and watched them strip essential facilities. US forces still cannot secure key institutions, protect electricity installations or halt the smuggling of oil or the sabotage of export pipelines. Iraqi army depots and arsenals remain insecured, allowing militants to use small arms and 500-kilogramme bombs to mount attacks on US troops, the UN and other important targets. While more than 70 US troops have been killed by hostile action since May 1, when Bush declared the war to be over, a stunning 6,000 have been sent back to the States with serious physical wounds and mental trauma.

On the security plane, the decision to disband the Iraqi police, army and intelligence services has left ignorant US commanders and frightened US soldiers in charge of security. According to morgue records, at least 50 Iraqis are murdered every day in the capital and countless others are robbed, raped or kidnapped.

Crude raids on private homes and shootings of Iraqi civilians by trigger-happy US soldiers have boosted Iraqi casualties to 7,798 fatalities and 20,000 wounded, 8,000 in Baghdad alone.

On the political plane, the most dangerous error was to appoint Iraq's interim Governing Council on the basis of the sectarian background of its members. Iraq's ministers were selected according to this criterion and members of Iraq's new army and police force are being chosen on the ratio laid down in the council, of 13 Shiites to every 5 Sunnis and Kurds, and every Christian and Turkoman. A poll published in Al Zaman, Baghdad's most influential daily, shows that 98 per cent of Iraqis strongly oppose the communalisation of government and state structures.

Finally, on the economic plane, privatising Iraq's public utilities and industries and granting foreign investors the right to 100 per cent ownership of firms established in Iraq is seen by the Iraqi business community as a sell-off of the country's assets and a threat to local companies which cannot compete with multinationals seeking to exploit the free-for-all.

At stake in Iraq is the future of the entire region. The collapse of Iraq into warring sectarian statelets could not only destabilise the country's neighbours but also lead to the rise of militant Islamist and nationalist groups with a regional agenda which includes the removal of rulers and governments friendly to the US and the West. If Bush and Rumsfeld remain in charge, Iraq will not become a democratic light unto the Arab world but a core of anarchy spreading chaos throughout the region.

Earth, a planet hungry for peace

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).

The Israeli apartheid (security) wall around Palestinian population centers in the West Bank (Ran Cohen, pmc, 5/24/03).