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Home Thoughts From AbroadSome U.S. soldiers have spent so much time in Iraq, it feels like home.

By Lawrence Kaplan
Posted Wednesday, Dec. 26, 2007, at 1:27 PM ET

(Continued from page 1)

The Army has immersed itself so thoroughly in Iraq that senior officers back in the United States worry that the force has become "out of balance," as Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey put it, too fixated on counterinsurgency. But there is another way to view this: Just as the U.S. Army that punched through Germany in 1945 bore slight resemblance to the amateurish force routed in North Africa three years before, the hardened units that America fields in Iraq today know the terrain in a way the Army of 2003 and 2004 never did.

Whether measured in terms of tactics and techniques improved, operational schemes perfected, or the clan loyalties of every house on every street cataloged and memorized, the accumulation of experience counts for everything in this war. In Iraq, roughly half of all casualties tend to be suffered during the first three months of a unit's 15-month deployment. When I last visited Bravo Company, it was getting hit by IEDs twice a day and mortared routinely. "The whole area was a meat grinder," Sgt. Johnson recalled, pointing to the canals and dikes that order the surrounding "triangle of death" into neat grids. But engagement with local tribes, intelligence tips, and targeted raids had quieted the area to the point where the company hadn't been hit by a single IED strike in four months. Similarly, the brigade as a whole had lost more than 50 soldiers during its first eight months in Iraq, but only one during the last four months.

What is true in microcosm is also true writ large. In a war where it's nearly impossible to detect intellectual coherence, the Army's learning curve tells a clear story. In 2005, with other brigades either bulldozing through towns or hunkering down on their outskirts, the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment literally "went native," fanning out across the city of Tal Afar and planting itself in the midst of a once-hostile population center. In 2006, the First Armored Division's First Brigade Combat Team borrowed and improved the template by establishing its own outposts across the brutal city of Ramadi and "flipping" the local tribes. The 10th Mountain Division then purposefully applied the examples of both cities to southern Baghdad. Perhaps too late for the home front, but Petraeus has enshrined the lessons of these places in a theater-wide strategy that is generating obvious results.

There is, of course, an obvious downside to having an army that all but qualifies for Iraqi citizenship, even apart from the tally in dead and wounded. If the well-worn cliché that the U.S. Army inhabits a different universe from the Iraqis around it is no longer quite true, the reverse certainly is: Not even 7,000 miles can fully measure its remove from American society. Having bled so much here, the officer corps has very little use for the prospect that it may "have to leave our bleached bones on these desert sands in vain," as Centurion Marcus Flavius predicted in his famous letter back to Rome. Its sense of ownership about the war grows deeper with each year the Army—and this is, at the end of the day, the Army's war—spends in Iraq. Neatly summarizing a narrative that has emerged from the ranks, the Washington Post's Thomas Ricks noted, "We in the military did what we were asked to do, but the politicians betrayed us, the media undercut us and the American people lack the patience to see it through."

Friction on this score begins within the Army itself, pitting officers around and including Petraeus, for whom victory in Iraq takes precedence, against counterparts back at the Pentagon, such as Army Chief of Staff Casey, for whom the preservation of the Army is what matters.

Then there is the frustration of fighting a war that, having been called into being by politicians, is no longer remotely connected to anything they say. "The U.S. as a Nation—and indeed most of the U.S. Government—has not gone to war since 9/11," Lt. Gen. Peter Chiarelli, until recently one of the highest-ranking officers in Iraq, wrote recently in Military Review. The argument is not limited by rank. Sitting on a bunk in Bravo Company's outpost, Staff Sgt. Corey Hollister noted the irony that, even as the debate in America remained bizarrely unaffected by the reality around him, "It's really military personnel and their families who don't want [the Army] to leave Iraq."

How could this be? An exhausted army is one thing. A defeated army is something else altogether. Anything but defeated, the 10th Mountain Division's Second Brigade Combat Team was officially welcomed home in a ceremony at Fort Drum, N.Y., the day before Thanksgiving. Bravo Company, too, was there. Whether they were truly home—that wasn't so clear.

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Lawrence F. Kaplan reported from Iraq for the New Republic from 2004-2006. He is editor of World Affairs, a journal to be launched in January 2008.
Photograph of soldier by Wissam Al-Okaili/AFP/Getty Images.
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Remarks from the Fray:

Underscoring once again the frequent difficulty of reconciling the conflicting information that one gets about Iraq, put the above quote from a service member in Lawrence Kaplan's story next to the results of a Pew poll that were published just today in USA Today, in which 49% of military families thought that the Iraq invasion was a mistake, with 55% giving disapproving marks for President Bush's job rating. Such ambivalence or outright disapproval would hardly seem to translate into wholehearted support no matter how you slice it.

It's admirable that the troops themselves are doing everything they can to try to win, and it's great that they've found a way to limit their casualties and make peace (as much as possible) with Iraqi citizens. But sadly, it's probably true that their efforts are destined to be undermined by a lack of political support. That's true here at home because Americans long ago concluded that this longshot experiment in nation building was a fraud and a travesty that was never worth its crushing costs to our nation. It's true in Iraq because the current Maliki government has no legitimacy at all, and still hasn't achieved any significant number of the benchmarks it was supposed to.

What the U.S. forces seem to have done successfully is to fight their way into the complicated system of tribes and militias in Iraq, and be accepted as a powerful player -- another tribe. While this may bring certain benefits in terms of a localized, near-term reduction in violence, is it helping in what is supposed to be the main goal of all of this: strengthening and legitimizing the central government? If anything, it almost seems to be doing just the opposite.

--fingerpuppet

(To reply, click here.)

It may simply be that those soldiers in Iraq know about other soldiers, myself included, who came 'home' to America and got out only to have everything, their career, their house and their hopes for a normal family life, absolutely and irrevocably stripped away from them.

Or at least they know about others like my 'battle buddy' from basic training who came home from Iraq and stayed in only to end up in a military prison for a tragic occurrence which was certainly influenced by the trauma of service in a war zone.

In comparison to those fates getting mortared in Iraq is a state of bliss. At least everyone is at equal risk of losing life or limb and all live together under the same (not ideal) conditions and eat the same (so so) food at the same dining facilities.

The illusion that 'things can only get better from here on' is also quite compelling while living under such conditions.

The powers that be are expert at retaining soldiers by making certain that the alternative, getting out and losing absolutely everything, is just too ugly to face. Stay in and you will be overseas again before you know what hit you.

--wmccomninel

(To reply, click here.)

(12/26)

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Let the Oil Deals Flow
Raad Alkadiri | Congress should not interfere in the oil industry's contract negotiations with the Iraqi government.