Tag Archive for: Iraq

Talking to the Chiefs: Mark Binskin

In a village near the embattled Iraqi city of Mosul, Australian Defence Force chief Mark Binskin met a team of Australian combat medics who’d set up a triage unit and emergency operating theatre in a small house they’d found still standing in the ravaged landscape. They worked with another coalition medical team treating Iraqi soldiers wounded in the bitter, close quarters fighting against the Islamic State terror group.

In a forward operating base, soldiers from Australia’s Special Operations Task Group were helping members of Iraq’s Counter Terrorism Service plan operations and call in air strikes on enemy forces as they fought brick by brick through the ancient, narrow streets of Mosul’s Old Quarter. The Australian Special Forces had trained many of the Iraqis to deal with snipers, improvised bombs and medical emergencies. Relationships were close.

Air Chief Marshal Binskin was struck by the ingenuity the Australians had shown to significantly increase the Iraqis’ chances of survival in action and in the event they were wounded. It demonstrated to him that for all the ADF’s investment in $195 billion worth of new equipment over the coming decades, its real strength is its people, he tells The Strategist.

‘The biggest lesson is that it doesn’t matter what technology you’ve got, it’s your people that matter. It’s a capability issue for us to get the best people we can,’ Binskin says.

For 15 years the ADF has been on near-continuous operations overseas in different environments with different people, different languages and different enemies; Binskin says that experience has made its personnel highly adaptive. They need all of those skills in the very tough environment of Iraq.

‘We’ve selected and trained the right people and that’s where we’ve got our advantage—through their ability to innovate, to find the best way to respond to a problem regardless of the situation they’re in, whether it be targeting or helping the Counter Terrorism Service look after its wounded people. That investment in people is what gives you the best outcomes on operations. Give them the best equipment and they can do it. They know the rules, they know the procedures; they are well led or they are good leaders, and they know the bounds they need to operate in. They know the rules of engagement and they know how to operate within them to best effect.’

Binskin is very conscious of concerns about civilian casualties in Iraq and he says ADF personnel go to great lengths to prevent them through exhaustive planning. Many people don’t understand the constraints ADF personnel operate under and the discipline they bring to their work, he says.

‘There’s international law, domestic law, laws of armed conflict, rules of engagement, there are tactics, techniques and procedures they work within. They know they’ve got to be discriminate, they’ve got to be proportionate and there must be a military advantage in what we’re doing. If they’re part of a coalition; they know they are operating under our rules of engagement or the rules of engagement of the nation they are working with, whichever is the more restrictive. They have to take all of that into account. That’s alright in the planning but on operations they work within those rules in a dynamic environment to minimise civilian casualties and collateral damage.’

When air crews return from a strike, that’s not the end of it, says Binskin. ‘They go through the debriefing, through the tapes they’ve made during the strikes to make sure their assessment at the time is validated and make sure there was no damage that wasn’t catered for, there wasn’t a chance of civilian casualties.’ Binskin says:

‘If there’s an issue, the operation is reviewed and we take any lessons out of that. If there was a civilian casualty, that is reported up the chain and we then work with the Iraqi government. We haven’t had that yet but that’s how the procedure would work. It’s a complex targeting cycle and a complex environment out there and we’ve got great people in it at every stage to make sure that what we’re doing is not only within the rules, but it’s right.’

As technology in the ADF becomes more complex, Defence is increasingly competing with the private sector for smart, capable people. ‘We’re competing in the STEM area just like any other high tech organisation,’ he says. ‘I think we’re holding our own at the moment but we’re going to have to get better at it as those other areas are starting to compete more strongly for qualified people as well.’

Binskin says the modern soldier’s equipment has evolved a lot in 15 years but that probably hasn’t been noticed as much as other advances in military technology, except by the Diggers who’ve been part of it.

‘Now, each soldier needs to be considered as an individual weapons system. They’ve got a weapon, integrated communications, they’ve got electronic countermeasures and their body armour and all that needs to be considered as a total system. When they patrol they’ve got to prepare and ensure their electronic counter measures don’t jam their communications and they need to overlap each other with their ECM.’

As part of the process of recruiting the best, the cultural makeup of the ADF is changing and female participation is growing. About 30% of applicants are women. Around 5% of recruits are indigenous. More people aged between 25 and 35 are joining up and retention rates are high.

The ADF is trained for a wide range of tasks from aid to civilian communities in times of disaster such as fires and floods to relief operations in the region to high-end war fighting, if required.

‘We structure and train to cover all of that,’ Binskin says. ‘It’s a pretty potent and effective force.’

What will Trump’s ‘America First’ policy mean for the Middle East?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Morning Calm Weekly Newspaper Installation Management Command, U.S. Army.

President Trump’s enunciation of ‘America First’ in his inaugural speech should have important implications for US policy toward the Middle East. It should mean disengagement from futile conflicts and reassessment of strategies toward key regional actors. The extent of Washington’s involvement has far exceeded its economic and strategic interests in the region and drained military and diplomatic resources that could be used to greater effect elsewhere, such as East Asia where it faces a major potential adversary.

There are multiple reasons for such a high degree of US involvement in the Middle East but most are now passé. First, it has become a matter of habit—a holdover from the Cold War when competition with the USSR drove much US foreign policy. Second is America’s assumed dependence on imported oil. Whatever force that may have had, it’s almost completely redundant today. In 2015 Persian Gulf countries made up only 16% of total US petroleum imports with Saudi Arabia accounting for just 11%.

It shouldn’t be difficult for the US to replace the entire Gulf supply (and certainly that from Saudi Arabia) from other sources in a market now flush with oil. In fact, given Saudi Arabia’s increasingly rash foreign policy moves in Yemen and elsewhere, Riyadh has become an albatross around America’s neck. Moreover, the spread of Saudi influence, encouraged by the US, has led to the emergence of the most virulent form of radical jihadism threatening not only the region but also US interests globally. Instead of turning a blind eye toward the spread of radical Saudi ideology, America should put Riyadh on notice that such propagation will no longer be tolerated. That should be one of President Trump’s priorities.

The security of Saudi Arabia and the balance of power in the Gulf are no longer vital US concerns, especially since Washington’s relations with Tehran are on a moderate upswing following the nuclear deal. US–Iranian relations would have progressed faster had it not been for the shortsightedness of the Republican controlled Congress, which continues to create obstacles in the form of new sanctions which prevent genuine rapprochement with Tehran.

Trump’s criticism of the nuclear deal during the election campaign makes that détente difficult and provides fodder for radicals in Tehran who oppose it. However, Trump is likely to revise his stand in office when he understands the situation’s complexity. Reneging on the deal would leave Iran free to pursue its weapons program and the only way to stop it would be by force which could start a conflagration in the volatile region. The nuclear deal puts Iran’s program in cold storage, but also provides major US corporations the opportunity to enter the large and technologically hungry Iranian market, which should be dear to Trump’s heart. He should find that increasingly appealing in the light of Boeing’s US$16.6 billion sale of 80 aircraft to Tehran. President Trump is in a far stronger position than his predecessor to persuade the Republican-controlled Congress to modify its position on Iran and this should be another priority.

The third reason advanced to justify a high degree of US involvement is concern for Israel’s security. That’s outdated given Israel’s tremendous military superiority over its Arab neighbors and the Arabs’ preoccupation with killing each other rather than addressing the question of Palestine or confronting Israel. Moreover, obsession with Israeli security on the latter’s terms prevents the US pursuing its genuine interests in the Middle East. Putting America rather than Israel first should be a priority.

The 2003 invasion of Iraq was an extremely bad idea and the US is paying the price for it still. So is the involvement, without much forethought, in the civil war in Syria. Both Iraq and Syria have become failed states and continuing US involvement in the Fertile Crescent does nothing but exacerbate hostility towards it among radical factions—above all, ISIS. The US should cut its losses and withdraw from both Iraq and Syria especially since no American vital interest is involved in either. Access to Iraqi oil now is of no particular concern to Washington (it may be to some American oil interests) nor is the character of the Syrian regime. Withdrawal from Syria will also leave Russia with the primary responsibility for finding a solution and expose the limits of its influence.

The only Middle East country where one could reasonably argue American strategic interests are at stake is NATO member Turkey. But the US shouldn’t get drawn into Turkey’s regional adventures, as in Syria, or its domestic quarrels with its Kurdish population. President Trump should advise Ankara to retrench from Syria and find a modus vivendi with its restive Kurdish population, with the Kurds in Syria and with President Assad. Washington should make it clear that Turkey cannot involve NATO in its quarrels with the Kurds and its involvement in Syria.

President Trump’s work is cut out for him in the Middle East. It would entail disengagement, retrenchment and reassessment to put ‘America first’ but that appears eminently doable. It needs the political will to implement decisions that would advance long-term US interests.

Masters of war in Syria and Iraq

The Middle East’s tragic tale of two cities—Aleppo in Syria and Mosul in Iraq—speaks to a fundamental lack of consensus in the region and within the broader international community. The lack of order in the international order is greatly complicating the task of bringing these conflicts to an end.

When the bloody conflict finally ends in Syria, there will be no victory parades, no moment of national catharsis. More likely than not, what there will be is a political arrangement that leaves Syria within its current borders but with local autonomy that reflects the diversity and—at least for the time being—the mutual distrust of its various ethnic and religious groups. No one will be happy. The accoutrements of a civil state do not exist, and there are no institutions around which to build social consensus or the rule of law.

Until these broad principles can be articulated, the war will never be truly over. Ceasefires work best—and hold the longest—when the combatants finally understand that a set of principles agreed by the broader international community will be the basis for shaping the future of their country.

The Syrian war is not unprecedented in the region. The Lebanese Civil War was even longer: from 1975 to 1990, that war produced a similar number of casualties and refugees, and when all is said and done, probably a similar number of unsuccessful ceasefires. The Syrian civil war is not yet even half the length of that horrific struggle; but nor is there any sign that the various combatants are fatigued by it.

The international community will likely be affected by Syria’s civil war more than it was by Lebanon’s, owing to its greater global impact. The refugee tide was at first contained within the neighborhood, especially in Jordan, Lebanon, Turkey, and even Iraq. But soon refugees began to flow to Europe and elsewhere, causing political tensions in countries far removed from the conflict. The huddled masses of refugees crossing one European frontier after another soon became a metaphor for what angers so many Europeans in this globalised age.

The lack of international consensus on Syria, reflected in the failure of the United Nations Security Council’s permanent players to agree on a way forward, has caused the situation on the ground to worsen. Fueled by continued support of the combatants by Middle Eastern states (which seem to have no confidence in the international system), and with Russia’s direct participation in the fighting, the crisis has deepened.

Russia’s intervention on behalf of Syrian President Bashar al-Assad has also caused further deterioration in US-Russian relations, which could fuel danger elsewhere in the world. US Secretary of State John Kerry and his Russian counterpart Sergey Lavrov have so far failed to find any workable way forward to end the fighting.

One longs for the day that Kerry and Lavrov emerge from a negotiating room to announce to the world that they have agreed on a set of principles that will guide Syria’s future and will work to achieve consensus among other members of the international community and with the combatants themselves. Only when the combatants can envision the post-war future can a ceasefire work. Nobody wants to be the last person to die fighting when the future is already known.

In Mosul, the fighting is not a civil war. Unlike in Syria, where there must be tradeoffs among the combatants, in Mosul the struggle against the so-called Islamic State (ISIS) is a war of annihilation. And, in contrast to the Russian and Syrian offensive in Aleppo, the Iraqi Arabs and Kurds and their American advisers most likely worked for months to anticipate issues and to ensure success before the fighting began.

But it is already clear that there is far more at stake in the Mosul campaign than the eradication of ISIS. Depending on how it ends, we will know whether Iraq emerges as a multi-sectarian state or a set of sectarian and ethnic enclaves. Sunnis seem to want no part of the Shia-majority government in Baghdad, even though the Iraqi army (along with the Kurds) is playing the largest role in the fight against ISIS.

As if the Sunni-Shia divide within Iraq were not difficult enough, a deeper and even more problematic fissure has now emerged—Turkey’s own struggles with its identity and its externally imposed borders. The extraordinarily harmful statement by Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdoğan that his country has not reconciled itself to its 100-year-old southern border with Iraq’s Ninewa Province has greatly complicated Turkey’s ability to play a role in Iraq’s healing process. Arabs have long harbored deep suspicion that the Turks want more than just to protect the Turkmen minority and Sunni Arabs in the conflict. Now, Erdoğan has confirmed these suspicions, and in so doing has created conditions for more violence in Iraq.

How the fighting in Aleppo and Mosul ends will help clarify the tasks ahead. But until Russia, the US, Turkey, Saudi Arabia, and others (Europe, is anyone home?) can come together around a set of principles that steer the region toward peace, the carnage will continue.

The Mosul offensive: military success doesn’t guarantee strategic victory

As the world watches the Battle for Mosul unfold, the key question isn’t whether the city will be liberated, but rather what comes next? The military operation to liberate Mosul could actually prove to be the least challenging task. The humanitarian and political fallout will be significant, and will have lasting ramifications.

For more than a year, momentum has been with the Iraqi government forces. But the so-called Islamic State (IS) has occupied Mosul for more than two years; therefore, it’s well defended inside the city, and in the words of Clausewitz, defence is the stronger form of war. It’s difficult to predict how long it’ll be before Mosul is liberated, but a conservative estimate would indicate months before all pockets of resistance are cleared.

Mosul was once Iraq’s second largest city and is still populated by well over a million—mostly Sunni—residents, including at least 5,000 IS fighters. Clearing the city will be a complex task, requiring fire support from tanks, artillery and aircraft. Bombs are destructive, particularly in urban terrain; therefore, the city will almost certainly be left in ruins.

Ramadi and Fallujah provide some useful insight into what can be expected in Mosul after the battle. But Mosul is a much larger city and the last true IS bastion remaining in Iraq. It’s also a key part of the caliphate; therefore, IS won’t give up without a fierce fight.

Anti-IS forces will aim to encircle the city from the north, south and east, leaving the west open for IS forces to withdraw. While leaving an open flank seems counterintuitive, it’s much easier to detect, identify, track and destroy the enemy in the open desert than in a built up urban environment where it uses underground tunnels and smoke to obscure movement from the air.

A tactical withdrawal would result in significant loss of prestige for IS, which has previously leveraged off battlefield success through information operations to recruit foreign fighters, inspire attacks against the West and raise international funds to sustain the ‘jihad’.

It’s more likely IS will treat Mosul as its ‘last stand’ in Iraq and prolong the battle. It will preserve critical enablers, including key leaders, but thousands of fighters will remain behind and be prepared die in place.

While anti-IS forces are currently advancing quickly towards Mosul, the hardest fighting is yet to come. Resistance will increase on the rural-urban fringe, then the house-to-house fighting could last months. IS will employ a range of layered and interconnected static and mobile improvised explosive devices to disrupt, and where possible, dislocate advancing government forces. IS fighters will move through the city via a series of interconnected tunnels to reinforce flanks and block advancing formations.

The prognosis: Mosul will become a battle of attrition and the city will be left in ruins.

Within the past week IS launched a major counterattack against Kirkuk to the southeast of Mosul. Such counterattacks will continue for three reasons. First, IS will want to recapture lost ground because territory defines the caliphate. Second, remote attacks shift focus from contested areas to force a redistribution of Iraqi combat power elsewhere. Finally, successful counterattacks will generate news and imagery to feed the IS propaganda machine. Continual losses are bad for the IS brand; it’s desperate for some battlefield success to fuel its narrative and inspire supporters.

While the Mosul offensive unfolds, the United Nations is poised to deliver the world’s biggest and most complex humanitarian effort to assist fleeing civilians, including more than half a million children. The internally displaced people (IDPs) require shelter, food and water—a significant logistic effort anytime, but particularly during a major battle. Most IDPs won’t have the ability to choose where they go; they’re now caught up in the midst of a large battlefield, so their options are to either remain in place, attempt to break through battle lines, or move to UN IDP camps.

Some civilians may be reluctant to flee the city because they don’t know what awaits them on the outside. Will they be viewed as IS sympathisers because they’ve lived under its rule for more than two years? Or, will they be seen as victims of the crisis and treated as Iraqi citizens in need of UN assistance and Government support? Although the majority are Sunni Arabs, there is a multi-ethnic dimension that will add further complexity in the aftermath of the military operation.

The Iraqi government’s role in all of this is important. It needs to be seen to serve the interests of all Iraqi people—Sunni, Shia and Kurds. While Prime Minister al-Abadi is pressured from both the US and Iran, he needs to remain stoic and committed to his pledge for an inclusive government that serves the interests of all its citizens, regardless of religion, ethnicity or gender.

If the humanitarian fallout from Mosul isn’t dealt with swiftly and responsibly, or the Iraqi Government doesn’t present an inclusive, viable alternative to IS, there will be no enduring peace. Sectarian conflict will continue, enabling either IS or a successor to resurface and thrive in the resulting violent, chaotic and uncertain environment.

Even when Mosul is liberated, the IS threat will continue to evolve. Australia and its allies need to be prepared and recognise that military success in Mosul doesn’t guarantee strategic victory. That problem requires an Arab-led solution that effectively harnesses and integrates all instruments of international power.

The war powers debate: the Governor-General as Commander-in-Chief

Image courtesy of Flickr user Blue Mountains Local Studies

A recent ABC Lateline program has stirred fresh debate about the exercise of war powers in Australia, following the Chilcot Report’s criticism of the United Kingdom government’s decision-making in the lead-up to the Iraq War.

Prominent voices demanded that parliament should have to approve any decision to go to war although there is no particular reason to suppose that a larger group of politicians would necessarily make a better decision than a small group. Regardless of whether the parliament or the executive decides, there’s much that could be done to improve existing executive practices. Decision-making by the National Security Committee (NSC) of Cabinet alone, as is currently the case, is undesirable.

The NSC decides on the use of the most extreme powers available to government. This includes deliberate killing, destruction and capture in war. Such action may also be militarily offensive rather than defensive in character. Despite this, an NSC decision does not in itself provide a clear legal basis for the use of military force. As a result, parliamentary and public debate is less informed and effective in holding the government to account; it’s less clear which actions of the ADF are within the scope of lawful authority and which are not; and members of the ADF are potentially exposed to personal legal liability for following orders for which the source and legal basis are unclear.

There’s no positive authority in Australian case law or statute to kill, capture or destroy in war. Such matters have traditionally been part of the war prerogative. Such case law hasn’t directly authorised actions against the enemy, but instead rendered such actions immune from legal liability. The extent of that immunity is unclear and the subject of continuing litigation before the courts in the United Kingdom.

Until 1942, declarations of war clearly invoked the war prerogative. This had the advantage of identifying the enemy as well as the duties of those in the armed forces. The King gave the Governor-General the power to declare war separately against Japan and other Axis powers by special royal instruments in 1941 and 1942. This meant that the Governor-General could exercise all aspects of the war prerogative. This power only passed to the Governor-General in very precise terms. It did not pass to any other Commonwealth official.

Importantly, members of the ADF have a duty to obey lawful orders. As put by Justice Murphy in A v Hayden in 1984, ‘Military and civilians have a duty to obey lawful orders, and a duty to disobey unlawful orders’. An order from the Governor-General to the ADF invoking the war prerogative would make it a duty for ADF members to kill or capture the enemy, and destroy enemy property, where it’s lawful to do so under the law of armed conflict. Only the Governor-General has that power, through having command-in-chief of the Australian Defence Force. Despite a general power of direction, no minister has command over any member of the ADF. Therefore there’s no defence of lawful orders available to a member of the ADF for following an NSC direction.

This isn’t a hypothetical issue. The prosecution of two commandos before a court martial in 2011 raised the important question of what the authority was for them to be using force in Afghanistan.

One way to address these issues would be to have an order from the Governor-General to the Chief of the Defence Force to deploy the ADF for a particular purpose. It could look like this:

Whereas:

the Republic of Iraq is under armed attack by forces known as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, and

the Government of Iraq has requested military assistance from Australia to repel that attack;

I, General Sir Peter Cosgrove, Governor-General of the Commonwealth of Australia and Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force, on the advice of my ministers and acting in accordance with the war prerogative exercisable by me, order the Chief of the Defence Force to use force to assist the Government of Iraq to resist enemy forces known as the Islamic State in Syria and Iraq, in accordance with such directions as my ministers may give.

Such an order identifies the legal basis to act in international law, which is collective self-defence of Iraq at the invitation of the Government of Iraq. It also provides a clear strategic intent, which is resisting the enemy of Iraq, even if there’s no strategic end state. It acknowledges the convention of acting upon ministerial advice but also that the order relies upon the war prerogative as exercisable by the Governor-General.

An order like that could provide the basis for informed parliamentary and wider public scrutiny and debate. It could also be helpful in scrutinising ‘mission creep’ beyond the scope of the order. Equally, an order could be pleaded in court as a defence of lawful authority or a defence of lawful superior orders. This would be a significant and necessary improvement to the legal procedures by which Australia decides to go to war.

 

Countering terrorism: why Iraq matters

Image courtesy of the Australian Defence Force

In 2003, Coalition forces decisively destroyed the Iraqi Army and toppled Saddam Hussein. The military mission had been accomplished, but what was left?

While the decisive phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) was relatively well planned and executed, insufficient consideration was given to arguably the most important phase—stabilising the environment after the shooting stopped. The key lesson for campaign planners was the need to articulate a unified end state—a clear and agreed vision of what peace should look like.

Fast forward to 2014 when another US-led coalition entered Iraq, this time in response to a request from the Iraqi Government after the so-called Islamic State (Daesh) captured a number of Iraqi cities, and gained effective control over a significant part of Iraq’s territory. Combined Joint Task Force – Operation Inherent Resolve (CJTF-OIR) was established to help Iraq defeat Daesh. With a limited mandate, the coalition primarily focused on training, and advising and assisting the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), as well as providing air support.

Iraq is now a coalition partner, fighting another war on its own soil against an insurgency and terrorist group. In the past 12 months, the ISF has—with considerable support—made slow but significant progress recapturing Iraqi sovereign territory and militarily defeating Daesh.

With Daesh now on the back foot in Iraq, a military victory is again likely. But have we learned the lessons of 2003? As with Coalition forces then, the task on the battlefield won’t be as challenging as ensuring long-term peace and stability when the fighting ends. And the consequences are serious: a failure to prepare to establish peace and stability in Iraq will have significant implications for the global terrorist threat.

For Australia and the broader international community, Iraq remains critical in the fight against terrorism. An unstable Middle East region, characterised by chaos, violence and uncertainty, provides a prime breeding ground and focus point for violent extremism, and an ideal training ground for terrorists. Iraq matters to our counterterrorism efforts because many of those terrorists, who complete their apprenticeships in Iraq, will advocate attacks on Western targets through remote recruitment, support and direction, or undertake attacks themselves.

In defining the peace we seek, it’s first necessary to understand the complex environment of Iraq. One of the Iraqi government’s main challenges is that it isn’t just the ISF fighting Daesh. The fighting force is made up of a large number of internal and external actors, including numerous Shia militia groups, Sunni tribal fighters, Kurdish Peshmerga and Iranian Revolutionary Guard Quds Forces.

While at face value that represents an increased fighting force ratio, the question is why are all those groups doing the Iraqi government’s fighting for them?

The most obvious reason is to protect Iraq. But looking deeper, each of those groups has its own agenda and interest in Iraq’s future.  They have competing visions for Iraq’s future which stand in contrast to Baghdad’s—and indeed Canberra’s—envisaged end state.

The political landscape in Baghdad is becoming increasingly murky. It is a momentous challenge for the Iraqi Government to reconcile Sunni, Shia and Kurdish grievances whilst fighting a war and also trying to keep Iran at arm’s length.

When Daesh is defeated, what will become of the armed militia? Will they pose a new internal security threat for the Iraqi Government or will they be absorbed within the ISF? The cost of both options would be enormous.

What of Shia Iran and its role? How about the West? What’s the future for defeated Daesh fighters who tactically withdraw and attempt to re-integrate within Iraqi society?

While there are no clear answers yet to those questions, one thing is certain: for years to come, Iraq’s internal environment will be dominated by a highly diverse and complex demographic comprised of those disparate factions, hampered by ongoing political, ethnic and sectarian tensions in a hotly contested and dynamic region.

To illustrate the point, as a combat team commander in Iraq in 2007, the primary threat to my force was the army of Shia Cleric, Muqtada al-Sadr’s, Jaysh al-Mahdi (JAM). JAM’s mission was to undermine the will of coalition forces, primarily through using improvised explosive devices (IED). From January 2007 to June 2008, JAM was responsible for more than 1,500 IED attacks against coalition forces.

Eight years on, as the commanding officer of the first Australian and New Zealand Training Team of Task Group TAJI in 2015, I was bemused to learn that JAM had rebranded itself as the ‘Peace Brigade’, Saraya al-Salam. More puzzling is the fact that this Shia militia group is now a coalition partner, on our side, fighting Daesh. This Shia militia group tolerates the coalition presence for now, while we share a common enemy in the Sunni Daesh, but there will likely be a tipping point in the future where they switch sides and again target coalition forces.

There are no easy solutions to those security challenges, and no guarantees, but Iraq is worth fighting for because the risks associated with inaction are too great. While there’s instability and conflict, Iraq will remain a breeding ground for violent extremism and a training area for foreign fighters, some of whom will return to their countries of origin.

For this reason, Western governments need to better collaborate with their partners in the Middle East to develop a clear understanding of what the peace should look like, and harness all elements of international power to design and execute a coherent strategy for the region.

Likewise, Australia must consider Iraq an essential piece within a fully-integrated, whole-of-government counterterrorism strategic plan, particularly as Daesh looks to extend its reach to Southeast Asia.

Sea, air and land updates

Image courtesy of Flickr user NASA's Earth Observatory

Sea State

A new report (PDF) from CSIS has warned that Russian submarine activity in the Baltic and Mediterranean seas and the North Atlantic are at their highest levels since the end of the Cold War. It found that the Russian Navy and its submarine force had remained relatively insulated from the challenges that had severely impacted Russia’s broader military modernisation strategy, and that Russian submarines are generally very capable vessels when properly maintained. The report suggested NATO and partner nations wouldn’t be able to quickly counter Russian undersea challenge in the region, due to the inability of most NATO members to meet defence spending targets,  declining capabilities and a lack of integration among relevant allies. In response, it suggested NATO members and partners needed to pursue organisational reforms and a federated response to capability development.

US Vice President Joe Biden announced last Thursday that a US naval vessel would attend the Royal New Zealand Navy’s 75th anniversary in November. The visit will be the first time an American warship has visited the country in 33 years, after New Zealand introduced a nuclear-free policy in the 1980s. US warships were banned in NZ waters because the US wouldn’t officially confirm or deny if its ships were carrying nuclear weapons. NZ Prime Minister John Key made the invitation, stating it would appear odd if all of the nation’s other allies attended without the US, and noted that the ship would need to comply with NZ law—meaning the ship won’t have any a nuclear weapons capability.

Flight Path

A new article on The National Interest has argued that the divestment of the A-10 community—not the aircraft itself—poses the greatest threat to the future of USAF missions. Major Joel Bier, a former USAF Weapons School Instructor Pilot, said the move towards a multirole solution that includes close air support (CAS) responsibilities would see CAS expertise evaporate as multirole communities ‘return their focus to traditional air-minded missions’. Just last month, during his nomination testimony, USAF Chief of Staff General David Goldfein said the A-10 community is USAF’s ‘PhD force when it comes to close air support’. In more A-10 news, USAF officials briefed outside stakeholders in a meeting on 20 July, detailing the possibility that it may pursue two separate light-attack aircraft—potentially in parallel—to meet both immediate and long-term needs.

USAF is heading further into the final frontier, with a new white paper recognising that US adversaries are actively fielding systems to deny the US use of space during a conflict. The Air Force Space Command released details of the newly implemented ‘Space Mission Force’, including a plan to train airmen to operate military satellites in a threat environment and to teach tactics to respond to threats. The initiative aims to ensure that a greater number of operators know how to act in a ‘contested environment’ and will see operators receive four to six months of intensive training before apply their skills to real-world scenarios.

Rapid Fire

Iraqi forces are employing the medieval tactic of digging a trench around Fallujah in order maintain control after recently recapturing it from Daesh. When completed, the trench will be 11 kilometres long, 12.5 meters wide and 1.5 meters deep with a single opening that will allow residents to enter and leave. In a slightly more modern security technique, forgery-proof ID cards will be issued to the 85,000 Fallujah residents who fled during the May–June offensive to retake the city.

In the wake of the failed military coup in Turkey, some 35% of all the Turkish Armed Forces generals and admirals are in detention. Turkish President Erdogan has promised to overhaul the army and give it ‘fresh blood’. However, given that Turkey is one of the leading members of the NATO alliance, there are concerns that those changes will disrupt its military readiness—as the absence of experienced commanders could inadvertently heighten tensions between NATO and Russia.

As the Syrian war rages on, an article from Defence One provides an overview of the weapons used during the lengthy conflict. Featuring an interactive timeline that spans five years, the site shows that fighters in the conflict have used some of the most hi-tech weapons of the 21st century—but also some of the most basic…

The intelligence jigsaw

Image courtesy of Flickr user Matthew Quarisa

I’d like to add a different perspective to the post on the limitations of intelligence that was offered by my colleague, John Coyne. I write as someone who worked at the Office of National Assessments for over 11 years, although I left ONA in late 1996, and have no personal or specific knowledge to offer on the character of the supposed ‘flawed intelligence’ about Iraqi WMD that’s said to have provided the basis for the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

Let me begin by agreeing with John’s analogy on the nature of intelligence assessment—it’s like being given 10,000 jigsaw pieces within which an indeterminate number of pieces from a 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle are hidden. Intelligence assessment has much of that ‘puzzle-within-a-puzzle’ quality to it, where you don’t have all the pieces—typically you may have only half—and you aren’t even fully certain that the pieces you do have are entirely authentic. Casting it like that provides a better sense of what intelligence assessment can and can’t do.

The analogy’s not meant to belittle the role that intelligence collection and assessment agencies play. In reality, what ONA offers is ‘all-source assessment’: that is, it merges information that’s publicly available (whether in the form of readily-available media reporting or less accessible ‘grey literature’), with information that comes through confidential government channels, and with reporting that comes in through more arcane sources (what we commonly call ‘secrets’). As you go up that chain, information becomes more expensive—and harder—to collect. In essence, then, the government has spent a tidy sum of money to get the analyst the initial 10,000 jigsaw pieces. The eventual incomplete puzzle might seem a weak foundation for grand conclusions, but typically the analyst has access to more pieces of that puzzle than anyone else.

Still, the incompleteness of the intelligence analyst’s knowledge is, I believe, the best explanation for why it’s wrong to think—as many do—that the US, UK and Australian government ‘lied’ about Saddam’s possession of WMD in 2003. ‘Lying’ would mean they had the complete jigsaw puzzle, and consciously misrepresented what the jigsaw showed. I think they never had the full picture. Intelligence doesn’t offer a perfect understanding of the world—and Iraq was a hard collection target.

So, let’s assume that strategic analysts in 2003 started with an incomplete puzzle. What happens next? Here, I think, is where the going gets even tougher. The job of an intelligence analyst is to call it as s/he sees it—that is, to give the government the best assessment of what they think the puzzle’s actually about. Because the puzzle’s incomplete, good assessment turns upon good pattern recognition skills, expertise and experience. But let me make one thing plain: analysts are not paid to tell the government that they don’t know what the puzzle shows. Nor are they paid to offer a string of conflicting and ambiguous judgments to their ministerial readers. If ONA were to do that, it would—and should—be closed down.

Good assessment turns on good judgment. And for that reason, when we think about how to ‘get the process right’, I think that’s essentially done by hiring the best people. I’m opposed to the idea that analytical tradecraft should fall under the purview of the Inspector-General of Intelligence and Security. It’s fictitious to believe that an external agency should stand over ONA analysts qualifying their judgments. If an analyst writes ‘Iraq probably has weapons of mass destruction’, and someone else comes along and—in the spirit of contestability— adds ‘but it might not’, I really don’t see how that helps. I don’t think it even adds any new information.

The myth of the ‘lie’ means that lots of people over the years have come to believe that Saddam Hussein never had weapons of mass destruction. That’s simply wrong. The Iraqis used chemical weapons against the Iranians in the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Further, the existence of a biological weapons program was dragged from the Iraqis in 1995, when the Iraqis confessed not merely to manufacturing biological agents but to weaponising them.

Yes, the UN Special Commission did good work in tracing and destroying the bulk of the Iraqi arsenal in the 1990s. But Saddam frequently led UNSCOM inspectors on a protracted game of hide-and-seek. And in 1998 he threw them out altogether. True, the inspectors returned in 2002. But the question that surely rebounded around all three Western governments in 2003 was ‘Why would Saddam go to such lengths to conceal the status of his WMD stocks unless he had something to hide?’ Richard Haass has answered that for us: Saddam didn’t want it known that he didn’t have any WMD. If that’s the real explanation, Saddam Hussein was playing a decidedly risky game—not least because he was relying on the ability of Western intelligence analysts to separate out the pieces of two distinct jigsaw puzzles from within the 10,000 pieces.

Two crucial truths in the Chilcot report?

Edited image courtesy of Flickr user Jose Manuel Escarcega

The Chilcot report underlines two crucial truths that further undermine the Iraq War legacies of George W. Bush, Tony Blair and John Howard. The first is that the invasion was unnecessary, precisely because the US-led policy of containing Saddam Hussein’s regime was working. The second is that the invasion transformed Iraq from an al-Qaeda-free zone into an area where al-Qaeda and its progeny flourish. Neither point has attracted much attention in the past week.

Start with containment. In 26 February 2003—about three weeks before ‘shock and awe’ was inflicted on the Iraqi people—Howard took to the Wall Street Journal opinion pages to explain why Saddam couldn’t be contained. Containment worked against the Soviet Union, he said, because ‘the doctrine of Mutual Assured Destruction guaranteed the maintenance of the status quo’ until the internal implosion of the old Soviet empire. Such a strategy couldn’t work against the Saddam Husseins’ of the post-September 11 world, the Australian Prime Minister warned, because ‘the cost of doing nothing is infinitely greater than the cost of acting’.

What Howard and other hawks failed to grasp, however, was that the Iraqi threat could’ve been contained as it had been contained since the 1991 Gulf War. The Iraqi dictator, far from being bent on religious martyrdom, was a cynical calculator whose overriding priority was to hold onto power and exercise it ruthlessly over the unfortunate people of Iraq. (Besides, as the anti-war conservative and ABC Boyer lecturer Owen Harries often quipped, what did Saddam ever do to Australia other than buy our wheat?)

True, containment can’t work against terrorists, who can run and hide. But Saddam wasn’t in cahoots with Osama bin Laden and the perpetuators of 9/11. Moreover, rogue states do have a mailing address; and it should have been clear that if Saddam smuggled weapons of mass destruction (WMD) to al-Qaeda or used banned weapons against US interests, his regime would have met ‘national obliteration’ from the US nuclear arsenal, as Bush’s senior advisor Condoleezza Rice pointed out in Foreign Affairs in 2000. Containment worked against nuclear-armed Joe Stalin and Mao Zedong at the height of the Cold War; it was working against Saddam Hussein, whose regime we soon discovered didn’t even possess WMD.

Granted, the sanctions, naval blockades, and no-fly-zone lacked the political sex appeal of ‘liberation’ after 9/11. But at least such realist strategies avoided the unintended consequences that a liberated Iraq has delivered. As a 98-year-old George Kennan, the intellectual architect of the Cold War doctrine of containment in 1947, warned six months before the invasion: ‘If we went into Iraq, you know where you begin; you never know where you are going to end.’

Which brings us to the Islamic State. Few myths are as persistent as the argument that the Iraq invasion has no connection to the rise of the Sunni jihadist network. Washington neo-conservatives dismiss any links. So, too, does Howard.

Writing in The Australian after Chilcot’s release, Greg Sheridan defended the former prime minister when he argued: ‘It is utterly intellectually dishonest to attribute the terrible instability and conflict in the Middle East to Iraq.’ Why? Because Islamic State emerged from Syria’s civil war, in which the US coalition didn’t intervene.

In fact, the taproot of today’s mayhem was what the distinguished US conservative columnist George Will has called the ‘ruinous grandiosity’ of Bush’s ‘freedom agenda,’ which Tony Blair, Howard and Sheridan himself enthusiastically supported.

‘Liberation’ didn’t just amount to toppling a brutal tyranny that kept a lid on simmering ethnic and religious tensions. It meant toppling the minority Sunnis from power in Baghdad and replacing them with the majority Shia. As a result, the invasion upended the sectarian imbalance that had been in place for generations. It also created a power vacuum that was swiftly filled by al-Qaeda in Iraq.

A Shia sectarian regime, supported—perversely—by both the Americans and Iranians, was more focused on revenge against former tormentors rather than building a nation. Meanwhile, Sunnis resented their new status as political losers in post-Saddam Iraq. As a result, many felt their only recourse was to tolerate, even support, the Sunni insurgency against the US-led occupation that morphed into a plethora of Sunni jihadist groups who were even more fanatical than al-Qaeda.

It’s no wonder virtually every scholar of the Middle East claim al-Qaeda in Iraq became the progenitor of Islamic State. Many IS commanders, including Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi, learnt their fighting skills during the US-led occupation. They moved to Sunni Syria, because the ‘surge’ of 2007 had temporarily kept a lid on those age-old ethnic and tribal tensions. When those tensions resurfaced after the withdrawal of US troops in 2011, the jihadists returned to Iraq with a vengeance.

Those who continue to deny the link between the needless, foolish and ultimately catastrophic war and today’s mayhem in the Middle East should heed the French philosopher Henri Bergson’s musings that ‘the present contains nothing more than the past’, and that ‘what is found in the effect was already in the cause’.

Invading Iraq: Tony Blair’s real motivation

Image courtesy of Flickr user Center for American Progress

I haven’t read the dozen-odd volumes of the full Chilcot Report, but I can recommend the 150-odd page Executive Summary. It’s a valuable document and a welcome affirmation, in troubled times, of the principles of accountability on which representative government must be built. But it has serious flaws.

The Executive Summary suggests that in the 12 volumes of seemingly obsessive detail, Chilcot and his colleagues have missed arguably the four most important points about the whole sad story of Britain’s decision to help America invade Iraq.

The first concerns Britain’s, and especially Blair’s, prime motivation. The Report takes more or less at face value, and never seriously contests, the Blair Government’s position that their fears about Iraq’s WMD were indeed the primary reason for deciding to invade Iraq. This is at least highly contestable, and I think almost certainly false. It is not that they did not genuinely believe Iraq had WMD: all the evidence seems to confirm they did, and hence did not lie about it.

But Chilcot doesn’t convincingly explain why Blair might have decided that the risks posed by Iraq’s WMD had suddenly become so serious as to warrant the extraordinary costs and risks of invasion and regime change. It isn’t enough simply to say that 9/11 had changed perceptions of risk, because there never was significant evidence of connections between Saddam and al-Qaeda. If nuclear terrorism was the fear, the danger of al-Qaeda getting WMD was much higher in Pakistan. So why suddenly turn on Iraq?

The best and simplest explanation is that the WMD were merely a pretext, not a reason, to invade Iraq. That explains why Blair and others were so insouciant about the intelligence gaps: the intelligence was not driving their decisions. It was just being used to explain those decisions to the rest of us.

So what was the real reason? My hunch is the truest answer for Britain is that Blair invaded Iraq in order to assert, in the curiously edgy post-9/11 world, his view of the way the world should work, and of America’s, Britain’s, and his own role in it. He wanted to assert a triumphalist vision of a post-Cold War world order framed by American power, with Britain in a central role as its primary helper, and with he, Blair, providing the moral courage, intellectual heft and inspirational leadership.

If so, then Chilcot lets Blair off far too lightly, because his failure wasn’t, as Chilcot suggests, to pursue what might under other circumstances constitute a legitimate strategic objective in a muddled and incompetent way. It was to launch a war in pursuit of a vain delusion of national and personal power.

Second, Chilcot doesn’t clearly recognise how vain that delusion was, because the Report doesn’t face up to the nature of Britain’s and its allies’ failures. It suggests that with better planning and policies, and a few more resources, things might have gone much better; and that Blair’s vision of rebuilding a stable pro-Western Iraq might then have been realised. In other words, Chilcot shares Blair’s own view that failure in Iraq was a matter of poor execution, not of a fundamentally flawed conception.  

That is, in a sense, to share Blair’s central delusion: that the West, underwritten by American power and guided by British statesmanship, has the capacity to take over a country the size of Iraq and transform its national life and political institutions to match our interests and values, at a price we’re able and willing to pay. The most important lesson of Iraq, and of Afghanistan, and Libya, and Syria, is that this is false. Such massive efforts of political transformation require resources on a scale and over a timeframe that no country in the West, including America and Britain can or will commit.

Third, Chilcot gives a lot of attention to Blair’s epic struggle, and failure, to achieve a UN mandate for the invasion. But is doesn’t seem anywhere to address the deeper question: what difference would a UN mandate have made?  The invasion and occupation didn’t fail because it was illegal without a UN mandate, and it wouldn’t have succeeded any better if the elusive second UNSC resolution had been secured.

Finally, in so starkly blaming Blair for poor decision-making, Chilcot seems to let many others off too lightly. Blair must of course be held responsible for the many failures—and as I have suggested, those failures were even deeper than the report suggests. But he wasn’t the only person in Whitehall responsible for British policy. Under the time-honoured principles of Westminster-style cabinet government, his Cabinet colleagues shared that responsibility.

So it’s their fault—as well as Blair’s—if they went along with him, just as it’s their fault as well as Blair’s if they didn’t demand and exercise their right and responsibility to dissent if they did not. They shared his responsibility and they must all share the blame. Some might say that that isn’t how things are in the contemporary ‘presidential’ model of Westminster government that operated under Blair. But Iraq shows why that model doesn’t work, and needs to be fixed. Chilcot fails to draw that vital conclusion.

And the blame should be spread beyond Cabinet too. Blair’s senior civil and military advisers didn’t share his and his cabinet colleagues’ responsibility for the final decisions, but they did have a plain duty of their own to give prudent, carefully-considered and well-informed advice, and to give it as forcefully as necessary to make sure the message got through.

And what of Australia? We seem content to assume that there are no lessons to be learned from the decisions for war made in the decade after 9/11 by our Governments, Labor and Coalition, both in Iraq and Afghanistan. But all of the failings in British policy-making had their echoes in Australia, and we’ve taken no steps to recognise and understand them. So don’t be surprised if we repeat them.