Iraq, from a Marine's perspective

[Joe Hoya]

A buddy and astoundingly bright fellow Hoya of mine has been in Iraq serving in the Marines. It's an interesting perspective (written like four months ago) because it's much more than you ever get about the situation from news outlets.

Please keep the discussion civil so I don't have to delete this thread.

This is the best, most comprehensive thing I have been able to write so far to try to explain Iraq as I have come to see it. Obviously my opinions and views are directly informed by my experience here as a Marine infantry officer. However, as always, the opinions expressed here are entirely my own, and should absolutely not be understood to represent the military, the Marine Corps, or anything or anyone else.

In the past few weeks, a series of events in Iraq have coalesced around the fifth anniversary of the invasion. America passed the 4,000 KIA mark. Iraqi security forces and the Mehdi Army clashed violently in Basra and Baghdad. At home, our three presidential candidates are forwarding starkly different plans for the future of America in Iraq. And in a few short days, General Petraeus will testify to Congress on his assessment of the success of the surge.

For the past months I have patrolled the streets of my tiny corner of Al Anbar province with my Marine rifle platoon. I have spoken with hundreds, probably thousands of Iraqis - policemen, sheikhs, farmers, school teachers, taxi drivers, the unemployed. With every mile I've trudged under the stark Iraqi sun, with every new insight I've gained into these people and our operations here, my assessment of the likelihood of a free, prosperous, democratic Iraq has steadily waned.

Listening to the debate on Iraq back home, or what passes for debate at least, I have become convinced that the majority of Americans, pundits, and politicians simply do not understand what is going on here. I want to try to explain what I have seen here, and why I do not believe that the American experiment in Iraqi nation building is destined for success in the foreseeable future.

1. Iraqi National Character

Discussions of national character fell out of style sometime last century. They seem to smack of a fatalism not in keeping with Western notions of self-determination, and oftentimes are more than a little tinged with racism. Whenever one generalizes, by definition one makes characterizations that are not entirely true for every single person. So understand that when I say Iraqis, while I don't mean literally every single Iraqi citizen - there are always exceptions - I mean, roughly, "more than 95% of the Iraqis who I have met."

That disclaimer out of the way, there is no way to sugarcoat this, so I will just state it bluntly: Iraqis are not fit for democratic self-rule. Iraqis are lazy, complacent, dishonest, corrupt, and opportunistic. There is a basic lack of understanding or interest in capitalism, the mainstay of democracy. Iraqis do not conceive of money as something to be made through hard work and economic development. Instead, it is something to be taken, or gained, in a sort of zero-sum competition. Money comes either from the government, or from the American occupiers. The very few ambitious Iraqis I have seen, are not ambitious to build businesses or generate sustained economic growth - they are ambitious in their efforts to win money from American contracts. When people do get money, they hoard it. Maybe there are banks in Baghdad, but out here in the smaller towns there is no concept of banking. People literally carry their life savings in their pockets.

Everywhere I go, almost every Iraqi I meet is looking for a handout. The police want the Americans to pay them. The farmers want the Americans to build them irrigation ditches. The sheikhs want the Americans to give them money for... something, I haven't quite figured out what. Everyone wants us to fix their schools, pave their roads, build them soccer fields. There is absolutely no sense whatsoever of communal responsibility for community problems. The best illustration of this confronts me every single time I step outside of the wire: there is a tremendous amount of garbage and filth piled in the streets. Iraqi women maintain spotless homes, but just outside of the four corners of their own home, Iraqis could care less that there are years worth of garbage everywhere.

Simple ideas of political expression are utterly foreign and incomprehensible to them. For example, the police never get paid, doubtless because of corruption somewhere in the Ministry of the Interior. When I try to explain to them ideas like starting a police union, demonstrating, writing letters to the editor of Baghdad newspapers, or voting for a new representative in Parliament, I'm greeted by blank stares or, at best, laughs. Now democratic habits are not intuitive to a nation accustomed to dictatorship, and Iraqis could possibly learn them over time - if they wanted to. But what I am trying to make clear is that there is simply no motivation, no desire, no impetus to take charge and change things. They just want money given to them, for free.

Iraqis are not people who just need a little help to get back on their feet. They are the kind of people who have no reservation about begging for a fish every single day - and who are insulted at the suggestion that they could learn to fish for themselves.

Perhaps most disheartening of all, I see little prospect for generational change here. The children take after their parents. Give an Iraqi kid a pencil, and he will hide it behind his back with one hand while he reaches out his other hand and says Mister, can I just have one pencil? You gave them to everyone else, can't I have one? When your hands are full of candy, as you reach out to give it to one kid, another kid steals out of your pockets. I love kids more than any guy I know, and even I have come to avoid interacting with these selfish Iraqi children.

In short - Iraqis are not the kind of people who make you want to help them. If more Americans realized how awful these people really are, I strongly suspect that we might be less interested in their future.

2. Iraqi Political Instability

A year ago America initiated the surge, and violence dropped. But this is Iraq, and of course things are never that straightforward. Several things happened at once: Muqtada al Sadr, for reasons unexplained, announced a cease-fire for his Mehdi Army. Al Qaeda in Iraq overplayed its hand in Al Anbar and began targeting sheikhs and using chlorine gas in several attacks. This led the sheikhs in Al Anbar to decide, collectively, that al Qaeda was a bigger enemy than the US occupiers, and they began to encourage their tribesmen to resist al Qaeda. Meanwhile, American military leadership made two tactical decisions that reaped substantial security benefits.

First, they began paying former insurgents - initially called Concerned Local Citizens, recently re-named the "Sons of Iraq" - to stand post in their neighborhoods and guard against al Qaeda attacks. This dealt an Qaeda a double blow - not only were its ranks depleted when foot soldiers deserted to take advantage of a regular paycheck, but suddenly it could no longer operate with impunity in the face of a 90,000+ strong civilian watch.

Secondly, the Americans went in to Baghdad and erected miles and miles of concrete walls between Sunni and Shia neighborhoods. Iraq is, for the most part, culturally segregated. Sunnis live in the West. Shia live in the East. Kurds live up north. The only place where Sunnis and Shias are mixed in any great number is Baghdad and the surrounding areas, and that's where most of the ethnic killing was taking place. The walls were an unpopular, heavy-handed, and not particularly democratic solution to the problem of cultural conflict, but the bottom line is that they worked. People who had been killing each other on a daily basis were no longer able to shoot at each other.

While the Americans were doing a bang-up job of improving the security picture and giving the Iraqis the breathing room they needed to get their political act together, the Iraqis did, essentially, nothing. The much-ballyhooed reconciliation legislation allowing former Baathists access to political positions is barely worth the paper it's printed on. I'll talk about this more later, but this is not the real problem in Iraqi politics. The real problem, the root cause of all of Iraq's other political ills, is corruption. Letting the Baathists back into the ring just opens up the corruption competition to more players. And that's all that the legislature accomplished, in a whole year. Iraq is just as backwards, politically divided and corrupt as it was a year ago, before the security gains.

The recent fighting in Basra showed just how fragile these security gains are - and just how incapable the Iraqis are of maintaining them without American assistance. In fighting against the Mehdi Army in Basra, desertion rates among Iraqi soldiers and officers were between 10 and 30 percent. Just think about that for a moment. Mehdi Army soldiers went around Baghdad with impunity, intimidating high-ranking Iraqi Army officers in their own homes, burning them down if they did not agree to stay out of the fight. Maliki talked a big game about pursuing the Mehdi Army "until the end," and then less than a week later he caved in to Sadr's demand that he quit arresting Mehdi Army criminals. A year after the surge began, Iraqi politics are still held captive to the whims of an anti-American cleric. As soon as he decides to end his cease-fire, most of the security gains will go up in smoke, just like Basra's neighborhoods did last week.

The gains from the Americans' Sons of Iraq initiative (known in the American military by its transliterated Arabic acronym, SAI) are also precariously fragile. In a way, SAI is a victim of its own success. Because of Iraq's failure to grasp capitalism, unemployment here is rampant. The SAI initiative made it theoretically possible for any Iraqi male - illiterate, unskilled, whatever - to get a paycheck. Importantly, they didn't even have to do physical labor, which most Iraqi males despise. All a man had to do was stand in the shade holding a rifle, and the Americans would pay him. It was just a little bit too good to be true. And so, predictably, the number of men wanting to get on the SAI dole quickly overtook the Americans' willingness to pay.

There are no hard numbers, but I can tell you anecdotally that probably less than 10-20% of current SAI post-standers are getting paid. The rest of them hope that if they keep coming to work the Americans are eventually going to pay them. They put up new checkpoints all the time that have absolutely no security value, whose only purpose is to attempt to convince the Americans that they should pay the post-standers. I can not tell you how many times - thousands, at least - I have been asked by Iraqi police and SAI members when the Americans are going to start paying them. Many of them have worked for nearly a year with no pay. That in itself is a testament to the total lack of economic opportunity around here.

Eventually, sooner or later, these unpaid SAI members are going to realize that we are never going to pay them, and then they are going to go back to the unskilled, labor-unintensive job they had before - planting IEDs for al Qaeda. It's just a matter of time. The only alternate solution is for America to put practically every single Iraqi man on the dole. Forever.

The other often glossed over problem with SAI is that we are creating, paying, and encouraging the formation of tribal militias. A lot of tribes really hate each other. At the very least, they view each other as competitors for limited resources. On top of that, just because the sheikhs oppose al Qaeda now does not at all mean that they are pro-US, pro-Western, pro-democratic, or liberal in any way. Some of them are. Most of them are not. Especially for a lot of Iraqi women, as soon as the Americans turn their attention elsewhere, it isn't going to matter whether the rifle is being held by an al Qaeda soldier or an SAI man - the level of oppression is going to be the same. By encouraging these tribal militias, we're just further priming the Iraqi civil powderkeg.

3. Iraqi Corruption

It is clear that Iraq's civil fate in large part hinges on its economic fate. It is universally true, anywhere in the world, that a lack of economic opportunity leads to a host of social ills. In a place where the average young male has almost literally nothing to lose, it isn't hard for al Qaeda to find a receptive audience for its sales pitch. Despite its vast oil reserves, what Iraq needs is an economic shot in the arm, a Marshall Plan for the 21st century. Unfortunately, economic development in Iraq is hamstrung by a pervasive culture of corruption. It is impossible for me to overstate this problem. It is apparent to me that right now, in Iraq, the biggest obstacle to development is not terrorism, but public corruption.

Iraqis can not be trusted with money. Corruption is a normal, routine, expected part of Iraqi political and economic life. In the mornings, I meet with Iraqi Police who complain that they aren't getting paid by the Ministry of the Interior because they can't afford the $300 a head to get on the payroll. In the afternoons, I go watch those same IPs extorting "illegal" bribes from drivers to cross a bridge. In the evening, we talk in our company meetings about SAI pay rosters full of phantom names, people trying to get paychecks for people who don't exist. The whole point of trying to get a government position, from what I can tell, is to get on the corruption gravy train. There is no sense of civic pride or duty. There is only the opportunity to quit being the sucker at the bottom of the corruption food chain.

Now, Americans want to help Iraq develop economically, partly because we are just good people and partly because we sense that this is ultimately the way out of our mess here. American development projects can either go to Halliburton or to an Iraqi contractor. As the years have passed, the trend has shifted towards giving projects an "Iraqi face." Ideally, this would mean a project paid a double dividend - first in the jobs and wealth created in the process of construction, and then again in the actual functioning of the completed project.

For instance - the land around here, on the banks of the Euphrates, is pretty decent for farming. It needs to be irrigated though, and for that, you need big canals and big pumps. In a world free of corruption, Americans would offer money for the construction of the pumps and canals. Iraqi contractors would bid, the best bid would win, and the contractor would go to work. He'd employ a lot of people in the process of building a good canal, which would then lead to productivity gains for hundreds of local farmers. Everyone would benefit. Five years in, we still don't understand Iraq or the culture here, because we still act like this is how the process actually works.

But I'm not making this example up. Here's what really happened, when the Americans decided to spend a hundred thousand dollars to fix a canal and build a pumphouse here in my village:

The last unit needed a way to legitimately hand out contracts, so they created a city council. There wasn't one before - the concept simply did not exist. The city council was populated by whoever would join it. In practice, this meant that the city council was filled up by people who realized that this was a great way to make money off of the Americans. When it came time to give away the contract, it of course went to a brother or a cousin of someone on the city council. On paper, this was a huge success for the last unit - they had created a local government, and that government was helping to develop the local economy. But what really happened was that the brother or the cousin went to the old pumphouse, put a new coat of paint on the old pumps that had been there since the early '80s, and pocketed the cash. The old unit left and we showed up here. We didn't know anything about the contract, even that it existed, much less who took the money. Now there's no water in the canal, and the local economy is just as bad as it was before. The farmers are angry because we told them we were going to fix their canal, and then we didn't. The only person who won here is the corrupt Iraqi who was smart enough to take the chump Americans for a ride. It goes without saying that there's no legal recourse to get the money back.

American officers come here for a few months, or a year. We come from a military culture that rewards integrity and hard work. We don't speak Arabic or intuitively grasp the genuinely bewildering intricacies of Iraqi tribal politics. In a way, American military culture makes military commanders uniquely unsuited to deal with the duplicitous nature of Iraqi politics and economics. We are really, really good at fighting and winning wars. But developing local economies and untangling webs of corruption and lies in a foreign language just isn't our job. And so it shouldn't be a big surprise that we're not all that good at this.

4. America's Mischaracterization of the "War"

Americans like to see the world in clear-cut dichotomies. Republicans vs. Democrats. PCs vs. Macs. Yankees vs. Red Sox. In American political discourse, there is no more compelling dichotomy than the morally crystalline framework of a War, with the forces of Good neatly arrayed against the competing forces of Evil. And so we wage war on all kinds of things: the War on Drugs. The War on Terror. The War on Poverty. The War on Illiteracy. The War on Illegal Immigration. The War on Christmas, for crying out loud.

Talking about Iraq with the terminology of war masks the real issues and limits our ability to analyze our full palette of options. Our national debate seems to be between either "staying the course," whatever that means, or "cut and run," or whatever better tagline the Democrats want to come up with to characterize a quick drawdown. There is also this undercurrent of wanting to help the noble, beleaguered citizenry of Iraq in their valiant struggle against tyranny and oppression. I hope I have said enough already to disabuse you of that particular fallacy.

What is going on here is not war. Yes, there obviously is violence in this country. But there is violence all over the world, and the presence of violence does not equal war. What is going on here is much more akin to a law enforcement problem in a rough neighborhood than it is to a war. We patrol the streets looking for bad guys. When we find them, we go and arrest them. If they shoot at us while we are arresting them, of course we shoot back. But most people here are not criminals, they're just citizens, and there's no way to tell by looking at someone if they are a criminal or not. And, I'm sorry, you don't give out contracts for the construction of irrigation pumps in the middle of a war zone. In 2003, there was a war in Iraq. But this is not a war any more.

For those who would support Senator McCain and his stay the course plan, there are a lot of really obvious questions that are inexplicably not being asked. Why are we staying the course? I don't mean "why" metaphysically, and not for some kind of silly answer like "they will follow us home if we leave." I mean, concretely, why are we going to remain there - what is the goal, how will we know when we have attained it, and how can we better define that goal so that it is based on factors that we can control? We can't change the unpleasant realities of Iraqi culture, and, realistically, we'll never be able to make violence here fall to zero. So what is our end goal in Iraq, and how are we going to achieve it?

For those who would say we should withdraw, there are also a lot of really important questions. If we left, al Qaeda would strengthen and there would probably be significant violence here, probably civil war and a partition of Iraq into separate states. Is that an acceptable price for us to pay to bring our troops home? If not, then do we have some kind of plan in place to respond to Iraq's inevitable decline upon our departure? Do we have a plan to keep Iraq from turning into another failed-state terrorist haven, or, alternatively, to contain it if that does happen? Maybe Democrats do have answers to these questions, but I sure haven't heard them.

The problem with both of these camps is that they treat the Iraq problem like it is a war to be won or lost. They start with conclusions - we should stay and win the war or we should go home and quit the war - and then work back to arguments. If we could stop talking about Iraq like it is a war, then we could start talking about goals and outcomes here more meaningful than "victory" or "defeat," "stay the course" or "redeployment."

What we should do instead is honestly pose, debate, and decide a simple underlying question: what are America's realistic, achievable goals in Iraq? Maybe those goals are best achieved by staying the course, and maybe they are not. But there is no way to answer that question without first posing it, which, to my knowledge, nobody on the national stage has done, ever. In recent years national leadership has sidestepped responsibility for Iraq by leaving it up to the military, but, again, that approach fails to appreciate the full nature of the Iraqi problem. Since Iraq is not a war, this is not a question that can be solely placed to, or answered by, military commanders.

I have a pretty strong hunch that if we could step back from the frenzy of election year politics and take a pragmatic, technocratic approach to this problem, we just might be able to come up with a couple or three outside-the-box solutions for a problem that is unlike anything Americans are accustomed to dealing with. But until that happens, frankly, and sadly, I just can't say that I'm terribly optimistic about the future of America in Iraq.

[Crazy_Ivan]

An interesting read Hoya, not supprising what he has said about not being ready for democracy.

[Len-Det64]

This is not just an Iraqi problem. Anyone who has spent any time in any third world country would have these same observations. These people have lived with corruption and and stealing as a way of life and it all starts from the leaders of the countries and works its way down.

[KINGS17]

For those who would support Senator McCain and his stay the course plan, there are a lot of really obvious questions that are inexplicably not being asked. Why are we staying the course? I don't mean "why" metaphysically, and not for some kind of silly answer like "they will follow us home if we leave." I mean, concretely, why are we going to remain there - what is the goal, how will we know when we have attained it, and how can we better define that goal so that it is based on factors that we can control? We can't change the unpleasant realities of Iraqi culture, and, realistically, we'll never be able to make violence here fall to zero. So what is our end goal in Iraq, and how are we going to achieve it?

For those who would say we should withdraw, there are also a lot of really important questions. If we left, al Qaeda would strengthen and there would probably be significant violence here, probably civil war and a partition of Iraq into separate states. Is that an acceptable price for us to pay to bring our troops home? If not, then do we have some kind of plan in place to respond to Iraq's inevitable decline upon our departure? Do we have a plan to keep Iraq from turning into another failed-state terrorist haven, or, alternatively, to contain it if that does happen? Maybe Democrats do have answers to these questions, but I sure haven't heard them.

This Marine and others like him should be asking the questions when Obama and McCain debate the Iraq issue.

Good read.

[ibleedkngs]

Very good read.

[Maddogg420]

This post does not coincide with the news outlets I listen to. So I will disregard it entirely and pretend that I didn't read it.

[FootKnight]

Thank you for posting this.

I've always been under the opinion that we need to stay in Iraq until they get some semblance of stability. I had heard bits and pieces of what this dude said from guys I talked to coming back from/coming out of Iraq, but never in this complete, well-written form. I heard about the walls. the SAi, the national attitude, etc, but never like this. This definitely makes me re-think my position on the subject. Will Iraq without us ever been stable? It doesn't sound like it.

While I do not like leaving a country, that obviously is not stable at all, to its own devices like this, this post makes me think we might as well just cut our losses and go. Iraq will never be "stable", and it hurts for me to realize this. I have been hoping since the beginning that we could help these people and get them to not just kill each other and destroy their country as soon as we left their own security up to them. It's looking like we can't. I don't like that. Leaving a country to just kill itself does not sit right with me.

This was a very interesting and enlightening read for me, thank you. I must think more on this.

[JJ289]

We needed the surge to make Iraq stable. At least that is what they tell us. But we can't leave because we will lose what we have gained? I thought we won the war when Bush declared "Mission Accomplished." So, if we won the war, what we now have is an occupation of Iraq. The Bush Administration has never been clear about Iraq, and I don't expect that to change. They lied us into it and they lie to keep us in it. January 20th can't come soon enough.

That was a great read. It just goes to show you that when you invade another country it helps if you know a few things about the local culture, customs and languages. As Colin Powell basically said, "you break it, you buy it." Unforttunately, we are all paying for it. And more than 4,000 of our bravest died (as well as several hundred thousand Iraqis). Ultimately I do think that the members of our military would only want to be sent into harm's way only when necessary.

[Crazy_Ivan]

If the U.S. and Britain leave right now we will have another Iran. Iran's influence and aid to some of the more hostile Shia leaders will no doubt see Iraq turn into another Persian country run by religous zealots. I know Obama speaks of pulling the troops out ,but Bush has already managed to put whoever the next president will be in a tough spot.

[Maddogg420]

Originally Posted by Crazy_Ivan

If the U.S. and Britain leave right now we will have another Iran. Iran's influence and aid to some of the more hostile Shia leaders will no doubt see Iraq turn into another Persian country run by religous zealots. I know Obama speaks of pulling the troops out ,but Bush has already managed to put whoever the next president will be in a tough spot.

Whereas if we stay, the Taliban in afghanistan will grow in power, and our military ability and flexibility will be severely constrained. As it stands now we can't maintain control of Iraq, our allies (especially the Canadians) are on the front lines of Afghanistan, and our homies the Georgians are gonna bail outta Iraq to deal with their current situation.
Our invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran dramatically regardless of whether we stay or leave. We basically won the Iran-Iraq war for them, and the only way anything good(read beneficial for the U.S./world community) comes of our invasion is if we maintain high levels of troops in the country for a few generations.

[GregDM]

Thanks!

That was a great read--very informative, interesting, and well written.

[Crazy_Ivan]

Originally Posted by Maddogg420

Whereas if we stay, the Taliban in afghanistan will grow in power, and our military ability and flexibility will be severely constrained. As it stands now we can't maintain control of Iraq, our allies (especially the Canadians) are on the front lines of Afghanistan, and our homies the Georgians are gonna bail outta Iraq to deal with their current situation.
Our invasion of Iraq strengthened Iran dramatically regardless of whether we stay or leave. We basically won the Iran-Iraq war for them, and the only way anything good(read beneficial for the U.S./world community) comes of our invasion is if we maintain high levels of troops in the country for a few generations.

Exactly right, the U.S. and Britain might just have helped Iran win that war.

[GregDM]

I forwarded the original post to my friend in the Guard. He has now been back from Iraq for a little while. He had this to say:

"I'd say he hit the nail on the head. This seems like a well-thought out analysis without any pretense or partisan leanings.
My experience was a little different than his. We did more patrolling on our own and had significantly less contact with Iraqi police or military personnel. While we would visit police stations, we usually escorted civil-military teams to do assessments and we were just responsible for security. Plus, we were in the heart of Baghdad, a very built-up urban area at first, and then out in a mixed urban-rural area, so we didn't have a 'village,' just neighborhoods. Also, most of the civilians we talked to said the same thing over and over again, they complained about electricity, sewage, etc, so that got old real fast.

The Iraqis truly are incredibly selfish. Most of the intelligence tips we received (I believe) were to resolve neighborly disputes, not to go get 'insurgents'. And Iraqis, young and old, are always looking for a handout.

He's 100% correct about the trash. The mentality is: my house and yard look immaculate, but I'm perfectly happy to take my trash out in old vegetable oil cans converted to trash cans, and dump the trash in the open field near my house. (The goat and sheep herders loved fresh trash for grazing, by the way).

Another interesting thing he didn't touch on was the traffic, which was a big problem in Baghdad. To combat IEDs, the military cleared the shoulders of some of the major freeways so there were no hiding places. Then they hired an Iraqi company to put small curbs along the shoulders. Well, this stopped Iraqis from driving wherever they pleased, so the Iraqis just went out and created their own 'offramps' by pounding the curbs into dust. We also saw this in the medians. Imagine driving down [a US highway] and seeing cars making U-turns through a gap in the median (on this point, I'm happy we have the CHP).

He touches on it but doesn't go far enough about the walls. I believe the walls are the primary reason we're seeing fewer IED attacks. In Baghdad, most of our IED attacks were isolated to major highways, and we believed that if you put up huge 12-foot "T-barriers" (large concrete wall sections) that you would eliminate the line-of-sight for the IED triggermen and have fewer IED attacks. I would be interested to see photos of the Al-Daura Expressway (the road where we had the most attacks and where I was wounded) to see if they have walls along that road. The walls are probably not good for the long-term prospects of the conflict, but at least they've reduced American casualties to a point where people are a little less apprehensive about seeing Iraq get as stabilized as possible.

That was interesting reading. Thanks,

[Name]"