The Iraqi Counterinsurgency

Two pieces on the Iraqi Conterinsurgency:

1.) The Way of the Commandos, by Peter Maass

2.) What Went Right, by Rich Lowry

Also read this report by the Center for Strategic and International Studies, summarized by Maass:

scathing report from the Center for Strategic and International Studies, still in draft form but posted on the center’s Web site, blames senior American officials for these failures of Iraqi will. ”The police and the bulk of the security forces were given grossly inadequate training, equipment, facilities, transport and protection,” states the report, written by Anthony Cordesman, a military expert and former Pentagon official. ”These problems were then compounded by recruiting U.S. police advisers — some more for U.S. domestic political reasons than out of any competence for the job — with no area expertise and little or no real knowledge of the mission that the Iraqi security and police forces actually had to perform.” The report seems to be referring to, among others, Bernard Kerik, the former New York City police commissioner, who was the first police adviser to L Paul Bremer III, administrator of the Coalition Provisional Authority. Kerik left after three and a half months. Although the report notes some progress in recent months, it concludes: ”Unprepared Iraqis were sent out to die. . . . The fact that some died as a result of U.S. incompetence and neglect was the equivalent of bureaucratic murder.”