...AND SAYS RIVAL SHI'ITE PARTY IS BACKED BY IRAN. Salih al-Ubaydi told RFE/RL that the Imam Al-Mahdi Army is not supported by Iran, adding: "It is very well known that there are some political parties playing the Iranian role in Iraq. It is not the Sadrists; it is the al-Hakim party," or the Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq. Al-Ubaydi addressed Iranian interference in Iraq, saying that "it is very well known that Iran also has participated in this campaign against the Sadrists in Al-Basrah, because the Sadrists in Al-Basrah have good control, and at the same time they do not take their orders from the Americans or the British counsels, nor from the Iranian counsel there. So, it is a kind of propaganda against the Sadrists to push them out of Al-Basrah, and they can work upon their investments inside Al-Basrah" (see "Iraq: Al-Sadr's Militia 'Won't Fight Government,'" rferl.org, April 22, 2008). KR

AIDE SAYS AL-SADR WON'T ORDER MILITIA TO FIGHT IRAQI GOVERNMENT... Salih al-Ubaydi, the official spokesman for Shi'ite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, told RFE/RL in an April 22 interview that he does not believe al-Sadr will order his militia, the Imam Al-Mahdi Army, to fight the Iraqi government. Al-Sadr issued an ultimatum to the government earlier this week, saying he would launch an open war if the government did not call off security operations targeting Sadrists (see "RFE/RL Newsline," April 21, 2008). "I think Sayyid Muqtada does not accept any kind of clashes with government troops. If any kind of open war starts, it will start against the occupation forces. But if the occupation forces try to make use of the Iraqi troops in front of them during [any such] clashes, we have to defend ourselves," al-Ubaydi said. Asked if al-Sadr has control over the entire Al-Mahdi militia, al-Ubaydi said: "We do not say that we have control over all of them. But at the same time, we have started very good work to take control of this popular institution. And at the same time, we have done good work to distinguish the bad people who have penetrated in order to tarnish our reputation." He added that "the government knows very well that there are many senior figures in the Iraqi police and the Iraqi army who are killers, and who have committed many crimes under the authority of the government," but that the Baghdad authorities have not taken steps to prosecute those criminals. KR

Article published Apr 7, 2008
Real roles, missions debate

April 7, 2008

By Andrew Hoehn and David Ochmanek - Congress has directed the Pentagon to undertake another review of "roles and missions" among the military services.

Past reviews have generally devolved into rather sterile debates over second-order issues of force management and efficiency, such as whether the Army should operate a fleet of tactical airlift aircraft. But one issue of strategic importance will face this and future administrations: how should the United States organize its forces to counter terrorist groups abroad?

The answer will bear not only on the effectiveness of the nation"s fight against terrorism but also on the credibility of U.S. defense commitments globally.

More than six years after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001, the Bush administration has yet to strike a durable balance in allocating resources among efforts to defeat terrorist groups and more familiar military missions against threats by state adversaries.

At the heart of this issue lies the question of how best to shape and size the overall force. Since 1950, when President Truman decided to fight to preserve the independence of South Korea, the United States has made it a policy to field sufficient military forces to deter — and defeat — large-scale aggression in two distinct parts of the globe more or less simultaneously.

This policy has been sustained to this day for good reasons: Because the nation has important interests and security commitments in multiple regions, and because adversaries such as North Korea, Iran and, potentially, China, pose threats to those interests, a "two war" posture has been essential to the credibility of U.S.-led alliances and, in turn, America"s overall national security strategy.

Were the nation to fall short of this capability, we would risk inviting challenges to our interests, to the security of our allies, and to peace and stability in the Persian Gulf, East Asia, and elsewhere.

Some are now urging the defense secretary and the president to adopt a different basis for sizing U.S. forces. They argue U.S. military operations against al Qaeda since Sept. 11 have not been as effective as they might be, partly because the forces that have borne the brunt of the effort are not well-suited to many dimensions of the fight against terrorist and insurgent groups.

These observers call for the creation of units specially configured for long-term advisory assistance missions in the dozens of countries around the world that play unwilling hosts to radical Islamist terrorists and insurgents. There is much to recommend this approach: We have seen it work in the Philippines and elsewhere.

Where we part ways with the advocates of large-scale "indirect operations" is when some insist that, to be able to conduct a substantial advisory assistance effort, the nation must reduce its forces to the point that a "two-war" posture is no longer viable.

Under this logic, U.S. forces would be configured for deterring and prevailing in one significant conflict while conducting a large-scale, steady-state effort against terrorist groups in multiple regions.

At first blush the logic is compelling: Prior to Sept. 11, we had a force that could prevail in two wars; since then, major new requirements have been added in the form of a global campaign against terrorist groups; therefore, something has to "give." On closer inspection, however, the choices facing us are not that stark.

The key lies in moving to a somewhat greater degree of role specialization among the military services.

Advisory efforts to help friendly governments counter terrorist and insurgent groups have heretofore been conducted primarily by U.S. special forces, supplemented by contributions from the larger general purpose forces. While some of these operations have included air and naval forces, the bulk of the effort has been focused on the effectiveness of partner nations" ground forces.

Efforts are ongoing to grow the special forces, but there are limits to how fast and how far these elite units can be expanded. To conduct a sustained, multiregional counterterrorist campaign at the appropriate level of effort, the general purpose forces will have to make a substantial commitment to this mission. Most of these people will come from the Army and Marine Corps.

At the same time, future power projection missions are taking on more of an air and maritime complexion. The three most plausible future wars for which U.S. forces should prepare involve conflicts with North Korea, Iran, and China (in defense of Taiwan).

The central roles for U.S. forces include interdicting enemy naval forces, gaining air superiority, defeating attacks by ballistic missiles and, perhaps, seeking to coerce adversary leaders through targeted bombing and/or embargoes. These tasks place heavy demands on the Air Force and the Navy.

Renewed conflict on the Korean Peninsula might well call for large-scale, combined-force ground operations, though our South Korean allies can be counted on to provide the bulk of the ground forces.

All this means the United States can and should move beyond a "one size fits all" approach to sizing military forces toward a construct that shapes each service for the types of operations it is actually expected to conduct in the future. Specifically

• The Army should be directed to designate a substantial number of its brigade combat teams (perhaps one-third or more of the active duty force) as advisory assistance units. The Marines likewise should take steps to re-focus some of their units. The remaining units of both services should be optimized for combat operations and sized to prevail in one major conflict against an enemy state.

• The Air Force and Navy should focus on power projection as their primary role and be sized and equipped to prevail in two major conflicts. They should also be directed to provide certain assets (e.g., intelligence collection and analysis, airlift, helicopter units, maritime patrol, base operating support, medical teams) to support advisory assistance missions.

Reducing the level of ground forces prepared for large-scale combat operations would entail some risk, but we judge it to be reasonable, given the types of security problems we confront. Certainly, designating units that will have advisory assistance as their primary focus will enable a much more effective long-term campaign against terrorist groups.

In short, the nation can afford to maintain a "two war" posture and at the same time prosecute a more effective long-term campaign against terrorist groups. The Army and Marine Corps should be directed to play leading roles in the fight against terrorism and be prepared to combat a single state threat elsewhere. The Navy and the Air Force should be sized and outfitted primarily to defeat state threats in two distinct areas of the world.

Andrew Hoehn and David Ochmanek work for the Rand Corp. and are authors of "A New Division of Labor: Meeting America"s Security Challenges Beyond Iraq" (Rand, 2007). Both have held the position of deputy assistant secretary of defense for strategy.

Sadr's in a JAM

By Thomas Donnelly
Posted: Tuesday, April 22, 2008

ARTICLES
The Daily Standard
Publication Date: April 22, 2008


Resident Fellow
Thomas Donnelly

Almost from the moment it began on March 25, the inside-the-Beltway Conventional Wisdom about the Iraqi Army's offensive against Muqtada al-Sadr's "Jaysh al Mahdi" militia and other, more criminal elements in the city of Basra--the second-largest city in Iraq and whose port is Iraq's lifeline to the international economy--was that it was a half-baked enterprise and soon a fully-baked disaster. But the latest news from Iraq strongly suggests that is, once again, the narrative of defeat that is half-baked. Over the weekend, the Iraqi Army asserted control over the Basra neighborhoods that had been Sadrist "strongholds" (though, as in the past, the pattern of JAM behavior is flight-not-fight when its losses begin to mount) and continued to apply strong pressure on Sadr City, the main JAM redoubt in Baghdad.

But, before the reality check, let's indulge in a retrospective of the failure fantasies of recent weeks. "I hope we don't hear any glorification of what happened in Basra," House Speaker Rep. Nancy Pelosi warned Gen. David Petraeus and Amb. Ryan Crocker before they delivered their Iraq update testimony to Congress on April 9. Pelosi was parroting the left's rush to judgment that the Iraqi operation was a conclusive failure and that Muqtada al Sadr and Iran were the big winners. Basra was an unpleasant "lesson" for the Maliki government, wrote Robert Dreyfuss on March 31 in the Nation; the prime minister personally "lost face" and the initial cease-fire "worked out in Qom, Iran and mediated by Tehran," was "doubly embarrassing." But it was worse for the United States and an "utter humiliation" for President Bush.

Taken together, these trends measure a kind of Iraqi surge of the sort that was envisioned by the American surge of the past year.

The allegedly Mainstream Media had likewise already picked up on the left's talking points: USA Today editorialized on April 1 that the Basra offensive "weakened Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki . . . strengthened the hand of Muqtada al-Sadr" and "in another piece of bad news, all this helped Iran." Trudy Rubin's April 6 "Worldview" column in the Philadelphia Inquirer trumpeted that the "Basra fiasco showed Iran's power in Iraq." Rubin followed Dreyfuss's line that it was the commander of the Iranian Quds force who "negotiated" the ceasefire--because, as Iranian foreign minister Manucher Mottaki told her as the Davos World Economic Forum (where Important People gather to certify what will and will not be Conventional Wisdom), "The United States and Iran have common interests in avoiding total chaos in Iraq." But the strongest celebration of Sadr's "victory" fell to Time magazine's Charles Crain; the firebrand cleric "finds himself in a perfect position," he wrote April 1. "[J]ust when it appeared he might be marginalized again, the Iraqi government has burnished Sadr's image as a leader who defies the United States and an Iraqi government that refuses to accept U.S. troops."

The British press has also been hard at work trumpeting the alleged defeat, and their interest is sparked all the more because of the proximity of British forces in the south of Iraq--indeed, the British army long ago withdrew from the streets of Basra. The Guardian's Jonathan Steele concluded on April 4 that the "assault on Basra was particularly foolish." Muqtada al Sadr "comes out of the crisis strengthened. His militiamen gave no ground." According to Steele, Sadr enjoys "widespread popular support"--not just among a portion of the Shiite poor--"because of his nationalist credentials." One wonders what the Anbari shieks or Kurdish faction leaders would agree. Sean Rayment, the London Daily Telegraph defense correspondent, wrote on April 21--quoting a host of British officers--that the battle to retake Basra was a "complete disaster. . . . The net effect of all this is that the British Army will be forced to remain here"--does he mean at their base outside Basra?--"for many months longer."

And now for something completely different; the reality check in the form of a summary of recent news from Basra and Baghdad:

On April 20, "Iraqi soldiers took control of the last bastions of the cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's militia in Basra on Saturday," according to James Glanz and Alissa Rubin's account in the New York Times. Notably, this "Iraqi government's monthlong military operation against the [Jaysh al Mahdi] fighters" was given a thumb's-up by Iran's ambassador to Iraq. Taking a term from Prime Minister Maliki, Hassan Kazemi Qumi described the Sadrist militias in Basra as "outlaws."
On April 19, Reuters reported that the Hayaniya district in Basra was taken by Iraqi troops, "backed by a thunderous bombardment by U.S. warplanes and British artillery." An Iraqi interiror ministry spokesman told the news service, "Out troops deployed in all the parts of the district and controlled it without much resistance. Now we are working on house-to-house checking. We have made many arrests."
Fighting continued in the Sadr city section of Baghdad, where U.S. and Iraqi forces have been pursuing elements of the Mahdi militia and Iranian-backed "special groups," some dozens of whom have been captured and killed. Although Sadr, still thought to be in Iran, threatened a "third uprising," issuing a "last direct warning and speech to the Iraqi government to refrain and take the path of peace and abandon violence against its people. If the government does not refrain and leash the militias that have penetrated it, we will announce an open war until liberation." Sounding less like a firebrand speaking from a perfect position, the cleric lamented, "This government has forgotten that we are their brothers and were part of them." Et tu, Nuri?
The Iranian ambassador does not appreciate the assaults on Sadr City; unlike the Basra offensive--which targeted some groups less responsive to Iranian influence--the Baghdad campaign "would aggravate the situation and make things worse" from the Iranian perspective.
While it's very difficult to tell who's up and who's down in Baghdad on a day-to-day basis, what seems increasingly clear is that the Shia community, like the Sunni community before it, is reaching a point where it is fracturing and beginning to reject those who have staked themselves--and whose future depends--on stoking sectarian extremism.

There's even a struggle in the Sadrist movement. On April 12, Riyadh Noori, a senior aide and in-law of Sadr and a suspect in the 2003 killing of Abdel Majid Khoei, a respected cleric and rival of Sadr's, was gunned down in Najaf. It remains unclear who killed Noori, but Sheik Fatih Khashic Ghitaa, director of the Al Thaqalayn Center for Strategic Studies, probably got it right when he told the Los Angeles Times, "It's going to be a fight among the Sadrist people themselves because three or four parts of the Mahdi Army are splintering."

This moment of flux is also a moment of tremendous opportunity for the United States and its Iraqi allies, and not least of all Prime Minister Maliki, once almost universally reviled (and still reviled in the western press) as a weakling unlikely to serve out his term. And while the halting successes in Basra and Baghdad reveal some of the underlying problems of the Iraqi Army and other security forces, Maliki has persevered and his willingness to take a risk may be rewarded--it is Maliki, not Sadr or his Iranian backers, who has emerged stronger in the past weeks.

Over the next six months it's reasonable to hope--though we've all heard this before--that, at last, a new Iraq will emerge: the offensive against al Qaeda remnants continues in the north of Iraq, the Sadrists have lost momentum and cohesion, and upcoming elections improve the prospects for bringing to power a newly responsive central government. Taken together, these trends measure a kind of Iraqi surge of the sort that was envisioned by the American surge of the past year.

Thomas Donnelly is a resident

Clinton says US would ‘obliterate’ Iran
By Daniel Dombey in Washington
Published: April 22 2008 16:28 | Last updated: April 22 2008 22:26
Hillary Clinton warned on Tuesday the US would “obliterate” Iran if it used nuclear weapons against Israel, in comments that could foreshadow a tough new doctrine of deterrence towards the Islamic republic.

“I want the Iranians to know that, if I’m the president, we will attack Iran,” Mrs Clinton said in response to a question about a possible Iranian nuclear assault on Israel. “In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”

Mrs Clinton’s remarks – on the day of the Pennsylvania primary – highlight the national security issues she claims to be more qualified to deal with than Senator Barack Obama, her Democratic rival. She is also running a television advertisement featuring Osama bin Laden and combat scenes to stress such issues.

But her remarks come as consensus increases in the US that there is little Washington can do to stop Iran moving closer to nuclear capability and that current policy may be outdated.

The comments are likely to increase the pressure on Mr Obama to match Mrs Clinton’s language on Iran.

“Talk using words like obliterate doesn’t actually produce good results,” Mr Obama said on Tuesday. “I’m not interested in sabre-rattling – I think the Iranians can be confident that I will respond forcefully and it will be completely unacceptable if they attack Israel, or any other of our allies in the region, with conventional weapons or nuclear weapons.”

The potential nuclear threat from Tehran is set to be a big concern of the next US administration. Many western intelligence agencies predict Iran will be able to develop enough fissile material for a bomb between 2010 and 2015.

A US National Intelligence Estimate concluded last year that “only an Iranian political decision to abandon a nuclear weapons objective would plausibly keep Iran from producing nuclear weapons, and such a decision is inherently reversible”. However, it also said Iran had halted a covert nuclear weapons programme in 2003 – a finding that confused US allies and diminished expectations of a pre-emptive US attack on Iran.

Some leading US advocates of a tough approach to Iran’s nuclear programme have since given up expectations of a pre-emptive strike, and have also dismissed attempts by the Bush administration to increase international sanctions.

“As there will apparently be no disarming of Iran by pre-emption or by sanctions, we shall have to rely on deterrence,” wrote Charles Krauthammer, an influential conservative, in the Washington Post this month.

Mrs Clinton’s latest comments build on her remarks in last week’s Democratic debate when she suggested that stronger US security guarantees for Arab countries as well as Israel could prevent an arms race in the region. She insists on greater diplomatic engagement with Iran, although, unlike Mr Obama, she says she would not meet Mahmoud Ahmadi-Nejad, the country’s president.

Additional reporting by Andrew Ward in Philadelphia

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2008