Sun Tzu, The Art of War, III.29: “He whose generals are able and not interfered with by the sovereign will be victorious.”  Tu Yu comments, “Therefore Master Wang said: ‘To make appointments is the province of the sovereign; to decide on battle, that of the general.’ “

In a word-picture of the intransigence and inertia at the Department of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld has agreed to funding for more Iraqi troops.  This is tacit acknowledgement that force projection is not currently large enough.  This might have been an effective strategy a couple of years ago with the defeated but still intact Iraqi army if Paul Bremer had not disbanded them, but it raises the question whether more of the same co-opted troops can quell the violence?

The police are under enormous sway by the Sadr-controlled militia:

“How can we expect ordinary Iraqis to trust the police when we don’t even trust them not to kill our own men?” asked Capt. Alexander Shaw, head of the police transition team of the 372nd Military Police Battalion, a Washington-based unit charged with overseeing training of all Iraqi police in western Baghdad. “To be perfectly honest, I’m not sure we’re ever going to have police here that are free of the militia influence.”

Seventy percent of the Iraqi police force has been infiltrated by militias, primarily the Mahdi Army, according to Shaw and other military police trainers. Police officers are too terrified to patrol enormous swaths of the capital. And while there are some good cops, many have been assassinated or are considering quitting the force.

“None of the Iraqi police are working to make their country better,” said Brig. Gen. Salah al-Ani, chief of police for the western half of Baghdad. “They’re working for the militias or to put money in their pocket.”

U.S. military reports on the Iraqi police often read like a who’s who of the two main militias in Iraq: the Mahdi Army, also known as Jaish al-Mahdi or JAM, and the Badr Organization, also known as the Badr Brigade or Badr Corps.

Similarly, many pragmatic and tactical problems associated with the Iraqi army are surfacing, and we have discussed the fact before that often as not the Iraqi soldiers actually hinder U.S. troop efforts to secure regions.  But the biggest problem with the use of either the U.S. forces or the Iraqi army to secure Iraq is that this is not desired or even allowed in some instances by Prime Minister Maliki.  When the blockade of Sadr city is ended by order of Maliki’s government, al Sadr’s political capital is both confirmed and increased.  Politicians are deciding on strategy, battle plans and tactics rather than the military.  The military is the tail being wagged by the dog.

As recommended by F. J. Bing West in the September-October 2006 edition of Military Review, the “government in Baghdad must drive a wedge between Shiite extremists and the Shiite militias, and similarly split al-Qaeda and the religious extremists from the Sunni “mainstream” insurgents.”

But with the current Parliamentary system of government in place, Maliki will not disarm the Shi’ite militias.  He loses his coalition if he does.  Further, as long as the Sunni population believes itself to be the recipient of the raw end of the deal in a new Iraq, it is difficult to see what the incentive is for the Sunnis to split with al Qaeda, the Fedayeen Saddam and other Baathists.