By PHK
New Mexico Congressman Tom Udall (D) briefed members of the Council on International Relations (CIR) in Santa Fe, on April 17, 2006 on the results of his first fact-finding mission to Iraq - as part of a ten day bipartisan Congressional trip to the Middle East in late March-early April led by Arizona Republican Senator John McCain.
Here are highlights of what sounded to me like what must have been a terribly troubling experience:
• The security situation in Iraq continues to worsen. There is a disconcerting disconnect between what is occurring on the ground and how the W administration portrays it. Cases in point – the road from the airport to Baghdad is now so insecure that the CODEL was helicoptered into the Green Zone rather than going by land. Their trip to the Marine Base outside Falluja and then to Al Hilla, sixty miles south of Baghdad, were also by Blackhawk. And a young Iraqi working for the U.S. State Department in Al Hilla said that unlike under the Saddam regime when he drove to Baghdad regularly in his own car, he now too relies on air to make the trip because of the risk to his own personal safety.
• Michael Gordon and Bernard Trainor’s book COBRA II is right. The details are all there: the administration’s plans for the invasion and aftermath were dead wrong. The U.S. military did not send enough troops to pacify the villages at the time of the invasion or secure the arms caches scattered throughout the country, but the worst mistake was Bremer’s decision to disband the Iraqi army and refuse to pay them. Udall contrasted this with post WWII Germany where the U.S. kept the German army in place but removed and tried only the top leadership. Our early mistakes in Iraq sowed the seeds of today’s insurgency which Marine General Casey – who Udall said basically stuck to his talking points – said is fueled by our presence.
• Worsening conditions: Unemployment in Baghdad is extremely high. Because of the deteriorating situation there, 35,000 people have now left their homes in the city and moved into tents in the desert. Udall also said that the number of insurgent attacks at 600 per week has not decreased, but remains under-reported in the US media and that many of these attacks are remotely activated IEDs. Lack of electricity remains an issue – now only six hours per day as opposed to the 20 hours per day before March 2003. Oil production has not returned to pre-war levels, corruption and violence prevail, and that General McCaffrey told them that the U.S. military is running through tanks at four times the rate it does elsewhere because of the harsh desert environment; Replacements do not keep up.
• The $1.5 billion in Iraq reconstruction contracts is spent – and Udall does not see further funding forthcoming from Congress.
• The Sunni Triangle: US military briefers at the well fortified Marine Base there, described Falluja as partially pacified, but nearby Ramadi as not. “Land piracy,” the CODEL was told “is rampant because the insurgency is in control.” The insurgents have plenty of money – including $80 million in ransom received for hostages from the Europeans - and legions of unemployed from whom they recruit. 15 leaders in Ramadi were slaughtered by insurgents. Law enforcement is a revolving door, e.g. “the bad guys are arrested, sent away, only to be released to return to the streets in a month.”
• What next? Because W’s claims that victory remains “just around the corner” is a pipedream, Udall said he favors a phased withdrawal of U.S. armed forces during 2006 – that the training of Iraqi security forces is continuing to increase, and U.S. forces must stand down as the Iraqi forces stand up. His position is in opposition to Senator McCain who wants to maintain current troop levels. Today, polls show that 87 percent of Iraqis want a concrete deadline for US troop withdrawal as opposed to only 24 percent who said so in 2004.
• Because our troops don’t know the language and the culture and Arabic interpreters are far and few between (one for an entire battalion), the US troops cannot distinguish between friend and foe. Udall said he favored keeping US troops in the region – probably in Kuwait where he thought they would still be welcome and in Iraq’s Kurdish region; that it is possible the Iraqi government itself will ask us to withdraw, but if we do and the country remains unstable, the Arab League has indicated its willingness to send in troops. Despite other problems this might create, at least the Arabs speak the language and know the culture. Udall added that with the U.S. forces out, it should be possible to call a World Donor Summit to solicit multilateral commitments because more reconstruction aid is desperately needed.
• Udall characterized the insurgency foremost as: 1) Sunni against Shiite and 2) Al Qaeda against the U.S. But he also said that Al Qaeda forces probably amounted to no more than 1,500 and that when their CODEL had met with King Abdullah of Jordan after their visit to Iraq, the King told them that he had offered President Bush to send in Jordanian forces to go after Zarqawi, but the Bush administration never responded.
• An overstretched U.S. military: Udall said that troops from New Mexico he met at the base in Falluja were keen to talk and that their individual morale is high. He also noted, however, that 50 percent of our troops in Iraq come from the National Guard, that some of the guard has already had three tours of duty there and that polls of U.S. military forces in Iraq show that 40 percent of them cannot identify their mission. He said despite the administration’s pooh-poohing that polling data, he’s convinced it is accurate. In response to a question, he said he supported the reinstitution of the draft – because it would be fairer. The US, he also added, is not good at building peacekeeping contingents like the Europeans are; this is part of the problem they face in Iraq.
• Iran: Udall said that he thinks, unfortunately, that the Bush administration’s goal for Iran is the same as it was for Iraq: Regime Change. But he added that as soon as the administration mentions this to U.S. allies - including the UK - the response is: “Sorry, no military option.” Udall concluded by observing that if the White House were to focus instead on the central issue of slowing nuclear proliferation, it would have the rest of the world with us.
Note: Udall is one of 135 Democratic members of Congress who voted against the invasion of Iraq. According to him, 30-40 more Democrats said at the time that the U.S. should go to the UN. Udall believes that the Iraq invasion will go down as a colossal foreign policy blunder, and that the U.S. foreign policy focus should have remained on Afghanistan, Al Qaeda, Bin Laden and the global terrorist threat –not been distracted by the drive to depose Saddam Hussein who did not harbor Al Qaeda terrorists on Iraqi territory.