By Afzal Ashraf
2 Jul 2014
The rapid advance of the militant jihadist group the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIS) southwards towards Baghdad in early June was facilitated by, amongst other things, the shocking surrender or desertion of about three Iraqi Army divisions. For an army trained primarily by the US under one of its most famous generals, David Petraeus, at a cost of over $2 billion, this raises questions about the quality of the training provided. Military doctrine dictates that fighting capability is more than the creation of a trained and equipped army. Culturally, generals, like laymen, tend to think that by training men and providing them with weapons they can create a fighting force. Yet a fighting force needs, above all else, the willingness to kill and die for a cause. That willingness cannot be developed or imposed externally by other armies; it requires the creation of a national spirit by a country’s political leadership – a spirit from which the army can draw much of its strength.
The failure to recognise the crucial role of national identity and leadership has doomed much of the West’s investment in developing the Iraqi Army to failure. This has, in turn, exposed the true extent of the weakness of the Iraqi government’s sovereignty over its territory. For Iraq, the result could be an irrevocable change to the nature and form of the country. For other states, it provides a sobering lesson in the challenges associated with effective nation-building.
Critical analysis of the US-led coalition mission that trained Iraq’s security forces – comprising the army and police – between 2004 and 2010 identified a number of weaknesses in the strategy, delivery and sustainability of the training provided. According to Anthony Cordesman and Adam Mausner in their 2007 report on Iraqi force development, there was too great a focus on numbers trained, rather than qualitative measures of capability developed, mainly because the force was grown too rapidly to achieve quality. At the same time, the army was designed primarily to deal with external threats rather than civil conflict. And, generated during the height of the Sunni insurgency that persisted between 2005 and 2008, most recruits were Shia, with Shia militias exploiting the opportunity to obtain free training and equipment from the coalition. The result was a force containing large elements whose loyalties were divided. Meanwhile, the development of effective leadership was slow, due partly to the dearth of experienced leaders following the 2003 ban on Ba’ath party members performing official roles, and partly to widespread corruption, including the misappropriation of equipment and supplies. The outcome was a force poor in cohesion and commitment, with these and other intrinsic faults revealing themselves through widespread desertions, mutinies and capitulations, which began as early in the training programme as 2004.
Nevertheless, the international training mission in Iraq provided far higher-quality training and equipment to the Iraqi Army than ISIS could ever have obtained, despite propaganda videos showing ISIS recruits tackling assault courses and undergoing other combat drills. Indeed, members of ISIS and its forerunner, the Islamic State of Iraq (ISI), underwent quick, ad-hoc and secret training sessions run usually by ex-military (often Ba’athist) personnel. By contrast, Iraqi Army officers were trained at the Ar Rustamiyah Military Academy to a formal syllabus based on that used by the British Army at the renowned Royal Military Academy Sandhurst. The question, therefore, is why the Iraqi Army performed so poorly when faced with what is, in relative terms, an inadequately armed and trained rabble force.
The likely answer revolves around one particular element of fighting capability: the moral component, which exists alongside the physical and conceptual components. Explained in detail in the 2001 British Defence Doctrine (Joint Warfare Publication 0-01), the moral component can be simplified to the willingness to kill and to die for a cause. It is here that the role of leadership is crucial. Leaders need to identify and articulate a cause their fighters can believe in – and they need to be seen, by their subordinates, to believe in it themselves.
It is in the absence of the moral component that the recent failure in Iraq lies. As is frequently the case in developing countries, the political culture in Iraq has tended to centralise power and privilege, leaving regional and local governments to fight for resources. Indeed, Prime Minister Nouri Al-Maliki, since first coming to power in May 2006, has led a government that is Baghdad-centric – something that seemed unlikely to change as he began his third term in May. With these political stresses exacerbated by the prevailing culture of identity politics at all levels of government, and deep sectarian divisions within Iraqi society, the subliminal message is therefore that the leadership is not prepared to enter the political battlefield and experience the risks attendant to essential political and economic reform. This suggests that the cause of a strong and unified Iraq is not worth fighting for, even within the political sphere.
Another shortcoming in achieving the moral component relates to the leadership’s lack of charisma, which is critical to success in war. Rhetorical ability is the leader’s key weapon in articulating a believable cause, whether on the battlefield to the troops, as with King Henry V’s St Crispin’s Day Speech, as immortalised by William Shakespeare, or over the airwaves to the nation, as with former British Prime Minister Winston Churchill’s rousing June 1940 speech ‘We Shall Fight on the Beaches’.
Yet post Saddam, Iraq has failed to develop a common identity, a common purpose or a leadership with a common appeal around which its troops can rally. Just a couple of minutes spent viewing Maliki’s speeches online confirm that his rhetorical style is far from inspiring.
By contrast, and as noted by Washington Post journalist David Ignatius in a recent article for JConline, ISIS’s leader Abu Bakr Al-Baghdadi has a charismatic, albeit barbaric, aura. And even though Al-Qa’ida severed its links with the group due to differences over targeting fellow Muslims and the excessive use of gruesome videos, ISIS can still invoke the wider movement’s ideology and rhetoric to inspire its followers. At the local level, even Muqtada Al-Sadr – whose Jaysh Al-Mahdi militia was recently reawakened by Ayatollah Ali Al-Sistani’s call to arms to confront ISIS – can deliver a more emotionally impactful address than the prime minister.
Indeed, Maliki’s government has failed, since 2006, to make a sufficiently inspiring case for unity across the country’s religious, ethnic and tribal groupings. Ironically, it is the ISIS extremists who have most effectively hijacked the theological concepts of unity in Islam in their extravagant assertions that they will unite the whole of Iraq with the rest of the Muslim world under a single caliphate.
Iraq’s failures, in this regard, are rooted in Saddam’s nepotic dictatorship, in which his fellow Sunni cousins were preferred in leadership positions over representatives of the majority Shia population. He brutally punished dissent, allegedly killing the popular Shia cleric Mohammed Al-Sadr in 1999, and gassing ‘errant’ Kurdish villages such as Halabja in 1988. After Saddam’s fall, there was little attempt to heal the scars of resentment that such authoritarianism created.
Furthermore, the coalition’s insistence on holding the country’s first democratic elections in January 2005, within two years of Saddam’s fall, also stunted the development of manifesto-based political parties, ushering in identity-based governments that cemented, rather than bridged, divisions along ethnic lines. Earlier experiences in Germany and Japan – judged by James Dobbins et al. in America’s Role in Nation-Building from Germany to Iraq to be examples of successful nation-building involving the US – saw the transition to democracy take more than five years. The coalition’s actions in Iraq, therefore, worked against this hard-earned experience, and were ultimately destined for failure.
Partly this was because the pressure to hold these first elections quickly did not allow time for the three main political blocs in Iraq – the Shia, with a large presence in the south, the Sunni Arabs of the northeast, and the Kurds in the north – to adjust to the opportunities and demands inherent to full political enfranchisement. Instead, the Kurds treated the elections as an opportunity to extract political concessions, holding out until just days before the vote in order to confirm favourable power-sharing guarantees. Most Sunni Arabs, meanwhile, boycotted the elections because as a minority they felt that the electoral process would not address issues important to them, including resistance to the US-led occupation, the increasing power of the Shia militias and associated attacks on Sunnis, and the trial of Saddam Hussein. Very few manifestos were published and there was no time for the public debate of ideas, leaving votes to be cast on the basis of personality and identity. Thus the opportunity to forge a government of national unity based on a popular manifesto was missed and, far from reversing the trend towards deeper division, subsequent elections have only deepened it.
With regard to the country’s armed forces, the result of the diffuse and disunited nature of power within the state has been a weak and internally divided military, lacking both a common purpose and a unified and coherent leadership. Meanwhile, the absence of strong security forces able to fulfil their core functions has served only to encourage the development of powerful, resilient militias, a prime example being Muqtada Al-Sadr’s Jaysh Al-Mahdi militia.
Indeed, weak armies exist alongside strong militias not just in Iraq but in many countries where national identity and leadership are weak; in Libya, for example, militias have also eclipsed the national army as the primary instrument of security. The comparative strength of the militias in Libya and Iraq versus that of the countries’ regular armies proves that fighters can act with bravery and dedication to a cause if they believe in it and if led by inspiring leaders. Whatever becomes of Iraq in political terms following ISIS’s incursion, the army will have to be reformed and reinforced – not through better weapons and training, but through the entrenchment of a better idea of nationhood and better leadership. The question for Iraq is who will provide these vital ingredients of defence and security.
For the international community, meanwhile, the lesson is clear. Creating effective security forces requires the existence of a national identity and the installation of popular leadership. It now has the chance to watch and learn should these lessons be applied in Iraq over the coming months.
Dr Afzal Ashraf
Consultant Fellow, International Diplomacy, RUSI. He served in Iraq with the Coalition Forces from 2004 to 2005.
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