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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
I imagine that our interests would be similar to our interests in Africa. I’d expect that the ME would be a lot like Africa without all that oil money anyways. The Suez Canal would be a pretty nifty piece of property in any case.
I’m sorry that I missed this thread, but I feel like it’s worth responding late.
The Iraqi army was hardly typical of Middle Eastern militaries.
Blaming the ISF’s performance on conscription would make sense if they were conscripted. Since they were obviously not conscripted (conscription would have been insane as a US policy, and it’s not like the Iraqi army suddenly needed to expand after the US left). I’m a little disappointed in Ricochet for failing to point out this obvious problem.
The ISF had a tremendously high death rate (higher than the US military). They were on the front line in the WoT and they performed admirably in that role, although it’s true that it took a long time to get to that stage, and that they were never Americans, or even of Canadian or Australian quality.
The problem was that what they were good at is what they were trained and experienced in; identifying and killing terrorists.
In June, they suffered a tremendous defeat from a very different threat to the enemy that they had been trained to fight. This took place for a variety of reasons, chief among them being the fact that the Maliki appointed political officers (an unconstitutional parallel chain of command that had replaced the professionals) were targeted by exceptionally effective psy-ops and fled. The ISF didn’t know what was going on, but they knew their commanders had fled and that some of the world’s most creative committers of atrocities were invading and acting as if they were likely to be successful. I can see why so many chose to flee. Not all did, but those who stayed were hampered by those who didn’t and provided further footage to terrify their colleagues.
A lot of the commentary about this has suggested that routs aren’t something that happens in war unless there is a profound sickness in the nation/ army/ culture. This has confused me, since my reading of military history suggests that all armies break sometimes.
After the June debacle, the ISF pulled itself together and fought back. Along with the Peshmerga, they retook the Mosul dam. They’ve fought back and forward over Tikrit and other places. Their success has been mixed; they’ve mostly stopped the ISIS advance, but haven’t retaken a lot of territory. You might think that this shows them to be incompetent, since there aren’t that many soldiers in ISIS, but I’d remind you that the US military had some difficulty fighting smaller numbers of enemies (many of them being the exact same enemies) in Fallujah, with considerably more air support and quite a lot more modern equipment. What the ISF is doing is intrinsically hard, and they’re doing it somewhat successfully.