Why Iraq Has No Army

Though I continue to believe we are obligated to work to improve the situation in Iraq, at this point without regard to our national interest. Bush and the Neo-cons made a mess, now we must take responsibility for our mistakes.
The conventional approach advocated by Bush is to "stay the course" and plan on staying for decades to rebuild Iraq. Clearly, the American people won't wait that long and there is real question as to whether we are still part of the problem rather than part of the solution. The Bush Administration has been pursuing a unilateral course. That policy has failed miserably. Now we must try something else.
Gary Boatwright at Seeing the Forest quotes James Fallows in his article in The Atlantic that effectively outlines the conventional approach and why it won't work.

"On the current course we will have two options," I was told by a Marine lieutenant colonel who had recently served in Iraq and who prefers to remain anonymous. "We can lose in Iraq and destroy our army, or we can just lose. . . . In Vietnam we just lost," the officer said. "This would be losing with consequences."

Bush's Iraq war was lost the day that Iraq's Army was dismissed.

But here is the view generally accepted in the military: the war's planners, military and civilian, took the postwar transition too much for granted; then they made a grievous error in suddenly dismissing all members of the Iraqi army; and then they were too busy with other emergencies and routines to think seriously about the new Iraqi army.

This is the fundamental reason why America has already lost the Iraq war:

"No modern army using conventional tactics has ever defeated an insurgency," Terence Daly told me. Conventional tactics boil down to killing the enemy. At this the U.S. military, with unmatchable firepower and precision, excels. "Classic counterinsurgency, however, is not primarily about killing insurgents; it is about controlling the population and creating a secure environment in which to gain popular support," Daly says.

From the vast and growing literature of counterinsurgency come two central points. One, of course, is the intertwining of political and military objectives: in the long run this makes local forces like the Iraqi army more potent than any foreigners; they know the language, they pick up subtle signals, they have a long-term stake. The other is that defeating an insurgency is the very hardest kind of warfare. The United States cannot win this battle in Iraq. It hopes the Iraqis can.

[...]As a matter of unavoidable logic, the United States must therefore choose one of two difficult alternatives: It can make the serious changes—including certain commitments to remain in Iraq for many years—that would be necessary to bring an Iraqi army to maturity. Or it can face the stark fact that it has no orderly way out of Iraq, and prepare accordingly.

I’ve made offhand replies to any number of comments about the differing plans of the Democratic warmongers for “stabilizing” Iraq that they all sounded like terrific fifty years plans. After seeing the nuts and bolts of “stabilizing” Iraq, I think fifty years may be on the low end. I also believe that Bush and the neo-cons knew exactly what they were doing when they dissolved Iraq’s Army. They didn’t want America to leave Iraq for fifty years and they took the one step that guaranteed the United States could not withdraw from Iraq with honor.

There are several hopeful signs that the Bush Iraq policy has changed. Juan Cole outlines the indications.

It is the return of Realism in Washington foreign policy. You need the Iranians, as I maintain, for a soft landing in Iraq? So you do business with the Iranians. This opening may help explain why Ahmad Chalabi went to Tehran before he went to Washington, and why he was given such a high-level (if unphotographed) reception in Washington.

Likewise, it helps explain the Cairo Conference sponsored by the Arab League, the results of which were an effort to reach out to the Sunni Arab guerrillas. The Iraqi government even recognized that it was legitimate for the guerrillas to blow up US troops! This is a startling admission for a government under siege with very few allies. But it recategorizes the Sunni Arab leaders from being terrorists to being a national liberation force. You could imagine dealing with, and bringing in from the cold, mere nationalists. Terrorists are poison.