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What Happened to the Iraqi Army?
We’ve talked a lot about the rise of the Islamic State: how to explain its success so far, how we underestimated it, who its leaders are, what motivates them, and what they might be planning to do next.
What’s surprising is how (relatively) little attention has been paid to the scandal of the Iraqi Army’s flight and collapse back in June. How on earth could a large, experienced, and well-equiped force trained for a long time — and at tremendous cost — by the world’s superpower crumble so quickly against a small army of irregulars that didn’t even exist until a few years ago?
Why isn’t President Obama being grilled about this in interviews? Why hasn’t Congress been hauling generals and administrators into hearings to explain how billions of dollars of American treasure, countless man-hours, and precious lives were entrusted to an ally that proved not only incapable of defending itself — that would be bad enough — but even of trying very hard.
Clearly, the major precipitating factor was the the United States’ withdrawal from Iraq, per President Obama’s campaign promise. That is on the President, his party, and the American people (yes, even those of us who voted against him). But it’s worth noting that the Iraqi government hardly begged us to stay and that — however premature our departure may have been — they were the beneficiaries of years of sustained training and free equipping that would make most of the world green with envy. They should have been able to do better.
Another possibility is that IS is a truly remarkable fighting force, capable of combatting professional armies on two different fronts while simultaneously organizing massacres of religious minorities, planning attacks on the West, and building the civic infrastructure necessary to enforce the most repressive interpretations of Sharia. Even stipulating that the group was severely under-rated, it strikes me as highly unlikely that IS has wholly earned its success.
Another possibility — and one that strikes me as plausible — is that IS was able to recruit disaffected former Baathist officers who had been legally shut out of the Iraqi government, first by the United States (under President Bush) and then by the Shia-led government. Yet another is that the Iraqi Forces’ morale and patriotism was undermined by corruption, favoritism, and sectarianism:
Even among those Iraqi soldiers who have answered the call to re-enlist, morale is low, and distrust between the rank-and-file and officers runs deep. Most of those interviewed said they were joining primarily because they badly needed the pay, not out of any sense of loyalty or desire to fight.
“We’re back for money; we’re poor,” said Faisal Kamal Qasim, 30, a soldier who had been with the Second Division at a base in Mosul when the Islamic State fighters seized the city. “We don’t know what else to do.”
Whatever the correct combination of answers may be, the biggest question is why we don’t seem to care very much. Even if the Iraqi Security Forces recover and are able to push back IS with allied air support, what happened is a scandal. Americans should be mad — and trying to learn what went wrong.
Why aren’t we?
Image Credit: Flickr user U.S. Army.
Published in General
There never was an Iraqi army in any real sense.
Unlike our current military which is made up of volunteers who place the concept of loyalty to the flag and our nation above other considerations (although they are paid) most militaries in the Arab world are made up of conscripts whose first loyalty remains to their tribe or their sect rather than to their nation.
If you look at most of the successful armies in the world you don’t see ones at the top of the heap comprised of conscripts who are then badly paid on top of being asked to place their (somewhat artificial) nation above their consideration of their family, tribe or sect.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
What happened to the army of South Vietnam in 1975?
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
The take I heard recently, don’t remember where, is that once the US left the people in charge of the military basically turned it into a cleptocracy. Senior officials and officers would sell off equipment and basically use the military as a way to enrich themselves and their cronies. The rank and file had no leadership they respected and the whole operation just went to hell. I think tribal loyalties rather than national loyalties were a problem as well.
My business partner is from Iraq so I asked him this very question. He told me that the Shiites in the army refuse to put their life in danger for a Sunni so they dropped their weapons and ran when ISIS attacked Mosul – pure tribalism and religious hatred as Majestyk said.
BTW, my friend also told me that the Sunnis would never risk their lives to help a Shiite so the hatred cuts both ways.
Good luck getting the mess in Iraq straightened out…
That’s how it looks to me. If so, the problem’s much bigger than — and predates — our withdrawal.
I’m not pleased to write that.
That was a tie!
http://youtu.be/Zr9qX9k1Y98?t=47s
Same as the answer to, “What happened to principled Democrats?”
They’re a myth.
I read that the day after the US, Maliki, who is Shia, fired a bunch of non-Shia officers. Then, entire units of non-Shia troops where not paid. No US troops, No Pay, No Leaders.
Tom, that the Iraqi army and the Iraqi nation failed to hold together once we left probably isn’t all that surprising. Or at least it shouldn’t be. Even after billions spent. This project was always going to take time. Mccain’s vision of still being there in a few decades (like Japan, Germany, or Korea) was probably the realistic plan, and probably worth it IMO.
After all of the hard fought gains (even if you think our involvement was a mistake to begin with, we were involved and we did make some gains), our withdrawal was actually pretty likely to create the vacuum that leaves Iraq weak, jihadists stronger and on the move, Iran stronger, and the US in a weaker position in terms of the region. What should make us angry is that:
The only way that we were going to “fix” this was to essentially force these factions to get along. To say that we don’t have the patience for such a project is belaboring the obvious.
In the Middle Ages I believe there was a system in place which was used to ensure compliance with treaties that consisted of mutual hostage-taking and fostering of one group’s children by another. The theory being that you can ultimately meld two warring factions by intermingling their families. While this seems backwards and barbaric, I think it’s possible that this was an opportunity that we passed up.
It might have taken a generation for the system to take hold, but forced intermarriage and cross-tribal fostering would have ultimately had the effect of restraining the warring factions if by nothing else than sheer force of family ties.
(FYI – this was a response to Misthiocracy’s comment about the fall of South Vietnam in 1975.)
The U.S. Congress, post Watergate, cancelled funding and support. The North Vietnamese Army, with full support from China and the Soviet Union, was thus able to roll right over them. It boiled down to sponsorship, or lack thereof.
Even a best-case-scenario probably should have involved replacing US combat troops with an international peacekeeping force (the recent failures of UN peacekeeping notwithstanding), rather than simply abandoning the country to the wolves after having turned the joint upside-down.
Bingo!
What I cannot understand is why we are not forcing the current Iraqi government to repay us with barrels of oil for every single bomb we are dropping on ISIS targets. If not for us, it seems obvious that Baghdad would fall to ISIS very soon and all of the Shiites would be decapitated (more or less). I think we have leverage and should take advantage of it. It is the least they can do in return for us saving their lives.
A Democrat Congress.
Well there is some outreach going on…
I asked that question back in June!!
http://ricochet.com/iraqi-army-wont-fight-why/
There were some interesting responses — the comments are worth reading.
Tom, I’m glad you’re bringing it up again. In my view, it is the question regarding what happened in Iraq. Hopefully some knowledgeable folks are putting forth thoughtful answers in some defense and foreign policy journals by now.
Apparently a well regulated (i.e. well trained) militia is necessary to the security of a free state.
I find this article to be useful in understanding the Arab mind regarding war.
http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars
It is about 15 years old but it still rings true to me.
So, if accurate, would this hypothesis support the idea that as long as no single faction received military and financial support from the outside, no single faction would ever be able to dominate?
It’s too bad all that oil creates such huge incentives for outside powers to choose sides…
Echoing what others said, there’s no Iraqi Army because there’s no Iraq. We in the West poorly understood the reality of that patch of sand. It wasn’t until a few years ago when I really started digging into books on WW1 and the postwar era that I realized that countries like Iraq and Syria are essentially fake countries. They’re products of Sykes-Picot, drawn up by the British and the French to protect British and French interests, without any input from the peoples of the Levant themselves. They still consider themselves Kurds or Arab tribesmen. Just as the Czechs and Slovaks were forced together (and the Balkan peoples), so too were the various Levant tribes forced into these artificial creations. And like those European peoples, if the Levantines had any real say in the matter, they’d likely split up into many parts. Those Arabs have no loyalty to “Iraq”. It took Saddam’s terror regime to “unite” the place, if you consider a terrified populace “unity”. Even under Saddam, it was the Republican Guard… made up mostly of his Sunni tribesman… that wee truly loyal to him. Now it makes sense why “the fourth largest army in the world” folded like paper in 1991.
Pat Buchanan was right after all. Let ’em break up. Same goes for Syria.
The South was going to lose no matter what. They didn’t want Communism, but they didn’t want the responsibilities of freedom either. The South Vietnamese Army was always ****-poor in terms of motivation and fighting spirit. They preferred to let us do their fighting for them. Even after years of training and getting good equipment, they were notorious for dropping their weapons and running in a real fight. Our guys despised them. Their own generals used US pilots for their helicopters because they didn’t trust the skill and courage of Vietnamese pilots. The North was dedicated and motivated. The South wasn’t. Our efforts there were doomed from the start. We made the mistake of assuming that because South Korea was committed and willing to fight that South Vietnam would be too. Coincidentally, I’ve read accounts of South Korean troops in Vietnam. The NVA was impressed with them, and they developed a reputation as savage fighters among the Viet Cong (especially the ROK Marines at the battle of Tra Binh). South Vietnamese troops just could never muster that kind of commitment.
< devil’s advocate mode = on >
So that they can become new fake countries drawn up by China and Russia to protect Chinese and Russian interests?
< devil’s advocate mode = off >
OK…if there was no oil in the Mid East (or we didn’t need it) except for the protection of Israel and it being a training ground for terrorists, why would we care about it?
Without the oil, we would still “care”, but the incentives would be different. The incentives wouldn’t be to build nation-states up, but rather to ensure that nobody in the region would ever be able to make war against the West.
Because of the oil, the West has an incentive to build and maintain (prop up?) stable, functioning, industrially-competent, allied nation-states in the region. Preventing war against the West is only one goal, rather than the only goal.
It don’t think it’s a coincidence that ISIS’s priority is the oil-rich parts of the Middle East rather than, say, Afghanistan.
I cannot find a link, but at the time of the fall of Mosul I saw a blogger say that some ISIS guys had infiltrated the Iraqi army as squads dressed in Iraqi army uniforms. It only took one instance of a bunch of guys getting shot in the back by friendly fire, along with flying rumors of lots of similar squads, to cause widespread panic in the ranks. (This scenario was possible because logistics had always been something worked out by the Americans, and turned out to be a particular deficiency of the Iraqi army.)
The analogy to Vietnam is apt. The American Left are still operating on the tale that America lost the war, and the South Vietnamese collapsed from their own corruption. This colors their view of Iraq and Afghanistan.
It is only in conservative niche media and blogs that we learn that the war was won, and then the victory given away by the Democratic congress who overrode a Gerald Ford veto to pronounce that “not one nickel” could be used to support our ally in South Vietnam, who was thereby betrayed. Six months later, after the Army of the Republic of South Vietnam had run out of gasoline and diesel fuel, victory was swift for the enemy.
It is only in conservative niche media and blogs that we are reminded that half a million South Vietnamese lost their lives in this calamity, and the Killing Fields of Cambodia were made possible.
We have to keep sharing this story. The truth must be kept alive.
Another reason the Iraqi army collapsed is its inability to conduct large unit operations. That is a reason many third world armies fail. Coordinating operations in organizations larger than a Battalion is a skill few militaries in the world possess. With the ISIL armies on the attack, they could use their momentum to keep the Iraqi army off balance and unable to organize defense and counter attacks. US advisors are key in assisting with large operations. Same thing in Afghanistan – some locals are good at small unit operations – not so good at large.
If there was no oil then none of these madmen would have the walth or power to terrorize anyone other then their own likely equally barbarous immediate neighbors, in that sense no we would care very little.
We should have remembered that. Were we victims of our own rhetoric? Most of the world doesn’t seem to value and want to fight for its liberty. We in the US do have a shared culture, but how did it get that way with people of such different backgrounds? It must be the tribalism that is keeping the Iraqis from being free. They cannot effectively cooperate because their tribalism gets in the way of sharing common cultural values. We’re projecting our values onto them and the result is disappointment. So numbers really aren’t that important to an army. Numbers aren’t the reason why our military is so powerful either.