Cordesman on Iraq
Anthony Cordesman
Center for Strategic and International Studies
“The Iraq War and Lessons for Counterinsurgency”, March 16, 2006
Cordesman has been publishing papers on the Iraq war as it has progressed. He sometimes appears on the PBS News hour as a guest speaking on military affairs.
He observes that insurgent attacks are concentrated in four Iraq’s 18 provinces. These four, however, contain 43% of the population. The most rural provinces are comparatively quiet. So insurgency is concentrated in certain areas, but these are the key areas (including Baghdad). The Republican claim that “most of the country is calm” is true geographically, but not really the point.
Cordesman observes that economic reconstruction is not going well. Oil production is still below pre-war levels - and prewar Iraq was under sanctions. There has been about $20 billion spent on reconstruction and we have almost nothing to show for it. It’s true that lots of new schools have been built, but he points out that counts of new schools, etc. are irrelevant if they aren’t equipped and aren’t used, which is often the case. So much for another talking point about how the “good news is never reported.”
As for the insurgency, Cordesman argues again, as he has before, and has anyone who has ever studied guerilla war, that our technology is not the cure-all we think it is. “The insurgency has effectively found a form of low technology ‘swarm’ tactics that is superior to what the high technology coalition and Iraqi forces have been a le to find as counter.” (p.9). The US is making the traditional mistake - thinking we are superior because we have superior technology. Cordesman contends that the entire cost of all the IEDs exploded against us could well be less than the cost of one AH-1S (Cobra attack helicopter) (p.23) This illustrates so well why our wealth, technology, firepower has proven to be so ineffective.
As for the overall battle plan, Cordesman writes, “Much has been made of the intelligence failures in assessing Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. These failures pale to insignificance, however, in comparison with the failure of US policy and military planners to accurately assess the overall situation in Iraq before engaging in war, and for the risk of insurgency if the US did not carry out an effective mix of nation building and stability operations. This failure cannot be made the responsibility of the intelligence community. It was the responsibility of the President, the Vice President, the national Security Advisor, the Secretary of State, the Secretary of Defense, and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs … The nation’s leading policymakers chose to act on a limited and highly ideological view of Iraq that planed for one extremely optimistic definition of success, but not for risk or failure.” P. 12
While Iraq is not Vietnam, the US is making many of the same mistakes it made in Vietnam. One of those key mistakes is to stake your reputation on some marginal strategic assist - because then you cannot allow yourself to loose or withdraw before completion. Vietnam was not a vital assist of the United States, and neither was a contained, de-fanged Saddam. But once the Bush gang turned him into a monster, they had to get him.