Failure in Iraq? We've Already Failed

William M. Arkin on National and Homeland Security

"Failure in Iraq at this juncture would be a calamity that would haunt our nation, impair our credibility, and endanger Americans for decades to come," Robert M. Gates said yesterday upon taking the oath to be Secretary of Defense.

Public service I guess is about ruined holidays and long hours, but as Bob Gates starts his exhausting marathon of briefings and meetings, will somebody tell this supposedly savvy Washington operator that the United States has already failed?

Gates has pledged to rely on the uniformed military's "clear-eyed advice" - his second mission is to repair civil-military relations - but after six years and three generations of four stars losing the Rumsfeld war, can the military step-up to the plate and reach beyond its honor bound compulsion to take the next hill to tell the new Secretary the honest truth: We long ago failed.
Train Iraqi forces. It sounds so reasonable, like "diplomacy" with Iran and Syria or Palestinian-Israeli peace, gosh darn, why didn't we just think of it earlier?
Here are some bullet points for the new Secretary:

• We've been trying for three years: From Lt. Gen. Dave Petraeus' Multi-National Security Transition Command-Iraq (MNSTC-I) - remember that organization in 2004? - through today's training "surge" already underway, we've been there.

• Iraq's armed forces and police are no where closer today to being in a state to be trained to be a dispassionate professional force. In fact, there are further away: The institutions are merely a reflection of the country -- disorganized, sectarian, and corrupt. We, the U.S. military, moreover, have exaggerated the capabilities of Iraqi army and police forces.

• The American military is also not up to the task: Troops are exhausted, they remain culturally weak and distant from Iraqi political, social and religious realities, there are even insufficient translators and specialists more than five years after Sept. 11.

• Embedding is a recipe for disaster: American soldiers will become implicated and embroiled in human rights abuses and even major crimes committed by Iraqi forces. Who wants to put American troops into boiling pots?

The President might be able to swallow the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to increased American embedded trainers from the now paltry 3,000 to 4,000, and all of Washington can agree on a new training emphasis, but the missing ingredient here remains Iraq.

General after General, bureaucrat after bureaucrat will tell the new Secretary this week and next how an additional 20,000 to 30,000 will be deployed, how they are being prepared stateside, which states they will come from, how many Iraqi units are level one, level two, level three, which Iraqi leaders and units are considered the best, where the U.S. embeds will go, how they will be fed and commanded. There will be the ubiquitous stop light charts displaying the state of the program and the war: Green on preparations at Ft. Riley, Kansas; Yellow with regard to Iraqi cooperation; Red on the state of current violence.

It is all tactical talk, all details.

Will anyone get beyond the view that "we have to succeed" to actually ask the question as to whether it is possible or likely?

And that's where the American failure in Iraq already comes in: In the Islamic world, the United States military has already been shown to be vulnerable. The bad guys have invented improvised explosive devices, just as Hezbollah in Lebanon made clever use of anti-tank missiles against Israeli ground forces, displaying innovation and putting the hurt on U.S. forces. In other words, short of decimating the insurgents and the militias and the terrorists in an all-out renewed war, which isn't going to happen, what has already happened has left behind an image and a legacy that withdrawal won't make worse.

My guess is that given years, and allowing for 700 American deaths and 10,000 serious injuries annually, the United States could turn things around. Get it? There is no timeline because there is no timeline.

Do we think in all these briefings that the military can get beyond the details of the NEW training program to say it can't be done in 2007 or even 2008? I don't say this merely to suggest that there is some secret timeline that has to parallel the upcoming presidential election: the truth is that the American people demand action and change sooner. There just isn't a Power Point solution in Iraq that can satisfy what the people want.

So we have this palpable mood change in the Pentagon, as senior military leaders look forward to breaking the painful and emasculating chain that tied them to the last Secretary of Defense. The sense is that the era of the put-down and arrogance is over, that advice will at least be sought if not heeded, that the cold eye of reality will replace the starry eyed ideology.

I have a lot of friends in uniform, and I have my own favorites - smart, straightforward, savvy Generals and Admirals who have seen it all - and I have no doubt that they can step up to the plate. But can they see the truth beyond their can-do impulse? I sure hope so. Otherwise it's déjà vu all over again.

By William M. Arkin December 19, 2006; 8:39 AM ET