Articles by Herschel Smith

It has become clear that the Multinational Force command is clear and confident of Iranian involvement in Iraq at the highest levels.  On July 2, 2007, U.S. Army Brig. Gen. Kevin J. Bergner had some words for the world concerning what we knew about Iranian meddling by special groups of Iranian combatants in Iraq.

“These Special Groups are militia extremists, funded, trained and armed by external sources…specifically by Iranian Revolutionary Guards Corps Quds Force operatives,

In Guardsmen Attacked and Overrun at U.S. Border we discussed the embarrassing and dangerous rout of U.S. troops by heavily armed criminals at the border around January of 2007, and how, while the use of the troops didn’t violate Posse Comitatus, they were not armed (they didn’t have ammunition for their weapons) and had only assisted the border guards in clerical and maintenance duties.

After calling for the deployment of the National Guard to the borders by so many television pundits, it was difficult for the country to understand why their soldiers had been routed by drug gangs.  There is something far deeper at work here, and it will prevent the effective closure of the border no matter how many miles of fence is constructed and no matter how many border guards or National Guardsmen are deployed to the border.  Border Guards and the Armed Forces will behave in accordance with RUF, or rules for the use of force.

In Tennessee v. Garner, 471 U.S. 1 (1985), the SCOTUS (White, Brennan, Marshall, Blackmun, Powell and Stevens, with O’Conner and Rehnquist dissenting) weighed the use of deadly force for the apprehension of criminals:

The intrusiveness of a seizure by means of deadly force is unmatched. The suspect’s fundamental interest in his own life need not be elaborated upon. The use of deadly force also frustrates the interest of the individual, and of society, in judicial determination of guilt and punishment. Against these interests are ranged governmental interests in effective law enforcement.  It is argued that overall violence will be reduced by encouraging the peaceful submission of suspects who know that they may be shot if they flee.

The decision would change the face of law enforcement across the nation (even for those police departments who had already implemented something like the SCOTUS decision into policy):

Without in any way disparaging the importance of these goals, we are not convinced that the use of deadly force is a sufficiently productive means of accomplishing them to justify the killing of nonviolent suspects. Cf. Delaware v. Prouse, supra, at 659. The use of deadly force is a self-defeating way of apprehending a suspect and so setting the criminal justice mechanism in motion. If successful, it guarantees that that mechanism will not be set in motion. And while the meaningful threat of deadly force might be thought to lead to the arrest of more live suspects by discouraging escape attempts, 9 the presently available evidence does not support this thesis.

Notice here that the SCOTUS takes an irrelevant adventure into unscientific and anecdotal evidence to bolster their decision rather than focusing on the case constitutionality or lack thereof.  Continuing:

The use of deadly force to prevent the escape of all felony suspects, whatever the circumstances, is constitutionally unreasonable. It is not better that all felony suspects die than that they escape. Where the suspect poses no immediate threat to the officer and no threat to others, the harm resulting from failing to apprehend him does not justify the use of deadly force to do so.

What the decision means is that a police officer (and substitute here border guard) cannot use his weapon to apprehend; he can only use it for self defense in the case of an armed assailant who intends to do harm.  Apprehending must be performed without deadly force.  Notwithstanding the video of looters who were ignorant of the law being detained by police officers in New Orleans after the flood, the police cannot use their weapon to detain.  Those looters could have fled the scene if they were able to escape physical, bodily restraint by the officer.  They only stopped because they incorrectly thought that the officers could have used deadly force to detain them.

The gang members who regularly cross the southern border are not so ignorant of the law.  This legal criteria is applied without exception to non-citizens who have crossed over the U.S. border from Mexico.  Calls for sending the National Guard to the border are ostensibly a call for militarization of the border.  In fact, the administration, border guards and military forces of the U.S. know better, and thus the deployment of Guardsmen becomes a shell game with national security.  It is done knowing full well that it will have no effect on border security.

Big business has created a situation in which national security is being sacrificed for the sake of stock prices.  The logical connections go as follows.  The use of illegals to perform work in the U.S. is big business.  The corporate class has found a way to create a new slave class by paying lower wages to illegals while forcing the middle class to shoulder the burden for medical, social, language, educational and other welfare programs for this new slave class.  This new slave class makes an already porous border even worse, and helps to break a system that is woefully unprepared and improperly tooled to track illegals in the country.  This system breakage then redounds to further lack of control over potential terrorists who would cross over the border.

If you doubt that the new slave class is big business for corporations, the video below might convince you otherwise.

Many things can be done about the current debacle that is the border with Mexico.  The SCOTUS could revisit Tennessee v. Garner.  But will they?  The congress could enact legislation that militarizes the border (or at least provide more authority to border guards) and, by their constitutional authority, order the courts not to adjudicate the law.  But will they?  Miles of border fence could be constructed and manned by border guards with non-lethal weapons.  But will America do this?  We could imprison corporate executives who hire illegals.  But will we?  Will we institute all, some or none of these changes?  Without having a national conversation about the entire scope of the problem and getting serious about the hard work of securing the border, sending more Guardsmen to the border will not just be ineffective.  It will prolong the problem and prevent the national conversation from taking place.  And talk about “comprehensive immigration reform” (S. 1639) is a ruse and usurper of a real national conversation about securing the border.

In Settling with The Enemy we discussed the turn of many of the former Sunni insurgents, including the 1920 Revolution Brigades, against al Qeada and in favor of cooperation with U.S. forces.  This Anbar Province model has taken root to the Northeast in the Diyala Province.

BAQOUBA, Iraq — Two months ago, a dozen Sunni insurgents — haggard, hungry and in handcuffs — stepped tentatively into a U.S.-Iraqi combat outpost near Baqouba and asked to speak to the commander: “We’re out of ammunition, but we want to help you fight al-Qaida.”

Now hundreds of fighters from the 1920s Revolution Brigades, an erstwhile Sunni insurgent group, work as scouts and gather intelligence for the 10,000-strong American force in the fifth day of its mission to remove al-Qaida gunmen and bomb makers from the Diyala provincial capital.

Little so well illustrates the Middle Eastern dictum: “The enemy of my enemy is my friend.”

And as it struggles in the raging heat and violence of central Iraq, the U.S. military appears to have bought into the tactic in its struggle to pull what victory it can from the increasingly troubled American mission in Iraq, under congressional pressure for a troop pullout and a presidential election campaign already in the minds of voters.

Each U.S. Army company in Baqouba, an hour’s drive northeast of Baghdad, has a scout from the Brigades, others have become a ragtag intelligence network and still others fight, said Capt. Ricardo Ortega, a 34-year-old Puerto Rico native of the 2nd Infantry Division.

The Army has given some of the one-time insurgents special clothing — football-style jerseys with numbers on the chest — to mark them as American allies.

U.S. commanders say help from the Brigades operatives was key to planning and executing the Baqouba operation, one of a quartet of U.S. offensives against al-Qaida on the flanks of the Iraqi capital.

The informants have given the American troops exact coordinates of suspected al-Qaida safe houses, with details down to the color of the gate out front, said Lt. Col. Avanulas Smiley, 40, commander of the 1st Battalion, 23rd Infantry Regiment and a Tacoma, Wash., native.

Most of the Brigades members, whom U.S. officials call “concerned local nationals,” hail from eastern Baqouba, while the bulk of the fighting has so far raged in western Baqouba.

But with contacts among fellow Sunni fighters on the city’s west side, they have fed American soldiers critical information about al-Qaida positions.

The use of militias will be necessary in the future in part because the Iraqi army is not ready for performance of duties upon turnover of control.

American military commanders now seriously doubt that Iraqi security forces will be able to hold the ground that U.S. troops are fighting to clear _ gloomy predictions that strike at the heart of Washington’s key strategy to turn the tide in Iraq.

Several senior American officers have warned in recent days that Iraqi soldiers and police are still incapable of maintaining security on their own in the most crucial areas, including Baghdad and the recently reclaimed districts around Baqouba to the north.

Iraqi units are supposed to be moving into position to take the baton from the Pentagon. This was the backbone of the plan President Bush announced in January when he ordered to five more U.S. brigades, or about 30,000 soldiers, to Iraq. The goal is to reduce the violence to a level where the Iraqis can cope so that Americans can begin to go home.

But that outcome is looking ever more elusive. The fear is that U.S. troops will pay for territory with their lives _ only to have Iraqi forces lose control once the Americans move on.

Unless Iraqis can step up, the United States will face tough choices in months ahead as pressure mounts in the Democratic-controlled Congress to draw down the nearly 160,000-strong U.S. force.

Iraqi forces may be able to handle security in the Kurdish north and parts of the Shiite south. But that would face huge challenges in Baghdad and surrounding provinces where Sunni insurgents are deeply entrenched. The Americans then would face the dilemma of maintaining substantial forces in Iraq for years _ perhaps a politically untenable option _ or risk the turmoil spreading to other parts of the Middle East.

“The challenge now is: How do you hold onto the terrain you’ve cleared?” said Brig. Gen. Mick Bednarek, the operations chief of the current offensive in Baqouba, where Sunni insurgents have taken root in recent months. He said this week that U.S. forces have control of much of Baqouba.

“You have to do that shoulder-to-shoulder with Iraqi security forces. And they’re not quite up to the job yet,” Bednarek said.

The Brigadier General is being gratuitous in saying that “they’re not quite up to the job yet.”  They are nowhere near ready for turnover.  This assessment doesn’t differ from that of David Danelo in his stunning piece in Parade Magazine in March of 2007, but one must study Danelo’s piece to understand how fully and remarkably different the Iraqi army is from a disciplined Western army.

This difference is cultural, and has to do with a number of things: officer elitism and bifurcation from their troops, mistreatment of enlisted men, lack of an effective non-commissioned officer corps, educational problems, and many other things.  An important study was published entitled Why Arabs Lose Wars, by Norvell B. De Atkine.  The introduction is a worthy tease for the reader.

ARABIC-SPEAKING ARMIES have been generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s. Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers. Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war against the Kurds. The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre. And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many factors — economic, ideological, technical — but perhaps the most important has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from producing an effective military force.

This study should be required reading for all officers and NCOs, and serves to remind us of just why we are where we are in Iraq.  It is significant that a major tenet upon which the U.S. strategy was built, i.e., capture the terrain and turn it over to Iraqi forces, has become unhinged.  The reasons for this are deeply rooted and cause the problem to be intractable in the short term.  The use of militias and erstwhile insurgents in not just an expediency.  It is an adaptation and adjustment, and is necessary to hold ground that U.S. forces have captured.

My coverage of rules of engagement has been sweeping and continues to get traffic, especially The NCOs Speak on Rules of Engagement, and Rules of Engagement and Pre-Theoretical Commitments. I have argued for more robust rules of engagement, but I have nowhere argued that the lack of robust ROE is felt throughout Iraq in every unit and in every engagement. In the comments section to the later article, I responded to Charlie B. of OpFor that:

… those individuals who have had good experiences with the ROE will tend to side with you, while those individuals who have been in specific circumstances where the ROE have let them down will tend to agree with my article (some to greater and some to lesser degrees).

Second, I still believe that our pre-theoretical commitments determine the outcome of our thought. For instance, suppose that we began the discussion by asking the question, “why does such a thing as ROE need to exist?

In U.S. Presses for Amnesty for Insurgents, October of 2006, I discussed the press towards a broad-based amnesty program for the Sunni insurgents, observing that:

This is without question an attempt to quell the violence in al Anbar, and the hope appears to be that the tribes in al Anbar will root out al Qaeda (and other foreign elements), while a deal with the former Saddam loyalists will end the bloodshed associated with the insurgency.

But a deal will without doubt create many personal and emotional wounds with mothers and fathers of Soldiers, Airmen, Sailors and Marines who have died in Iraq fighting the insurgency.  There are still difficult times ahead.  Either these emotional wounds are created – probably never to heal – or the fight continues, with an uncertain end.

More than simple amnesty, U.S. forces are making allies of former insurgents, in spite of the unease that this creates with the Shi’a and Kurds.

Shi’ite and Kurdish officials expressed deep reservations yesterday about the new US military strategy to partner with Sunni Arab groups to help defeat the militant organization Al Qaeda in Iraq.

“They are trusting terrorists,” said Ali Al Adeeb, a prominent Shi’ite lawmaker who was among many to question the loyalty of the Sunni groups. “They are trusting people who have previously attacked American forces and innocent people. They are trusting people who are loyal to the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

Throughout Iraq, a growing number of Sunni groups profess to have turned against Al Qaeda in Iraq because of its indiscriminate killing and repressive version of Islam. In some areas, these groups have provided information to Americans about Al Qaeda members or the deadly explosives that target the soldiers.

The collaboration has progressed furthest in the western province of Anbar, where US military commanders enlisted the help of Sunni tribal leaders to funnel their kinsmen into the police force by the thousands. In other areas, Sunnis have not been fully incorporated into the security services and exist as local militias.

Some of these groups, believed to be affiliated with such organizations as the Islamic Army or the 1920 Revolution Brigades, have received weapons and ammunition, usually through the Iraqi military, as well as transportation, food, handcuffs, and direct assistance from US soldiers. In Baghdad’s Amiriyah neighborhood, a local group of Sunnis, the Baghdad Patriots, were driven around earlier this month in American and Iraqi vehicles and given approval by US forces to arrest suspected Al Qaeda in Iraq members.

In Fallujah, Regimental Combat Team 6 is training former insurgents to fight al Qaeda.

Marine Sgt. Tony Storey doesn’t like to think about what-ifs as he watches the young Iraqis he is helping to train take target practice. He recalls one man who was a natural with his AK47.

“Where’d you learn to shoot like that?” Storey asked.

“Insurgent,” the man said with a smile.

“Was he joking?” Storey asked while surveying the 50 men from the Albu Issa tribe firing their weapons at a distant target. “I don’t know.”

For the men of Regimental Combat Team 6, who are training members of Anbar province tribes to fight Al Qaeda, Storey’s question isn’t simple curiosity. Less than a year ago, the tribes viewed Al Qaeda in Iraq as an ally in their effort to push Americans out of the province.

Now, the tribes see Al Qaeda as a threat to their society and their businesses — many of them dependent on illegal smuggling — and they’ve turned to the U.S. military for help.

This model is also being implemented in the Diyala province.  The alliance goes to the point of arming the Sunnis to manage security in their own geographical areas.  After some aborted starts at a coherent reply to this, Prime Minister Maliki who initially repudiated this idea later claimed credit for it.

Maliki, representing the Shi’a, doesn’t appreciate the new alliance with and arming of the Sunni no matter what he claims, and there is a tense relationship between him and General Petraeus.  But the point goes far deeper than interpersonal relationships between U.S. generals and Iraqi politicians.  The alliance being implemented in Iraq is a high-risk / high payoff strategy that must be successful if Iraq is to be pacified, Maliki’s objections notwithstanding.

When the U.S. forces begin to stand down and withdraw, to remove the U.S. men and materiel in Iraq will take more than a year.  Withdrawal will be slow and deliberate.  Furthermore, it is likely that complete withdrawal will not happen for a long time.  More likely is that the U.S. will re-deploy to the North in Kurdistan, assisting the Iraqi army and police with kinetic operations upon request, while also serving as a stabilizer for the Middle East and border security for Iraq.

But it is just as likely that U.S. forces will not be performing constabulary operations for much longer.  The counterinsurgency field manual, FM 3-24, was written based on the presupposition that the U.S. has the ten to twelve years necessary to conduct the classical counterinsurgency campaign.  This was never true, is not true now, and will not be true in the future.  Military needs aside, the public – by the power of the vote – has the right and prerogative within the American system to make the policy decision on the conduct of war.  Asking the American pubic to support a counterinsurgency campaign over three consecutive presidential administrations is expecting the impossible, no matter how well the administration communicates the conditions of the campaign to the public.

All wars must end.  The end of Operation Iraqi Freedom necessitates settling with the enemy, a high stakes strategy, absent which there is only loss of the counterinsurgency campaign.

 Sun Tzu — “If I am able to determine the enemy’s dispositions while at the same time I conceal my own then I can concentrate and he must divide.  And if I concentrate while he divides, I can use my entire strength to attack a fraction of his