open Democracy News Analysis - Basra’s second battle decoded, Reidar Visser - Comments

cherif.rifaat on "Basra’s second battle decoded"

cherif.rifaat — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 16:51:55 +0100

"Watch Maliki's actions but also remember this action of the Iraqi Army was only their FIRST attempt.. They could get much better with practice. ...."

Western secular armies are a product of the industrial revolution. They have improved and become ever more effective in the post-industrial era, thanks to ever more advanced military technology. The fundamental basis for this vast superiority over pre-industrial age armies is a radical change in mentality so that leaders, officers, politicians, engineers, weapons manufacturers...all of society, has absorbed and developed a new mentality and attitude towards all aspects of life, including warfare.

In most of the world, including the Middle East and Iraq, there has been no Industrial Revolution and no accompanying change in mentality of most individuals within individual nations. But all these peoples see the success of the West and try to emulate them, including in matters of warfare. So they dress up their fighters in uniforms and teach them to march in columns to the rousing music of military bands. They try to acquire Western weapons and train these armies to fight and engage in large battles in the same way post-industrial societies fight. Because the mentality is not there, they only manage to create second class copies of Western Armies which are routinely and quite thoroughly defeated by genuine first class Western Armies.

The Iraqi army specifically is even worse and less effective: it is as a third-class Western-style army. There are a number of reasons for this, such as motivation, reluctance to hurt their own people and the fact that a foreign occupying power will never build an native army which can be good enough to be dangerous to the occupiers themselves, if ever it turns on them.

Now, if the first-class Western armies which invaded Iraq have been unable to defeat the new kinds of guerrilla wars which have stymied them, what makes anyone think that a third-class Iraqi conventional army can do so?

abuelita42pj on "Basra’s second battle decoded"

abuelita42pj — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 00:01:04 +0100

As I read your article and others from EU/UK and news reports such as PBS's NewsHour, I get the feeling most Westerners, even those of Iraqi extraction, don't really know what al-Maliki had in mind and he'd rather keep it that way.

He can bargain with Al Sadr better if no one else knows exactly what they agreed upon. There seem to be other agreements made with ISCI and al-Hasan's militias. They all want a piece of the "political pie" and al Maliki wants their votes for this fall--as you mentioned.

Iran is a secondary aspect that they will handle in their own way. They can use some of Iran's expertise in re-building their oil derricks and they have to get the smuggling down to less that 10% by having jobs with decent wages given to the workers. Right now many of them have no jobs and no way to care for their extended families. Iran's aid will help them re-build but they won't allow them to TAKE OVER. Iranians are not Arabs so they can't be allowed to "sneak" in as Cyrus and Darius did 2500 years ago. That is still more important than their being Shia. Shia'ism is only 1300 years old, their hatred of Persians is 2500. Also, Iran has only so much money to use to gain Iraq's loyalty. Many Persians/Iranians are already complaining about Ahmedinejad's inability to help them in improving their lives with better pay, lower costs on food and rent, etc. He has about 8 months to get them on his side again or he will be out of a job with no income--just like many other Iranians.

Watch Maliki's actions but also remember this action of the Iraqi Army was only their FIRST attempt.. They could get much better with practice. The loss of 1,000 soldiers could also have been a plus for Maliki. They weren't going to fight, they just wanted a paycheck. We lose 25% to 35% of our recruits in basic training. Iraqis didn't have much of that. Washington lost a lot of his men in the first battles and without the attack on Christmas Eve, he may have lost the War. He was the winner more by luck than by skill. Iraqi soldiers are learning. If they want their land back--and 95% seem to--they will learn how to handle the job or al-Sadr or al-Hakim, etc will be the one that takes over.

Basra’s second battle decoded, Reidar Visser

Mon, 31 Mar 2008 17:21:38 +0100

Reidar Visser is a research fellow at the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs. He holds a doctorate in middle-eastern studies from the University of Oxford. He is the author of Basra, the Failed Gulf State: Separatism and Nationalism in Southern Iraq (Lit-Verlag, 2005), the first study ever on a specific case of southern separatism in Iraq. Many of his writings on questions of federalism, autonomy and decentralisation in southern Iraq are available at his website, historiae.org

Also by Reidar Visser in openDemocracy:

"Iraq's partition fantasy" (19 May 2006)

"Iraq lives" (22 November 2006)

"Washington's Iraqi 'surge': where are the Iraqis?" (12 January 2007) On the surface, the story may look plausible enough. A provincial city rich in oil degenerates into mafia-style conditions affecting the security of citizens as well as the national revenue from this precious resource; the central government intervenes to clean up. This is how many in the media have been reporting the week-long clashes between government forces and militiamen in Basra which ended on 30 March 2008 with the withdrawal of Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi army from the streets.

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