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‘Winning’ in Iraq

January 11, 2007 on 1:36 pm | In Uncategorized |

So having spent a year or three vowing that while he’s prepared to consider a change of tactics, the strategy in Iraq is not for turning, today Dubya announced a change in … strategy. Except that when you analyse it, if it’s a change in anything at all, it’s a change in … tactics.

I didn’t watch the whole thing – you think I have no life at all? -  and I’m sure anyone who’s remotely interested will be overwhelmed with commentary over the next few days, but I thought I’d put my two bobs’ worth in anyway.

The new measures are a mix of military optimism and Harvard Business School Management By Objectives (MBO), circa 1975. First to the military optimism.

More troops will be sent to Iraq, bringing the total up almost to the level in January, 2005. Dubya asked himself why they would succeed where others have failed. It’s a reasonable question. The answer, apparently, is that in the past American and Iraqi troops ‘cleared’ an area of bad guys but as soon as they moved on, the bad guys would just come back. Bastards. But with more troops, they can hang on to the cleared areas indefinitely.

Two questions occur to my simple mind about this new tactic:

1. Won’t the bad guys just go somewhere else and cause trouble? Then the troops will have to leave the cleared areas and go to the new ones, meaning the bad guys can come back again … it’s like that amusement arcade game where you have to keep hitting the heads that pop up. I guess you could make it successful if you had enough troops to lock down the entire country, but I can’t see a 16% increase being enough to make that huge a difference.
2. To the extent that the tactic succeeds, haven’t you just created an obligation of indefinite duration? It’s a bit like grabbing a snake by the head: you stop the snake doing any harm but how will you ever let go? Once American troops are committed to clear-and-hold operations they can only be relieved if Iraqi forces develop the capacity to take over the holding bit, which obviously they can’t do now. The history of the occupation would make one pessimistic that they’ll be able to do it any time soon either, meaning that the ‘surge’ of extra troops is likely to be required indefinitely.

Coupled with these tactical matters is a series of political ‘benchmarks’ that the Iraqi government will be expected to meet. Anybody who’s undergone a formal performance appraisal in a large organisation will be familiar with the logic underpinning benchmarks. Hell, I’ve been teaching it for years.

• You set the employee/Iraq some overall performance objectives for the next 12 months;
• You establish Key Performance Indicators (‘benchmarks’) that you and the employee/Iraqi government will use to evaluate progress towards achieving those objectives.

What’s the next stage of the analogy? Well in an organisation, an employee who wasn’t meeting benchmarks might be given some training, counselled, warned and finally sacked. I guess the Iraqi equivalents are given some advice, given some serious advice, warned and finally … what? Withdraw American troops and leave the Iraqis to slug it out?

Dubya’s in a bind. Again today he emphasised all the terrible consequences that will befall America if the bad guys are allowed to win in Iraq. So if he’s going to be consistent he can’t withdraw American forces, it would be contrary to the USA’s interests. That would seem to leave the business option: sack the Iraqi government and get the head-hunters in to recruit a new one.

I’m sure there’ll be furious discussion about whether Dubya’s program will ‘work’ militarily but it seems to me that the discussion would be more profitably directed elsewhere – to his summary of the awful consequences of failure in Iraq, as defined by him. If he’s right, then of course it’s constructive to discuss the best way to achieve success. But if he’s wrong, then the sensible thing to do is get the hell out of there as soon as possible.

I believe he’s wrong, but I’m not dogmatic about it. I’d like to read a lot more rational debate that refers to solid evidence about what is actually happening in Iraq, free of the endless spin and the defining frame of the ‘war on terror’. In the mean time, I’d have to say that Dubya’s latest announcements are no more than the latest reactive response to events that are pretty much beyond anyone’s ability to control.