H. Thomas Hayden |

November 01, 2005

Patterns are beginning to emerge that provide some clues as to what might be expected in the near future. And, I am convinced, that things are not as bad as is being reported in the anti-Administration news media.

It is important to note first and foremost that the insurgency will not easily go away.

The former Ba'athist military and civilian officials under Saddam Hussein, who make up the bulk of the "insurgents," know that their days are numbered as soon as the US leaves and the insurgents have to face their own people. It has been variously estimated that there are 5-10 thousand insurgents. No one actually knows the number of "foreign fighters," the largest number of which are from Al Qaeda. Nevertheless, this is not an unmanageable number for a properly trained security force (police and military personnel).

However, the good news is that the Iraqi security forces, contrary to The New York Times and The Washington Post , are getting better. It is reported that there are c urrently 207,000 Iraqi soldiers and police that are trained and equipped for police or military operations. Most military analysts, not uninformed reporters, agree that there is sufficient leadership to deploy 120 army and police battalions of various degrees of readiness.

If you wait for the US Army readiness reporting system there are only two or three battalions up to speed with an army infantry battalion. However, if you think in Arabic terms, there are over 36 battalions that are trained well enough to undertake security operations without American supervision.

Every day these Iraqi battalions undertake more operations. Iraqi officers and NCOs are gaining more and more practical experience and confidence as they conduct raid or cordon and search operations. As was the case in Vietnam, each Iraqi battalion has a team of up to ten American "advisors," who help train and advise the battalions ­ these advisors do NOT run the battalion. The Americans help with logistics, communications, air strikes, and calling in MedEvacs. Another important item is the training of Iraqi NCOs, which has always been a major weakness with any Arab army and was particularly so with the Saddam Hussein Iraqi army.

The New York Times ran their usual derogatory story lambasting the Pentagon's report on Iraqi deaths in the war. Iraqi civilians and security forces were being killed and wounded by insurgents at a rate of about 26 a day early in 2004, and at a rate of about 40 a day later that year. The rate increased in 2005 to about 51 a day, and by the end of August had jumped to about 63 a day. No figures were provided for the number of Iraqis killed by American-led forces.

The New York Times went on to extrapolate the daily averages over the months from Jan. 1, 2004, to Sept. 16 this year, and found that the results totaled 25,902 Iraqi civilians and security forces killed and wounded by insurgents.

One danger is the rapidly expanding Kurd settlements in Kirkuk, which are effectively re-engineering the demography of northern Iraq, enabling the Kurds to add what ultimately may be hundreds of thousands of voters ahead of planned elections. There seems to be no doubt that the Kurds plan to make the city of Kirkuk -- and its vast oil reserves -- part of an autonomous Kurdistan.

Kirkuk, a city of almost 1 million inhabitants, is home to multiple ethnicities. It has a dark ethnic-cleansing past but has enormous potential for wealth. Kirkuk's exact demographic makeup is disputed by the Arab minority, but Kurds are believed to represent 40-45 percent of the population. The remainder of the residents is composed of Arabs, ethnic Turkmens and a small percentage of Assyrian Christians.

Kurdish political leaders explain that the repatriations are designed to reverse the policies of Saddam Hussein, who replaced thousands of Kurds in the region with Arabs from the south. The Kurds have initiated this action because in they feel the Iraqi government has failed to implement an agreement to return Kurdish residents to their homes.

According to a report in the London Sunday Telegraph , 30 October 2005, "Iran 'Sponsors Assassinations' of Sunni Pilots who Bombed Iran," by Toby Harnden, Aqeel Hussein and Colin Freeman: "Iran is backing a Shia insurgent campaign of systematically assassinating former elite Iraqi air force pilots as part of a covert sectarian war against Sunnis, according to senior politicians in Baghdad."

Former Iraqi senior military officers, overwhelmingly from Saddam Hussein's Sunni sect, are among the most alienated groups in Iraq and form a key element of the Arab nationalist section of the insurgency.

The London Sunday Telegraph went on to report: "Victim's families suspect their names and addresses have been taken from old records at Iraq's ministry of defense. They claim that the killings are the work of the Badr Brigade, the armed wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq, one of the two main Shi-ite parties that dominate Iraq's new government. Although the brigade has officially disarmed, it has recently been blamed for the killing of scores of Sunni clerics in revenge for massacres of Shias carried out by Sunni-backed insurgents.

In another sinister development in Iran, tens of thousands of ethnic Ahwazi Arabs, who populate the area bordering southern Iraq, may be displaced to make way for an expanded military-industrial complex in an area known as the Arvand Free Zone. The zone will cover 60 square miles, including land around the border cities of Abadan and Khorramshahr. The British Ahwazi Friendship Society, a British-Iranian human rights group, claims it will help Iran's Revolutionary Guard militias to influence Shia areas of Iraq."

Iran will continue to be a major obstacle to peace until a secular government is elected and an Iraqi army can defend its borders.

As I have said many times before, there are few parallels between Vietnam and Iraq, except that the political climate in the US will determine the effectiveness of Coalition combat power on the battlefield in Iraq and the seriousness of US foreign policy around the world. The American news media's negative reporting on the Bush administration's policies, combined with the printed and visual images providing a false impressions that the insurgents are stronger than they actually are, is having a very negative effect on public opinion and support for the war.

If we do not see through the completion of the developing constitutional process and the establishment of a viable Iraqi military and security force, and we pull another precipitous Lebanon or Somalia-style bug out, the US is finished as a world power.

We must finish the job that we started or our children and our grandchildren will see a very different standard of living and we most certainly will not have seen the end of war. Or another way to look at it, we can sweat a little now or we can bleed a lot later.