Countdown: 50,000 and counting

The last American combat brigade left Iraq today:

Final combat brigade

 

It's up to the politicians of Iraq now, let's see how well this democracy we built for them actually functions.

The election still hasn't settled. There were high hopes when Allawi's coalition won, since it seemed the best chance for political stability. But Malaki is still contesting the results, and I think a few of the deciding members of the Iraqi parliament have been assassinated over the months.

Can someone with more expertise on Iraqi politics help clarify and explain what's been going on?

 

So maybe this is appropriate, this time around?
[image=http://thefulcrum.blogspot.com/Bush-Mission-Accomplished.jpg]

How does it feel, Boba? Are the troops exhilerated, or resigned? I can tell you that when the Dutch troops left Afghanistan, the overall feeling among them was that they were not allowed to finish their job, so it kinda stung. It kinda felt like... defeat. Do you get that impression here or is it different?

 

Well, there are still 50,000 US troops stationed in Iraq, specifically 6 Brigades, mostly from the 3rd Infantry Division. The difference between Iraq and your Dutch comparison is that troops aren't simply packing up and going home. It's simply the next step in the original mission progression. There's the occupation phase. The implementation phase. The stabilization phase. and finally the final partnership/handover phase.

The last combat tasked unit to drive out of Iraq and into a rear deployment base in Kuwait was a Stryker Brigade from the 2nd Infantry Division(the 4th BDE to be exact) and they were quite celebratory in their mood.

The mission in Iraq was hung up where the implementation phase changed over to the stabilization phase, which was pushed along by the "surge." This now represents the transition between the stabilization phase and whatever relation is going to come from the final partnership. But there are going to be quite a few US troops in Iraq for least another year. The nature of the deployment is simply going to change.

 

But the fact that you have a timetable doesn't mean that that timetable is realistic. I mean... is it stable?

 

I meant in the sense that troops are going to stay until the job is finished, which addressed your illustration of the Dutch troops who were pulled out without a sense of completion.

The US military is very much goal driven, not time driven. All accounts that I've heard indicate that Iraq is much more stable from a US perspective at least. I understand that the bulk of the violence is now directed at local Iraqi politicians and figures, in a kind of back and forth "power grab" sense.

But yeah, internal forces in Iraq could certainly use all of this hype to try and expand the violence again, in which case additional US troops would be re-deployed back into Iraq, but I don't think that would result in any kind of gain to those same instigators.

 

Good.

 

But if they are just going to Afghanistan next year, does it really make you that celebratory? I know my Marine friend's unit had deployed to Iraq while he was on an LDS mission, but then they were just deployed to Afghanistan instead.

 

Absolutely I feel a sense of accomplishment, not to mention that just Afghanistan by itself is no longer going to require a breakneck deployment schedule that saw some units being deployed every other year(that this evidently applied to just cheap-to-deploy light-infantry units still irks me ), particularly with the force expansion we've had since 2003.

 

Something that doesn't seem to be making many waves is that covert operations are stepping up dramatically since Obama became President.

Secret Assault on Terrorism Widens on Two Continents.

Essentially, Obama seems to prefer trying to use a scalpel to using a hammer, has quietly increased the power of the CIA with regards to what they're capable of doing offensively overseas, and reduced congressional oversight of secret operations. Republicans don't want to say anything for fear of being soft on the War on Terror, Democrats don't think it's a good arena to challenge the President, so the US relies more and more on special operations teams and unmanned drones to do things we won't know about until the operations become declassified many decades hence. Or until wikileaks finds the mission reports.

 

Democratic presidents-and well, smart presidents in general-have always shown a preference for Ninja Command. It's generally cheaper, far less noticeable (did you know that about 75 countries have an SOF presence? No? Neither does anybody else ) and provides a far more flexible approach than even the post-Iraq conventional military can.


Hmmm...we should really have another thread discussing how the Iraq mission has drastically changed the military.


edits:

That article author is fooling himself if he thinks Pentagon spying is anything new. The military (and the State Department) used to be the USA's spy agency; the OSS-the CIA's forerunner agency-was all military, for example. And Military intelligence collection exploded under Reagan in the 1980s, as the military was not bound by the same overly-stringent rules the CIA and the rest of the civilian intelligence community had to follow. At least, Reagan's legal advisors said they weren't.