Iraqi President Confirms Satrapy Of Iraq

I hate to say I told you so but...

Iran's Kurdish president, Jalal Talabani, is saying Iraq will need permanent U.S. bases to "deter" external threats.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani, in an interview, asked for a long-term US military presence in Iraq, saying his country will need two permanent US air bases to deter "foreign interference."

"I think we will be in need of American forces for a long time -- even two military bases to prevent foreign interference," Talabani told The Washington Post.

"I don't ask to have 100,000 American soldiers -- 10,000 soldiers and two air bases would be enough."

The president indicated the bases would most welcome in Kurdistan, an autonomous region in northern Iraq that has practiced de facto self-government since the 1991 Gulf War.

But he suggested that the Sunni Arab segment of the Iraqi population would also welcome a long-term US military presence in Iraq.

"In some places Sunnis want the Americans to stay," he argued. "Sunnis think the main danger is coming from Iran now."

I think Talibani is grasping at Sunni straws there. The primary cause of instability in Iraq is still the occupation. It isn't Sunni fear of Iran that has led to 4,000 U.S. troops having their tours extended or Gen. Abizaid's admission that "we will stand down as they stand up" is a dead duck for the forseeable future. Still Talibani is right that Iraq will need U.S. forces as protection against foreign enemies - it has such an utter lack of heavy equipment, navy, airforce or logistics infrastructure that the tine United Arab Emirates could probably wipe out most of the Iraqi military in a day or so. There are, still, no plans to change that. There never have been. The Satrapy of Iraq has always been a de facto necessity imposed by the occupiers' lack of foresight.

Now, at least, Talibani has publicly admitted as much. That won't help fight the current Iraqi civil war at all, though - much of the problem is that the Iraqi government is seen as a puppet of America and needs American military might to prop up its legitimacy. That fuels both the insurgency and, to an extent, sectarian feuding, as factions try to grab a bigger slice of the pie in defiance of what is seen as a toothless Iraqi administration.

Its interesting, though, that Talibani is suggesting Kurdish territory, especially given yesterday's report that Turkey and Iran are about to invade Kurdish Iraq in pursuit of peshmerga terrorists. Yesterday's report also said that Iran, at least, might kill teo birds with one stone - attacking the terrorists "over there" so that they don't have to fight them at home but also viewing any invasion as a spoiler for a putative U.S. or Israeli attack on Iran's nuclear program in October. If so, it has to be said that Iran has been playing chess while the Bush foreign policy and Pentagon types have been playing tiddliwinks.

"If you fail to plan, you plan to fail" is a common adage in management. One can only wish someone had told Rumsfeld. Yet more too-little-too-late speaking up came today from his old generals in a hearing run by Senate Dems because the Republicans fearfully refused to hold any such hearing:

"I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq," retired Maj. Gen. John R. S. Batiste told a forum conducted by Senate Democrats.

A second military leader, retired Maj. Gen. Paul Eaton, assessed Rumsfeld as "incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically."

"Mr. Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making," Eaton added at the forum, held six weeks before the Nov. 7 midterm elections, in which the war is a central issue.

...Batiste, who commanded the Army's 1st Infantry Division in Iraq, also blamed Congress for failing to ask "the tough questions."

He said Rumsfeld at one point threatened to fire the next person who mentioned the need for a postwar plan in Iraq.

Batiste said if full consideration had been given to the requirements for war, it's likely the U.S. would have kept its focus on Afghanistan, "not fueled Islamic fundamentalism across the globe, and not created more enemies than there were insurgents."

[Col. Paul X.] Hammes said that not providing the best equipment was a "serious moral failure on the part of our leadership."

The United States "did not ask our soldiers to invade France in 1944 with the same armor they trained on in 1941. Why are we asking our soldiers and Marines to use the same armor we found was insufficient in 2003?" he asked.

Hammes was responsible for establishing bases for the Iraqi armed forces. He served in Iraq in 2004 and is now Marine Senior Military Fellow at the Institute for National Security Studies, National Defense University.

Eaton was responsible for training the Iraqi military and later for rebuilding the Iraqi police force.

He said planning for the postwar period was "amateurish at best, incompetent a better descriptor."

That incompetent planning has also gutted the U.S. military. Combat tours in Iraq, which should have a two year rest period between them, are down to 14 or 12 months apart even for those troops who don't get their tours extended. One such unit is the Third Infantry Division.

Col. Tom James, who commands the division’s Second Brigade, acknowledged that his unit’s equipment levels had fallen so low that it now had no tanks or other armored vehicles to use in training and that his soldiers were rated as largely untrained in attack and defense.

The rest of the division, which helped lead the invasion of Iraq in 2003 and conducted the first probes into Baghdad, is moving back to full strength after many months of being a shell of its former self.

But at a time when Pentagon officials are saying the Army is stretched so thin that it may be forced to go back on its pledge to limit National Guard deployment overseas, the division’s situation is symptomatic of how the shortages are playing out on the ground.

The enormous strains on equipment and personnel, because of longer-than-expected deployments, have left active Army units with little combat power in reserve. The Second Brigade, for example, has only half of the roughly 3,500 soldiers it is supposed to have. The unit trains on computer simulators, meant to recreate the experience of firing a tank’s main gun or driving in a convoy under attack.

“It’s a good tool before you get the equipment you need,” Colonel James said. But a few years ago, he said, having a combat brigade in a mechanized infantry division at such a low state of readiness would have been “unheard of.”

Other than the 17 brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, only two or three combat brigades in the entire Army — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully trained and sufficiently equipped to respond quickly to crises, said a senior Army general.

It looks like the failure to plan for training and equipping Iraqis means in reality that instead of the Iraqi troops getting better, U.S. military readiness, morale and ability are getting worse. It is this force that will be asked to hold the Iraqi line for the forseeable future. That is what Rumsfield has wrought - but the buck stops with his boss.