In a bloody ISIS attack on an Iraqi Army base just north of Fallujah on September 21, upwards of 500 government soldiers perished or disappeared, fleeing into the marshlands, the woods, or to the next base camp four miles away. Few were left behind alive, surrounded by militant fighters who by all accounts were supposed to be less equipped, less trained, and less organized than Iraq’s professional fighting force.
But the Iraqi security forces, into which American taxpayers poured some $25 billion over the course of a decade, had in the span of a summer, crumbled.
While pro-war critics blame the Iraqi military’s failures on the current administration for leaving the country too soon, American veterans and journalists who spoke with TAC say the army was corrupt, incompetent, and unmotivated from the beginning, and that top U.S. officials papered over this inconvenient fact for years in order to protect their commands and maintain public support for the U.S. intervention.
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This is a long way from the rosy picture described by top U.S. generals like David Petraeus and his protégé Raymond Odierno (now Army Chief of Staff) just a few years ago.
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Petraeus told Congress a year earlier, “the performance of many units was solid, especially once they got their footing,” and that over 100 combat battalions were capable of taking the lead, “albeit with coalition support.” He continued in his April 2008 testimony to describe “an increasingly robust Iraqi-run training base” that “enabled the Iraqi Security Forces to grow by over 133,000 soldiers and police over the past 16 months,” with “an additional 50,000 Iraqi soldiers and 16 Army and Special Operations battalions” expected by the end of the year.
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“Claims by Petraeus, Dempsey, and other U.S. generals of Iraqi effectiveness were always exaggerated or false,” said (Ret.) Col. Doug Macgregor, an author and Army consultant who served in the first Gulf War. “The generals were simply cultivating their Bush administration sponsors in pursuit of further promotion.”
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Commands were bought and sold, and subordinates were fleeced. According to a recent interview with author Patrick Cockburn, the going rate for a colonel’s position in the army is $200,000—$2,000,000 to be a division commander. Then one spends the rest of the time demanding grease from everyone else.
“They have no interest in fighting anybody; they have interest in making money out of their investment,” Cockburn told Tariq Ali in late September.
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Most of all, however, loyalty was the biggest factor in the Iraqi failures. After their own families, the soldiers and leaders were loyal to their tribes and then their religion, he said. “Iraq as a nation falls at the bottom of the list. Combine this with lack of cohesion, unity, loyalty, and camaraderie among themselves, and you have an organization that will disintegrate under pressure,” he wrote.
Set Up for Failure
There is enough blame to go around, said Maj. Donald Vandergriff (Ret.), who has done contract work training Afghan security forces. He said the U.S. made the same mistakes in Afghanistan and Iraq that it did in Vietnam over 40 years ago. “I’ve said all along, we keep trying to make these forces in our own image,” he said, and “they don’t take ownership because the system was forced upon them.”
The technology, the logistics, the modern air power, the intelligence—were and are all foreign to them. U.S. trainers come and go on short rotations, and there is no consistency, no ability to learn the foreign culture and understand the gaps. “Again we have to say, what kind of force would these people buy into? What kind of military can they afford and accept? Instead we force our own grand, narcissistic vision.”
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Originally Posted by Pericles
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