I don't always agree with Mike Few, especially when he baselessly attacks friends of mine. On the other hand, he had a nice Nirvana-ish piece about what he misses about Iraq that made me pause to wonder about what I miss about Iraq.

I found it easier to think of things I don't miss: the adrenaline jolts, the horrible climate (especially the mudstorms, when duststorms got overtaken by rainclouds), the fear of getting kidnapped, having loaded weapons pointed at me at checkpoints by nervous young men, or the body pieces of a suicide bomber that once landed in the backyard I would look at every morning.

So my list is shorter. In fact, it is only two things: The best tomatoes I've ever eaten, and the stars at night in the desert while I lay in my sleeping bag on a rooftop outside Najaf. I specifically remember we were driving from Baghdad to Tikrit in the summer of 2003. Around noon we stopped to buy fresh tomatoes and some baked bread, still warm. We sliced them up, salted them, and ate them by the side of the highway.

Taken with water, they made one of the best lunches I’ve ever had. I would have enjoyed the meal less had I known how dangerous Tikrit was about to become.

What do you miss, if anything?

That was the question a friend posed the other day. Here, slightly edited for clarity and further reflection, is what I wrote back to him:

My impression is that the Army is kind of all over the place these days. It reminds me a bit of the years in the mid-1950s before the Pentomic Army.

The looming budget cuts are the biggest thing shaping today's force. The Army may be going into what Eliot Cohen once called "the Uptonian hunker," waiting for the budget cuts to hit.

The second biggest thing is the dog that isn't barking. As far as I can see, there is very little interest in turning over the rock to figure out what the Army has learned in the last 10 years, how it has changed, what it has done well, what it hasn't. More than a Harry Summers, where is the intellectual equivalent of a self-evaluation such as the 1970 study on Army professionalism? Shouldn't the Army be asking itself how it has changed, and looking at  the state of its officer corps? We have seen some terrible leadership but very little official inclination to examine its causes. A couple of years ago, I noticed in reviewing my notes for my book Fiasco that, to an extent I hadn't noticed while writing it, it was the battalion commanders' critique of their generals.  

We have seen had huge changes in the way the Army fights. It isn't just the flirtation with conventional troops doing COIN. ( U.S. troop-intensive COIN has indeed gone out of intellectual fashion, but not I think a more FID-ish COIN.) It also is:

• An Army that does indeed win first battles but still doesn't believe that war termination is its business. (See the Bacevich piece in the Moten volume.)
• An Army whose generals frequently do not seem to be able to think strategically, and treats those who do as outliers.
• An Army that cannot fight without the presence of thousands of mercenaries on the battlefield, subject to neither local law nor military justice, and so polluting American efforts.
• An Army that has fought our first sustained overseas war (and in fact, 2 of them) without a draft. (The all-volunteer force has proven remarkably cohesive and resilient under the resulting stress.)  
• The one area where the Army seems genuinely comfortable is the technological, with information systems rapidly advancing, especially the use of drone aircraft for reconnaissance.

What are your thoughts, grasshoppers? What am I missing?

In case you missed it, Baroness Sky of Mesopotamia had a good article the other day on Foreign Policy about her recent travels (and fishing trips) in post-American Iraq.

Meanwhile, a big bomb killed or wounded nearly 200 pilgrims in Basra. And the police station in Ramadi was attacked, with 21 dead. And a bomb went off in Mosul. And there was a big roundup of “AQ” in Kirkuk. Yow.  Perhaps most damaging of all, Iraqi police officials are arresting innocents and then demanding bribes to release them, reports Ghaith Abdul-Ahad of the Guardian (U.K.).

The weirdest recent trend in foreign policy is the spate of former Bush Administration types berating President Obama for his handling of Iraq. Honestly, it feels to me like seeing Custer provide advice on how to handle American Indian tribes. Please, haven't you all helped enough already? (As for John Yoo advocating preemptive war with Iran -- that is clearly just him messing with us. Rick Santorum, too.) 

Second weirdest trend: Attacks on Iraqi fortune tellers.

By David Palkki

Best Defense department of dictatorial archives

I'm grateful to Tom for inviting me to present a few highlights from The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime, 1978-2001, which Cambridge University Press just published. I had the good fortune to co-edit this study, with Kevin Woods and Mark Stout, at the Institute for Defense Analyses for the Office of the Secretary of Defense (Policy). Our book is based on a review of several thousand audio files (and a smaller number of video files) that U.S.-led forces captured from Saddam Hussein's regime. The recordings cover several decades' worth of Saddam's meetings with his cabinet, Revolutionary Command Council, generals, tribal sheikhs, visiting dignitaries and others. 

The book is intended more as an invitation to scholars to conduct research using digital copies of the original records (and translations) at the Conflict Records Research Center (CRRC) than as an effort to compile definitive conclusions or policy recommendations, yet certain patterns and insights have surfaced as a result of our efforts. In this blog I'll touch on three. 

--First, Saddam was not in America's hip pocket during the 1980s. In fact, he was far more antagonistic toward and skeptical of the United States, even at the height of U.S. support for Iraq during the 1980s, than scholars have acknowledged. The United States was behind the Iranian Revolution, Saddam privately asserted, "to scare the Gulf people so they can have a [military] presence and arrange the situation in the region." After Iran-Contra revelations made clear that the United States had clandestinely armed Iran and provided it with military intelligence on Iraq, Saddam complained to his inner circle that the Americans were still "conspiring bastards."  From Saddam's perspective, the entire episode was intended to harm Iraq (not to help the Contras or free U.S. hostages). He referred to the incident as "Irangate," held at least seven meetings to analyze the significance of the revelations, and described U.S. behavior as a "stab in the back."  In May 1988, Saddam instructed his advisors, "We have to be aware of America more than the Iranians" because "they are now the police for Iran, they will turn anything they find over to Iran." In September 1988, just after the war had ended, Saddam expressed conviction to his advisers that the United States was behind a recent attempt on his life.

Read on

I think that as the United States leaves Iraq and shuffles toward the exit in Afghanistan, we need to think about how to answer that question when veterans of our wars there pose it.

This is a difficult one for me, because I think the war in Afghanistan was the correct response to the 9/11 attacks, but was mishandled for years after that, and I think the war in Iraq was an unnecessary and very expensive distraction from that response. Also, we may well see further violence in both countries that will raise questions about exactly what we achieved.

Also, today's vets tend to have good BS detectors. Recently I walked past a small monument to graduates of a high school who were lost in the Spanish-American War. It stated that they died "for humanity." I don't think so.

I think my response would be along these lines -- but I'd welcome your thoughts. "When your country called, you answered. You did your duty on a mission your country gave to you. In our system, thankfully, the military does not get to pick and choose what missions it will undertake -- that is decided by the officials elected by the people. Those officials are not always right, but they are the leaders we chose to make that decision. No matter what happens in Iraq and Afghanistan, you have the thanks of a grateful nation for answering the call."

Is that enough? I don't know. If someone said that to me, I suspect I would think, Yeah, well where was everyone else? Why did my friends die and yours didn't?

I don't know. Help me out here.

There's a memorable line here: "I was able to graduate college not despite being a combat veteran, but exactly because I am one."

By Edgar Rodriguez
Best Defense guest columnist

Every year, Veterans' Day stirs up mixed feelings for me. On one hand, I am proud that our country takes a day out to honor those that have served in uniform. On the other hand, I am dismayed that too often praise for veterans feels empty and insincere. It is insincere because most Americans only have a vague idea of the struggles that veterans go through. This lack of understanding is particularly true in regards to combat veterans, a group that I am a part of. I fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 as a Navy Corpsman attached to a Marine Corps unit. (Corpsman is Navy terminology for medic.)

In meeting people I often find that they cling to two stereotypes about combat veterans. One is of a broken-down drunk and the other is of the post-military Rambo-like figure that is inches away from losing control because he cannot readjust to American society. Often, they are surprised that I do not fit into these stereotypes making comments like "You don't look like a combat vet." Sometimes, people also ask strange questions ranging from the highly inappropriate "Have you ever killed anyone?" to the downright idiotic "What did you guys do on the weekends over there?" (Military personnel typically work everyday when deployed to combat zones).

But most of all, I have found that people are often genuinely perplexed that I have been able to be successful after leaving the military "despite" being a combat veteran. It is almost as if I am obligated to be doomed because of my combat service. I first encountered this attitude during the final months of my enlistment. After informing my Chief of my decision to leave the military he did everything he could to convince me it would be a mistake. He even went as far as making me see our Command Master Chief and speaking with him about my decision.

In my meeting with the Master Chief, he spoke of sailors that he knew that had gotten out with intentions of becoming successful but had their hopes dashed because they did not know how to function outside of the military, emphasizing that as a combat veteran I would be especially prone to failure. After sharing these sad stories with me he then went about offering me pretty much anything I could have wanted as long as I reenlisted, at the end saying, "Don't throw your career away Rodriguez. You could be a Master Chief!" I thanked the Master Chief for meeting with me, but I told him that I still intended to leave the military, leaving him noticeably disappointed. While I know that the Master Chief only had the best of intentions, I found it unusual and disheartening that he thought I could accomplish amazing things in uniform but at the same time accomplish nothing worthwhile out of uniform.

As disheartening as the meeting with the Master Chief was, I would later be grateful for it. The meeting prepared me for the array of uncomfortable situations I encountered after leaving the military. Once, during a doctor's appointment, the physician was surprised that I was a combat veteran and at the same time had no prescriptions for Zoloft or Prozac, saying, "Are you sure you were there?" Last year, during a research program at the University of Maryland, I attended a group lunch with two professors that I was working with. At one point one of them told me that if I had any issues that I should talk to his assistant. I told him that the program administrators handled all the administrative issues. To which he replied, "No, I mean if you have any veteran issues. Like if you go crazy or something."

In speaking with fellow veterans I have found that these sort of situations are not unique. These misunderstandings occur because the gap between veterans and nonveterans has grown to the extent that most Americans view veterans as an abstract idea instead of fellow citizens. Currently, veterans are 2.6 percent more likely to be unemployed than nonveterans and every day an average of 18 veterans commits suicide. I don't believe that a society that truly understands and does right by its veterans would have these sort of issues.

Society's lack of understanding makes the trauma of combat worse for veterans. As a combat veteran, I understand this intimately. Before Fallujah, I had intended to make the military a career. After Fallujah, I decided to leave. I left because while I was always proud to be a Corpsman, after Fallujah, I found that I had stopped enjoying it. Like many veterans, I signed up for the GI Bill upon entering the military, although I doubted I would ever use it. However, unsatisfied with the options left for me after the military I decided to use it and give college a shot. It didn't look like I had much of a chance of succeeding. There weren't any college graduates in my family and I myself barely graduated high school.

I started off at my hometown community college and while I did well, I found it academically unchallenging. I wanted something better so I transferred to another community college eventually transferring to the University of Florida. At the University of Florida I accomplished my goal of getting a degree, graduating with high honors with majors in Political Science and Linguistics. And I am proud to say that I was able to graduate college not despite being a combat veteran, but exactly because I am one. Combat is one of the most intense experiences a person can go though and it changes a person forever. But while combat is an intense and negative experience, it does not have to be destructive, it can it be constructive. If anything good can be taken from war, then that must surely be it.

In the past, when speaking to people about the struggles veterans face, I would sometimes say, "People are all about supporting the troops, so long as they don't actually have to care." And while that statement may seem mean and cynical, I thought it held a great deal of truth. I still do.

In my opinion, what veterans need are not acts of empty gratitude, holidays, or memorials. What veterans need more then anything is to know that they still have a stake in their own country after they've served. It is something simple, but it is also something profoundly important.

Edgar Rodriguez is a Iraq War veteran and a University of Florida graduate. He fought in the Second Battle of Fallujah in 2004 while attached to the ground combat element of the 31st Expeditionary Unit. He lives and works in Washington, D.C. 

If there is one phrase I could expunge from the U.S. military vocabulary, it would be that "Failure is not an option." Of course it is. And refusing to think about it seriously actually makes a bad outcome more likely.

Yesterday morning one of my smart CNAS colleagues, Shannon O' Reilly, was wondering aloud why the Pentagon didn't plan more for the option of the United States being kicked out of Iraq. The excuse being given, apparently, is that there was worry that such planning would leak.

I think that is just too damn convenient an alibi. I actually think that the bureaucracy dislikes planning for anything less than victory. No one likes planning retreats. The Army especially emphasizes optimism even when it isn't called for.

The problem with this is that, as David Kilcullen has pointed out repeatedly over the years, the host government you establish in places like Afghanistan and Iraq must at some point stand on its own two feet and demonstrate its independence. Inevitably, it will have to distance itself from the U.S. government. Basically, we should have expected to be kicked out at some point. In fact, had we done so, it might have been spun as a sign of success. But that would require some unconventional thinking, some serious consideration of the American relationship with host nation governments --and some long-term planning for that day of expulsion.

President Obama looks pretty serious about U.S. troops leaving Iraq in just 10 weeks. This means not that the war is over, but that we are leaving the war, which goes on. And on. And so on.

The next six months in Iraq will indeed be interesting. Secretary of State Clinton said on Meet the Press yesterday, "Now, are the Iraqis all going to get along with each other for the foreseeable future? Well, let's find out." I saw that movie! Feeling lucky, Iraq? Well, do ya?

Here is the worried assessment of retired Army Gen. Jack Keane, who in 2006 played a major role in fixing U.S. strategy in the war. I suspect various factions and external actors have been keeping their powder dry while U.S. troops were still on the scene. No one wanted to mess much with "the biggest tribe," especially because those fighters and weapons might be handy once that tribe left. It's like the Jets and the Sharks making nice while waiting for Office Krupke to move along. With Uncle Sam out of the way, it will be interesting to see which players -- internal and external -- seek to fill the vacuum. Why am I such a "pestamist"? -- to borrow a term my daughter invented as a child. Because none of the basic questions that led to the civil war of 2006-07 have been resolved-how to share oil revenues, what the role of the Kurds will be, and basically how to govern the country. (On the other hand, supporting the Clinton view, I have heard the argument that the U.S. presence is the factor that had enables Iraqi politicians to keep questions hanging fire.)

Think I'm being paranoid? OK, here is Yochi Dreazen's account in National Journal of a recent visit in Basra:

The Iranian consulate here dominates a section of this oil-rich city's skyline. An enormous Iranian flag can be seen from half a mile away, ringed by a welter of radio towers and satellite dishes. The walled compound houses three large villas and six smaller buildings. It's protected by well-trained Iranian and Iraqi troops. On a recent visit, I stopped my car and stepped out to take a few photos. Within seconds, a dozen men in tracksuits rushed out of adjacent houses and stores and surrounded me, handguns drawn. My translator assured them that we were journalists. The men, unsmiling, ordered me to hand over my camera and then methodically erased every picture I had taken since arriving in Basra four days earlier. They shoved us back toward our car and slammed the doors. Leaning into an open window, one of the guards told us to leave the area and not return. He was speaking Farsi.

When I read that, I thought of three things. First, someone telling me years ago that Iran doesn't want to control Baghdad, which is uncontrollable, it wants Basra, which is oil exports. Also, of two things Ambassador Ryan Crocker said about Iraq a couple of years ago:That the events for which the war will be remembered have not yet happened and that he kind of expected Iraq to wind up looking like Lebanon. I think he is still right on both counts.  

A CNAS colleague recently asked what she should assign her students to read about Iraq since the surge -- which after all began more than four years ago. I was surprised that I couldn't think of a book that captured the post-surge era. What I came up with was the writings of Toby Dodge. Another CNAS colleague suggested also the work of Joost Hilterman, especially this article. I'd be interested in any other suggestions from all of youse. (Maybe for the West Point faculty, we could compile a list of the 10 best articles and books on Iraq since the surge.)

I also really liked the overview provided by a recent article by Safa Rasul al-Sheikh and Professor the Lady Emma Sky in Survival. (She's slumming at Oxford now.) It provided a pretty good overview of what has happened in Iraq since 2006, especially from the perspective of Iraqis. A couple of their conclusions:

The Sunni insurgents were driven to negotiate because they came to the realisation that they could not overthrow the new regime, that they were losing Baghdad to the Shia militias, and that Iran was a bigger threat to them than the United States.

(p. 127)

Iran eventually succeeded in making a second-term Maliki premiership inevitable by putting huge pressure on the Sadrists to support him.

(p. 138)

Tom again: Meanwhile, over the weekend I read a pretty new book, The Saddam Tapes: The Inner Workings of a Tyrant's Regime, which consists of edited transcripts of captured recordings of Saddam Hussein's official meetings. No major Nixonian revelations, but a useful addition to the historical record. Among other things, it appears to confirm what some people have written, that he really believed he had prevailed in the 1991 war, because the Americans unilaterally had given him a ceasefire. As he tells aides on one tape made after the 1992 election, "Bush fell and Iraq lasted." And in an aside Saddam confirms that the Iraqi military really was shaken by the battle of al Khafji early in the 1991 war-a crucial development that Norman Schwarzkopf didn't grasp.

The second chapter of that novel could begin thusly:

BAGHDAD / Aswat al-Iraq: Security sources said today that an intelligence official was killed following an armed attack against him west of the capital, Baghdad.

The source told Aswat al-Iraq that the assassins crossed his road and shot him dead.

No other details were given.

Maybe one of those Scandinavian mystery novelists my wife is always reading needs to move to Baghdad.

Not a good sign if the Kurdish militia is stepping to in the province as the Americans are heading for the exits.

Speaking of students who are veterans, Alex Horton, whom I've followed since he was a bubblegum-chewing, hard-blogging infantryman in Iraq, has some interesting observations about starting as a student at Georgetown University: "... an associate dean spoke about development of the whole person, sound in spirit and mind. I could not help but think of my own development on the training grounds at Fort Lewis and the rooftops of Baghdad, where notions of spirituality and existence were taught at the velocity of molten shrapnel."

I like those last 11 words.

Army Maj. Jayson Stewart summarizes his 2008 tour of duty as an advisor to a unit of the Iraqi border patrol that actually was based more than 40 miles away from him. "There was a period there where I didn't get out for four months, and I was only able to entice them to come and see me probably once every two to three weeks."

I see this maybe as a Tom Hanks movie. Or John Candy, if he were still with us.

I hope that nobody else has to go through that same experience, because it did suck. I was able to build my own little stadium seating inside one of the more concrete rooms and turned one of my Armed Forces Network receivers and hooked it up to the one-eyed monster and put it on a seven-foot by eight-foot screen and was able to watch football, because I couldn't go anywhere and I couldn't do anything.

I think that fits my definition of hell: Isolated in southern Iraq with nothing to do and a year to do it in.

The war in Iraq continues. Suppose we gave a war in Iraq and nobody here cared? Not clear what the deal is to keep U.S. forces in Iraq. But keeping just 3,000 troops worries me -- that's more like a big kick-me sign than a force that can support and protect itself. (Unless it is a cover for about 12,000 more mercenaries.) I mean, Mookie already has threatened to whack American advisors remaining into next year. Meanwhile, Turkey conducted a bunch of airstrikes against Kurdish targets in northern Iraq.

It is also going to be harder to see one more American die in Iraq now that Iraq has lined up with Iran to support the beleaguered regime in Syria. Leaves a kind of even emptier feeling. (But at least we got Iraq's stockpiles of WMD!) Old Juan Cole sees an emerging Damascus-Baghdad-Tehran alliance. A new axis of evil?

Ken Pollack is worried that Iraq is on the precipice, again:

There is extensive scholarly literature on how civil wars start, end and recur, and Iraq's experiences over the past eight years conform to these patterns frighteningly closely. Historically, states that have undergone an intercommunal civil war like the one in Iraq have an unfortunate tendency to slip back into such conflict. This is especially true when the state in question has major, easily looted resources-like oil.

This same history demonstrates that a slide into civil war typically follows a period of time when old problems come back to haunt a country but everyone sees them as relatively minor and easily solved, and thus they do not take them seriously or exert themselves to nip them in the bud. Then, seemingly small and simple-to-overcome issues snowball quickly-much faster than anticipated-and a resurgence of civil war that people believed was years or even decades away reignites overnight. Unfortunately, the point where civil war became inevitable typically is clear only in the rearview mirror.

Speaking of Iraq, it is good to see old Joel Wing come off the injured reserve list.