By Matthew Roland
July, 2006. With the gut rumbling thump of an explosion I transformed from REM sleeping baby to pistol wielding Marine in less than 10 seconds. At the time I didn’t know what was going on, but I reacted with the quickness of a paranoid man living among the enemy. I found out later that the explosion was an Iraqi Police car vaporized by an insurgent’s RPG. The pistol I immediately grabbed was the loaded Glock that stayed under my pillow at night as a defense against assassination by Iraqi Police.
When I deployed to Iraq as a Marine in 2006, among other duties, I spent 1 month living at an Iraqi Police, IP station in the middle of the city of Fallujah. I was 1 of 15 Marines living on the second floor of a two story police station several miles from the nearest American base. We were there to train IP’s, recruit new volunteers to join the IP force, serve as liaisons between conventional U.S. forces and Iraqi forces, and patrol in IP protected areas in order to keep an eye on the IP force. In Iraq, it is necessary to build, maintain, support, and make independent a trained group of locals in order to improve security and bring relative peace and stability to a city. Unfortunately, the very characteristics that make the locals effective security personnel, also, quite often, make them “dirty” and untrustworthy. Iraq can’t be stabilized except by Iraqis. Iraq is unstable because of Iraqis.
An Iraqi police force and army are necessary for a myriad of reasons. Most of these reasons stem from cultural and religious differences, but many of them are a result of past U.S. blunders, and chafing over the amount of time the U.S. has stayed after the initially successful war. Many of these conflicts can be resolved by acting through a local proxy (read Iraqi Police Officer). However, several new problems arise as locals come to view the Iraqi Police force as a band of traitors or sympathizers, without the excuse of being foreigners. This later group of conflicts is closely related to the reasoning for an ongoing Iraqi anti-Iraqi insurgency. If one can solve this group of problems, one can probably stop the war. Not going to happen. The following is an examination of the first group of conflicts and their resolution.
According to the CIA’s World Factbook, 97% of the Iraqi population is Muslim, while only 1% of the U.S. population is Muslim. That is a pretty significant difference by most standards. Taking into account the profound effect that Islam has on the culture, politics, economics, and every other part of most Arabic speaking countries, this difference in religion has a tremendous impact. Therefore, it is necessary to have a security force comprised primarily of Muslims who understand and believe in the same system of values as the people that they protect.
Although humans communicate in many ways, the official way is through language. Arabic is somewhat different than American English. Actually, the alphabet, script, sounds, vocabulary, grammar, and use are all different. It is not easy for an American to learn Arabic quickly, even with proper schooling. At any one time there are as many as 140,000 Americans in Iraq; only a very small percentage of them speak Arabic, and those who do have nowhere near the proficiency of a native speaker. In order to communicate, U.S. forces generally use an interpreter. No one can communicate with a population like a local can. However, these men are not always reliable, available, or correct.
Iraqis know their own neighborhoods. They know their people. It is impossible for Americans, who are often in country for less than a year, to know what’s going on, where various group of people hang out, what looks out of place and what is normal, etc. An Iraqi Police officer should know what a group of people in his hometown wants, where they go, what they know, and how to win their support. According to James Dobbins, the Director of the International Security and Defense Policy at Rand, “Insurgencies are defeated not by killing insurgents, but by winning the support of the population, and thus denying the insurgents both refuge and recruits.” No one can win the support of a population or gather intelligence as well as a member of the population. James Dobbins also says that counterinsurgency operations “require detailed tactical intelligence, which can be developed only by Iraqis and is best gathered by a police force in daily contact with the population.”
In addition to religion, language, and knowledge of local populations, Iraqis are raised with and are comfortable with their own customs. Even if an American is accustomed to Iraqi culture, and can avoid being offensive, it is unlikely that he will ever be comfortable “cleaning himself” with water instead of toilet paper, holding hands with other guys, greeting people with a kiss on the cheek, doing without his left hand in nearly every social situation, shaking hands softly and without any vigor, and other cultural practices too numerous to mention. To a local Iraqi, someone who is born and raised American will always be an outsider, and an isolated one at that.
Securing a country and stabilizing a region means more than carrying a gun and hunting down insurgents. The members of that country and region need to be able to trust in, listen to, and support the group of people keeping them safe. That will never happen, if Americans constitute that group of guardians.
“In post-conflict situations in which the state has collapsed, security trumps everything: it is the central pedestal that supports all else,” said Larry Diamond, a former Senior Adviser to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Baghdad. Unfortunately, the creation and maintenance of an effective Iraqi police force, the one thing that would dramatically improve Iraq’s security, has been a near failure in many ways and for many reasons. In the words of Gerald Burke, a retired police major who has served as the security advisor to the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior, “The police training program in Iraq has been a complete failure.”
When an Iraqi man wants to become a policeman, he must fill out an application, go through a brief background check, pass an overly simple physical fitness test, and go to Jordan for a police academy. Unfortunately, most of the background checks are not thorough enough, and many possible insurgents have undoubtedly slipped through the cracks. After an Iraqi passes through the police academy, he more or less falls off the map. It is a widely recognized fact that anti-American and anti-coalition insurgents have penetrated the Iraqi police force. Rep. Robert Andrews, D-N.J. said, “I would be astonished if it’s not true that some of our graduates are out there today, attacking our forces.” The following are two examples of the questionable loyalty of the IP’s.
In Fallujah, in 2006, there was a small compound, no more than 100 yards square, next to the police station where I lived. This compound, housing a company of Marines, and the police station were no more than 50 yards apart. Nearly every day, our routine would be interrupted by the crump, crump, crump of incoming mortar rounds. In all the time that I or anyone else I knew, was there, not one mortar round strayed towards the police station, although they hit everything else. This kind of indirect fire is generally somewhat inaccurate, and there is only one reason for the police station to go unscathed. The insurgents had a personal interest and asset inside. In addition, the only Iraqi killed by any Marine in our group of 15 was an Iraqi police officer who attempted to kill our commanding officer.
There are many good IP’s who aren’t insurgents, but that does not mean that they are 100% loyal. When a large group of detainees was released from Abu Ghraib, through our police station, several IP’s ended up hugging and kissing the formerly detained insurgents, because they were brothers, best friends, cousins, or relatives. Many of the IP’s have a vested family interest in ignoring the insurgency because of family considerations. This is a daunting obstacle to overcome.
Finally, many young Iraqi men are afraid to throw their lot in with the U.S. led coalition. The men who join the Iraq police force will not live long if America withdraws completely. Fewer and fewer men are willing to risk their necks for the government set up by the U.S. According to Dobbins, “Washington has lost the Iraqi people’s confidence and consent, and it is unlikely to win them back.” He also says, “In the eyes of the Iraqi people and of all the neighboring populations, the U.S. mission in Iraq lacks legitimacy and credibility.” If America leaves without winning, every decent Iraqi who has helped us will probably lose their lives. Additionally, many Iraqis would rather leave the dangerous work to their neighbors.
Creating a working Iraqi police force with the training, equipment, and motivation necessary to combat the insurgency, is the quickest way to end U.S. involvement in Iraq. Unfortunately, according to Larry Diamond, “The effort to create a new Iraqi police force… withered from haste, inefficiency, poor planning, and sheer incompetence.” The force was also quickly infiltrated by insurgents and others who would use their position as a tool in fighting the U.S. There is little that can be done at this point to combat the problems with the Iraqi police force. One can only hope that with new schools for police, and an increased awareness of shortcomings among military leaders, new recruits will continue to improve over their predecessors.
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