restive Sunnis and no wealth or political influence, received little attention from the CPA or Iraqi civilian officials in Baghdad. Anbar was Indian Country, best handled by American military.
Despite the obvious insurgency in Anbar, at the beginning of the year General Sanchez was offering an upbeat assessment. “We’ve made significant progress in Anbar Province. Iraqis have gotten tired of the violence and are cooperating,” he said. “They want to get on with living their lives.”
Senior officials at the Pentagon weren’t so sure about such cooperation, and Wolfowitz was tired of haggling at long distance over minuscule budget matters. A deputy secretary of defense and a lieutenant general on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not have to send cables to the CPA asking for money to buy trucks or machine guns for the National Guard, as happened on more than one occasion.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz decided to conduct an outside review under CentCom’s auspices. In mid-January Major General Karl Eikenberry, an army officer with a reputation for intellectual rigor, arrived in Baghdad with an assessment team. He and his team listened to briefings by the CPA and JTF staffs working in the shambles of the tasteless palace inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone. Each day a thousand Americans left their tiny air-conditioned trailers, lined up for breakfast cafeteria-style, then drifted off to their plywood cubicles to spend a twelve-hour day in front of computer screens. Most never ventured out of the sixty-acre compound, spending tours of three to six months as secure and as isolated as they would have been in any prison in the United States.
The assessment team members visited eighteen American battalions. The battalion commanders were not satisfied with the pace or direction of the training of Iraqi security forces. With the exception of the British down south in Basra, all were disturbed by the fact that the insurgency was growing much faster than the Iraqi security forces.
At the same time, the CPA was structuring an army that was intended to play a very small role inside Iraq’s borders. Given the military’s depredations during the Saddam era, an army was not to be trusted. The CPA strategy envisioned a peacetime state—starting at an indefinite time two to five years in the future—when the Iraqi police would provide internal stability. It was up to the JTF to bring Iraq to that state of relative normalcy, after which the American forces would pull back to cantonments and the Iraqi security forces would take over.
The Iraqi Army would be based to the north and east, facing mainly toward the Iranian border. Ambassador Bremer had prepared for Congress a budget that allocated $2 billion for the new Iraqi Army to protect the external borders and $75 million for the National Guard to protect the police inside the borders. Per man, the cost was $50,000 for an Iraqi Army soldier for border defense and $3,400 for a National Guard soldier for defeating the insurgents.
This division of labor and resources did not make sense to planners in the Pentagon. “We had the wrong design for that army,” Secretary Wolfowitz said.
The CentCom planners had told the study members that “it is not our desire to use the Iraqi Army internally.” The Eikenberry study disagreed, concluding that “we don’t have the luxury of an Iraqi Army not involved in defeating the insurgency.” The key to the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq lay “in building up the Iraqis,” not in pursuing offensive operations.
The study recommended shifting from the CPA to CentCom control over the budgets and policies of the Iraqi Army and police. Training of the army had already migrated to CentCom, and it made sense to consolidate the various security functions under one manager. The Eikenberry study advocated unity of command, collocating budgetary authority, held by the CPA, with operational responsibility, held by CentCom. After
Despite the obvious insurgency in Anbar, at the beginning of the year General Sanchez was offering an upbeat assessment. “We’ve made significant progress in Anbar Province. Iraqis have gotten tired of the violence and are cooperating,” he said. “They want to get on with living their lives.”
Senior officials at the Pentagon weren’t so sure about such cooperation, and Wolfowitz was tired of haggling at long distance over minuscule budget matters. A deputy secretary of defense and a lieutenant general on the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff should not have to send cables to the CPA asking for money to buy trucks or machine guns for the National Guard, as happened on more than one occasion.
Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz decided to conduct an outside review under CentCom’s auspices. In mid-January Major General Karl Eikenberry, an army officer with a reputation for intellectual rigor, arrived in Baghdad with an assessment team. He and his team listened to briefings by the CPA and JTF staffs working in the shambles of the tasteless palace inside Baghdad’s heavily protected Green Zone. Each day a thousand Americans left their tiny air-conditioned trailers, lined up for breakfast cafeteria-style, then drifted off to their plywood cubicles to spend a twelve-hour day in front of computer screens. Most never ventured out of the sixty-acre compound, spending tours of three to six months as secure and as isolated as they would have been in any prison in the United States.
The assessment team members visited eighteen American battalions. The battalion commanders were not satisfied with the pace or direction of the training of Iraqi security forces. With the exception of the British down south in Basra, all were disturbed by the fact that the insurgency was growing much faster than the Iraqi security forces.
At the same time, the CPA was structuring an army that was intended to play a very small role inside Iraq’s borders. Given the military’s depredations during the Saddam era, an army was not to be trusted. The CPA strategy envisioned a peacetime state—starting at an indefinite time two to five years in the future—when the Iraqi police would provide internal stability. It was up to the JTF to bring Iraq to that state of relative normalcy, after which the American forces would pull back to cantonments and the Iraqi security forces would take over.
The Iraqi Army would be based to the north and east, facing mainly toward the Iranian border. Ambassador Bremer had prepared for Congress a budget that allocated $2 billion for the new Iraqi Army to protect the external borders and $75 million for the National Guard to protect the police inside the borders. Per man, the cost was $50,000 for an Iraqi Army soldier for border defense and $3,400 for a National Guard soldier for defeating the insurgents.
This division of labor and resources did not make sense to planners in the Pentagon. “We had the wrong design for that army,” Secretary Wolfowitz said.
The CentCom planners had told the study members that “it is not our desire to use the Iraqi Army internally.” The Eikenberry study disagreed, concluding that “we don’t have the luxury of an Iraqi Army not involved in defeating the insurgency.” The key to the counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq lay “in building up the Iraqis,” not in pursuing offensive operations.
The study recommended shifting from the CPA to CentCom control over the budgets and policies of the Iraqi Army and police. Training of the army had already migrated to CentCom, and it made sense to consolidate the various security functions under one manager. The Eikenberry study advocated unity of command, collocating budgetary authority, held by the CPA, with operational responsibility, held by CentCom. After
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