But today the Pentagon added two more phases, signified by “a bronze campaign star”:

Iraqi Surge – Jan. 10, 2007 to Dec. 31, 2008.

Iraqi Sovereignty – Jan. 1, 2009 through a date to be determined.

What, they didn’t want to start “Sovereignty” on Jan. 20, 2009? I kid. Sort of. Though that “date to be determined” endpoint would make a wag suspicious about whether all troops will really be withdrawn at the end of 2011 in accordance with the terms of the Status of Forces Agreement.

U.S. Army Soldiers in Iraq (U.S. Army photo)

A recent memo authored by a senior U.S. military official questions the basic rationale for keeping U.S. troops in Iraq until 2011 as the Obama administration has decided, arguing that U.S. troops have reached a point of “diminishing returns” in training the Iraqi security forces and risk jeopardizing both a future positive relationship with Baghdad by staying for another two and a half years and the safety of U.S. forces.

The short memo, written by Army Col. Timothy R. Reese, chief of the Baghdad Operations Command Advisory Team for Multinational Division-Baghdad, argues that all U.S. troops “smell bad to the Iraqi nose,” and accordingly suffer under laborious operational restrictions placed upon them by the Status of Forces Agreement signed by the U.S. and Iraq in late 2008. In particular, since the June 30 pullback of U.S. forces from Iraqi towns and cities, Reese, a high-ranking liaison to Iraqi security forces, writes that the Iraqi forces have placed “unilateral restrictions on U.S. forces that violate the most basic aspects” of the accord, including a “forcible takeover” of an entry point within the so-called Green Zone. “The security of U.S. forces are at risk,” he writes.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

As a result, Reese contends, “we should declare our intentions to withdraw all U.S. military forces from Iraq by August 2010,” a schedule that he says represents not “a strategic paradigm shift, but an acceleration of existing U.S. plans by some 15 months.” There are currently 130,000 troops in Iraq, a number scheduled to remain fairly static until early next year, after which the Obama administration and Reese’s senior theater commander, Gen. Raymond Odierno, intend to remove all combat brigades, leaving between 30,000 and 55,000 troops in Iraq as advisers until December 2011, as allowed in the SOFA.

Yet Reese argues in his memo — evidently written in mid-July — that the United States no longer possesses sufficient leverage to influence a host of Iraqi military and governmental problems, which the administration has cited to justify the presence of U.S. forces through 2011. But he contends that security has improved to the point where even an Iraqi military that he considers poor can keep the county from a much-feared internal collapse without the aid of U.S. forces. “Perhaps it is one of those infamous paradoxes of counterinsurgency that while the ISF [Iraqi security forces] is not good in any objective sense, it is good enough for Iraq in 2009,” Reese writes.

The Iraqi military that Reese advises comes in for a withering assessment. Although he writes that the U.S. can be “justifiably proud” that the Iraqi military has “defeated the organized insurgency,” any opportunity for bequeathing Iraq a professional military free from a “Baathist-Soviet model” is “now long past,” and U.S. forces cannot change the situation by 2011. Reese criticizes the Iraqi military for “endemic” laziness, corruption, nepotism, mistreatment of enlisted soldiers, and worse. The Iraqi Ministry of Defense and its Baghdad Operations Command are untrustworthy, incompetent and unable to “stand up to Shiite political parties,” despite “all the fawning praise we bestow” on both organizations.

Reese’s assessment of Iraqi government performance is even harsher. He writes that reconciliation of the ruling Shiites with former Sunni insurgents and rejectionists is “at a standstill, and probably going backwards,” nor is there movement to resolve Arab-Kurdish tensions in the north. Corruption and incompetence in the ministries is “the stuff of legend,” with Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s much-touted anti-corruption measures a mere “campaign tool.” Essential services like electricity still are unable to meet the needs of Iraqis, and the government does not take “rational steps” to improve them. “The general lack of progress in essential services and good governance is now so broad that it ought to be clear that we no longer are moving the Iraqis ‘forward,’” Reese writes.

The memo, according to several people who have read it, has made its way in defense circles for at least a few days. On Tuesday, a blog called Snuffysmith posted the memo’s contents, which were independently obtained by The Washington Independent. According to GoogleCache, another blog on the conservative Townhall network, The Enchanters’ Corner, posted it on Monday, but the blog is currently blank. Its bio page lists its author as “Tim The Enchanter,” a member of the U.S. Army “on active duty for almost 30 years” who is currently serving “in Iraq as an advisor to the Iraqi security forces.” According to an official bio, Reese received his first Army commission in 1981. Several efforts to reach him were unsuccessful. (As this piece was going to press, the New York Times published a piece about the memo as well.)

Reese is known in the Army as a historian as well an armor officer. In 2008, he and a colleague published a well-regarded study of the Army’s experiences in Iraq following the fall of Baghdad until January 2005, titled “On Point II.” Col. Gian Gentile, who led a battalion in Baghdad before the surge, said that Reese’s work on “On Point II” demonstrated that he is a “credible source,” and called his memo a “powerful and important view” of the U.S.’s situation in Iraq.

Douglas Ollivant, a former chief of plans for Multinational Division-Baghdad who left the White House last month as Iraq director, said there was “a grain of truth to the picture he paints,” but said that Reese’s account “is exaggerated, and does not account for Iraqi political reality.” Among other points, Ollivant critiqued Reese for not addressing what accelerating withdrawal “would do to our equipment withdrawal plan” or the “transition to State [Department] control.”

Messages left for a spokesman for Gen. Odierno were not answered by press time.

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki (AP Photo)

Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki opened the door for the first time Thursday to the prospect of a U.S. military presence in Iraq after the December 2011 deadline for troop withdrawal set by last year’s bilateral accord — something President Obama appeared to rule out during a joint appearance on Tuesday.

Speaking to an audience at the U.S. Institute of Peace in Washington, Maliki said the accord, known as the Status of Forces Agreement, would “end” the American military presence in his country in 2011, but “nevertheless, if Iraqi forces required further training and further support, we shall examine this at that time based on the needs of Iraq,” he said through translation in response to a question from The Washington Independent. “I am sure that the will, the prospects and the desire for such cooperation is found among both parties.”

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Maliki continued, “The nature of that relationship — the functions and the amount of [U.S.] forces — will then be discussed and reexamined based on the needs” of Iraq.

The Iraqi prime minister’s allowance for a post-2011 U.S. troop presence comes despite his increasingly nationalist tone to a domestic audience in advance of parliamentary elections, which are scheduled for January. He resisted the advice of Gen. Raymond Odierno, the commander of U.S. troops in Iraq, to keep a U.S. combat presence in volatile areas like Mosul after June 30, the date set by the Status of Forces Agreement for their evacuation from Iraqi cities and towns. Instead, when they departed, Maliki declared a national holiday. He called the withdrawal a “great victory” for Iraq, language reminiscent of his oft-stated declarations of victory over Iraq’s various insurgent groups. In his remarks at the U.S. Institute of Peace, Maliki moderated that remark, saying the U.S. “withdrawal from the cities is a victory, not a failure for either the Iraqis or the Americans.”

In a joint appearance with Maliki at the White House on Tuesday, President Obama gave no indication that he envisioned a place for U.S. troops in Iraq after 2011, instead pledging to “fulfill our commitment to remove all American troops from Iraq by the end of 2011.”  Using language that signaled an end to the U.S. troop presence in Iraq, Obama said the departure of U.S. troops from Iraqi cities was an “unmistakable signal” that his administration will “keep our commitments with the sovereign Iraqi government.” There are currently about 130,000 U.S. troops in the country.

Senior administration officials have denied any intent to keep U.S. forces in Iraq past that period as well. “It would require a new agreement, a new negotiation — almost certainly an Iraqi initiative — to provide for some presence beyond the end of 2011,” Defense Secretary Robert Gates told reporters in February after Obama announced a schedule for staggered U.S. withdrawal from Iraq in accordance with the Status of Forces Agreement. “So in the absence of that agreement, in the absence of any negotiation for such an agreement, it is in keeping with the SOFA that, to say definitively, that we will be out at the end of 2011.”

But some former officials and analysts close to the administration have envisioned small non-combat residual U.S. forces remaining in Iraq past the 2011 deadline to advise Iraqi security forces, echoing the notes Maliki struck on Wednesday. Doug Ollivant, who left the National Security Council as an Iraq director last month, told TWI that the U.S. military will retain ties with its Iraqi counterparts after combat forces depart similar to the “ties we have to many other countries in the region,” which are often for officer training, coordination and advice. (While some countries in the region, such as Qatar and Saudi Arabia, host U.S. military bases, Obama reiterated Wednesday that “we seek no bases in Iraq.”)

And in a paper for the Center for a New American Security, a think tank with close ties to the Obama Pentagon and State Department, John Nagl, the think tank’s president, wrote last month that developing Iraqi security capacity for air and naval operations “always required some level of American support beyond the SOFA deadline, but now the United States may need to provide continued air and naval protection for an extended period beyond 2011″ owing to the global economic crisis. Both Ollivant and Nagl have longstanding relationships with Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of all U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia.

While antipathy for the U.S. military presence remains a popular Iraqi sentiment — the streets of Baghdad resembled a “carnival” when U.S. troops withdrew, according to reporters on the ground — some Iraqi legislators and security officials have questioned whether the Status of Forces Agreement provides a sufficient amount of time for Iraqi forces to take control of the still-violent country. Qassim Daoud, a Shiite parliamentarian and former national security adviser to Prime Minister Iyad Allawi, has said the accord should be renegotiated to allow U.S. troops to stay until 2020 or 2025. Last year, Iraq’s defense minister, Abdul Qadir al-Obaidi, suggested in a press conference that the less-mature elements of the Iraqi security forces, like the Air Force, might require American assistance after 2011.

Most of Maliki’s remarks to the U.S. Institute of Peace described a post-2011 U.S.-Iraqi relationship in non-military terms. In keeping with a companion according known as the Strategic Framework Agreement, which spells out terms for a U.S.-Iraqi alliance after 2011, Maliki said he sought a relationship on “all levels — political, economic, educational, cultural.” He extended his thanks to “the international community and all the countries that have cooperated and helped Iraq,” saying Iraq would enjoy a “solid relationship with a great and strong country like the United States.”

A Gallup poll released last week found that 58 percent of Americans consider the U.S. invasion of Iraq to be a mistake.

Prime Minister Maliki  answered Spencer Ackerman’s question at a press meeting held Thursday, not Wednesday as we originally reported. We regret the error.

” …But we have taken it as far as Americans can.  In my opinion, anything we do now may do more harm than good in delaying the inevitable and reinforcing [Iraqis], at times, crippling malaise. The only enduring role for Americans is to provide the safety net to prevent complete collapse, chaos, and civil war; three things that I do not believe will happen in any event.”

Additionally, the Defense Department just emailed this out to reporters:

“The United States is committed to full, transparent, and continued implementation of the security agreement in a spirit of partnership with the sovereign nation of Iraq. Iraqi security forces continue to take the lead in the security and stability of Iraq,” said Gen. Ray Odierno, commanding general, Multi-National Force Iraq. U.S. forces outside urban areas will continue to conduct operations by, with, and through, ISF, focusing on securing Iraqi borders and areas outside the cities. “In order to meet our obligations under the security agreement, some U.S. forces will remain in cities to train, advise, and coordinate with Iraqi security forces, as well as support civil capacity efforts led by the U.S. Mission-Iraq, government of Iraq (GoI) and the United Nations. All U.S. forces retain full authority and ability to protect themselves, Iraqi security forces, and the Iraqi public,” said Odierno.

I had my doubts about Odierno’s commitment to implementing the Status of Forces Agreement. He proved me wrong.

But not if you’re an Iraqi. Just read the outpouring that The Washington Post reports for the end of a major U.S. presence in the cities and the towns:

“Out, America out!” a group of sweat-drenched young men chanted Monday at a Baghdad park as the sun was setting. They jumped up and down to the deafening beat of drums and the wail of horns.

It’s a “carnival” in Baghdad, according to The Post’s Ernesto Londono, filled with Iraqi troops grinning as they take their lives into their own hands and graffiti writers further south demanding, “Pull your troops from our Basra, we are its sons and want its sovereignty.” Don’t tell them today is just another day.

Building on the political opportunity afforded by today’s national celebration, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki declared victory, reports The New York Times:

“The national united government succeeded in putting down the sectarian war that was threatening the unity and the sovereignty of Iraq.”

Adds reporter Alissa Rubin, “He made no mention of the American military’s involvement in fighting here for the last six years.” If you were Maliki, would you? Rubin also notes that the government turned American reporters away from the Green Zone — the former U.S. enclave now under Iraqi control — in an apparent gesture “to signal that the Iraqi authorities were in charge.”

What will that entail? “A lot of it will be trying to deal with the al-Qaeda presence, particularly in Ninewa Province,” said Joseph McMillan, the principal deputy assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, on a bloggers’ conference call this morning. McMillan declined to get more specific, but said to expect “the tracking of insurgent activities, particularly on the borders” as a hallmark of U.S. troops’ new wilderness-focused combat mission.

Under what circumstances can U.S. forces operate in the cities after Wednesday? That’s “essentially a call by the Iraqi government,” McMillan continued. “If they tell us they need help, then Gen. Odierno and his staff will sit down with the Iraqi military and security leadership [to determine] what missions are appropriate,” and how to execute them in a supporting role. He added that even though about 120 bases operated by U.S. forces in urban areas have been handed over to Iraqi leadership, there hasn’t been much base construction for facilities out in the sticks. “My understanding is they’re doing minor work, the standard engineering thing” to accommodate an increased volume of U.S. forces in the facilities, but “we’re not in the mode of building new bases around the countryside.”

McMillan rejected the idea that the pullout from Iraqi cities represented a return to a pre-surge combat posture, when U.S. troops were criticized for “commuting to the fight” from big bases on the outskirts of Iraqi cities. From 2003 to now, “U.S. forces operated with the freedom to go into anywhere” deemed appropriate by their commanders, he said, and didn’t provide the responsibility for urban security to their Iraqi counterparts. “This is a fundamental change of the rules of the road. We are now handing off the urban security mission to Iraqi security forces.”

The cabinet suggested that the referendum could be delayed until January, but the parliament speaker, Ayad al-Summarie, an opponent of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, appears to be leaning in the direction of holding it by July 30.

Welcome to Christopher Hill’s first massive challenge as Iraq ambassador. He can continue to press behind the scenes for the Maliki government and the parliament to block or delay the referendum, contending that a premature U.S. departure is a gamble that Iraq can’t afford. But if he does that, the inevitable charges about American intentions for permanent occupation will intensify in an election year, risking not only the passage of the referendum but a more anti-American parliament as well. If he doesn’t press Maliki and the parliament, the referendum could pass. Would that be the end of the world? No, but it could make the actual withdrawal more chaotic. What’s striking is that for months, administration officials I’ve spoken with about Iraq have been convinced the referendum wasn’t going to happen.

On a kind-of-related note, Musings On Iraq has a good post noting that the Iraqis asked the British to keep 100 sailors and 5 ships in Basra after the “final” British pull-out date of May 31. Is this what’s going to happen for U.S. troops, as John Nagl kind-of-sort-of-maybe suggests in his new Iraq paper? If the referendum passes and U.S. troops have to leave Iraq in 2010, expect the Obama administration, ironically, to negotiate a more robust advisory presence than it would if the referendum fails, out of an attempt to mitigate the consequences of what it’ll view as an accelerated withdrawal schedule.

Documents obtained by TWI support claims by Iraqi translators that the shift of power toward Iraqi officials could put them in danger.

In the United States, it would be a mundane tax form, with standard provisions for cataloging an employee’s tax obligations. Full name. Citizen ID number. Address. Phone. Specifications about any children.

But Form D/4a from the Iraqi Ministry of Finance is sending waves of anxiety through the community of Iraqis who work as linguists, translators and interpreters for the U.S. military in Iraq. For the “terps,” as many U.S. troops and diplomats call them, the form is a prelude to a disaster. Unless their identities are kept a closely guarded secret, they fear, they and their families will be hunted by insurgents, militias and death squads — many of whom are tied to or work for the Iraqi government — for collaborating with the U.S. military.

Illustration by: Matt Mahurin

Several weeks ago, Global Linguist Solutions (GLS), the company that holds the contract with the U.S. military to provide translators, entered into negotiations with the Iraqi government about what their new obligations are for withholding employee taxes once the U.S.-Iraqi Status of Forces Agreement (SOFA) — which, among other things, gives the Iraqi government increased authority over U.S. contractors — goes into effect. The company said emphatically that it has no intention of turning over identifying information for its roughly 7,000 Iraqi employees. “We’re not providing any personal identification information,” said company spokesman Douglas Ebner. “We have not done so up to now, and we’re not going to change.”

But many of these contractors don’t trust GLS to keep its word. Some are considering fleeing Iraq entirely, raising the prospect of U.S. service members losing their ability to talk and listen to Iraqis. “We either quit,” said Garrison, the pseudonym of an Iraqi interpreter, in an email, “or sign our own death warrants by turning the information [over] to the ministry.”

Terps go to extremes to safeguard their identities. Many are known to soldiers and marines by Anglicized names like Moe and Tommy and Big King Paul. When leaving U.S. bases to accompany troops on missions, it’s common for them to wear ski masks and wraparound sunglasses in the burning Iraqi heat, their hands covered in flame-retardant gloves so as not to leave behind so much as a fingerprint. Some don’t tell their families how they earn a living; others actually live on U.S. bases.

And for good reason: those who help the U.S. in Iraq are targets for insurgents, as are their families. While there aren’t available figures on how many Iraqis employed by the U.S. have been kidnapped or murdered, a well-received play, “Betrayed,” by the New Yorker’s George Packer, has chronicled the anxiety of collaborating with the U.S. in Iraq.

“There’s no future for us here,” a translator calling himself Big King Paul told me in Baghdad’s Khadimiya neighborhood in March 2007. “The terrorists know us. We can’t live in this country.”

In several cases, the terrorists are within the Iraqi government itself. Insurgents and militia members have infiltrated the ranks of the Iraqi police, and to a lesser extent, the Iraqi army — a systemic problem that retired Marine Gen. Jim Jones, now President Obama’s national security adviser, identified in an influential 2007 report. Many political parties in Iraq, including aspects of the Shiite-dominated governing coalition, possess their own militias. And there remains a thriving kidnapping market in Iraq, creating a temptation among Finance Ministry bureaucrats to earn extra money by turning over case files on GLS employees to terrorists and criminals.

“Everyone knows the Iraqi police and all Iraqi security forces are either corrupt or [have] got something to do with militias or terrorist or insurgents,” said another Iraqi interpreter in an email.

Indeed, the very finance ministry that seeks employee identification information is run by a man named Bayan Jabr, who has ties to the Badr Corps militia affiliated with one of the major Shiite political parties, the Supreme Iraqi Islamic Council. In fall 2005, Jabr served as interior minister when U.S. forces discovered that the basement of the interior ministry was used as a torture chamber for Sunnis by Iraqi police officers. At the time, Jabr defended himself by saying, “Nobody was beheaded or killed.”

On Dec. 23, James “Spider” Marks, the retired Army two-star general who serves as CEO of GLS, sent GLS’ Iraqi employees a memorandum in Arabic informing them of impending tax changes brought by the SOFA. “What is required from the company GLS to do as an employer is to deduct the determined amount from your monthly wages and pay it to the Iraqi government,” Marks wrote. The memorandum sparked a widespread fear among linguists, translators and interpreters that GLS would compromise employee identities as an aspect of compliance with the SOFA. A copy of the memo was acquired by The Washington Independent and translated into English. GLS would not provide the original English copy of the document but confirmed that TWI’s translation was “substantially accurate.”

Ebner, the GLS spokesman, confirmed that the company was in ongoing negotiations with the Iraqi ministries of finance and interior to determine the scope of its new legal obligations to the Iraqi government. But he said that employee concerns were unfounded. “The type of information pertaining to personal identification for employees is not going to be provided,” Ebner said. “We are fully confident that we’re going to work out procedures with the Iraqi authorities that both comply with the tax provisions of Iraqi law while fully safeguarding the personal identification information of our employees.” The company’s contract with the Defense Department, first awarded in 2006, is worth an estimated $4.6 billion.

According to Ebner, GLS site managers in Iraq have been instructed to tell Iraqi employees not to fear new company compliance changes. He attributed employee fears to the sensitivity of the issue. “In some cases, our site managers are speaking into the wind to individuals who are very concerned by this,” Ebner said.

Some GLS employees say that they’ve heard GLS denials but can’t afford to credit them. A promise not to disclose identifying information “may work with a friend or some other things but it will never work on this case,” said one interpreter. “We heard that the action was halted until further negotiations are reached,” said Garrison. “Absolutely, I fear for my and my family’s safety. The Iraqi ministries still have elements who can use this information to blackmail or threaten linguists or their families with. I have seen interpreters killed and displaced because their places of residence were identified by militants.”

A different interpreter emailed that he only worked for GLS because of their guarantees of employee confidentiality for a dangerous job. Now, that interpreter said, it is “just [a] matter of time” before insurgents are able to discover interpreter identities. “Iraq is no longer [a] safe place for us,” the interpreter said.

Another interpreter said that his site manager actually told him a different story. “GLS told me that they have to give my information to the [Iraqi government] because of the SOFA agreement,” the interpreter said. “I told the [project] manager in my unit that I’m willing to pay the taxes — 20 percent of my pay — but I don’t want them to give my identity information to the [government], but unfortunately the interpreters’ manager in my unit said ‘I’m afraid it is not a choice this issue is high high enough, the unit can not discuss this.’”

It is unclear what provisions of the Status of Forces Agreement mandate the additional legal compliance. While several portions of the accord suggest that Iraq has new authority to enforce its laws against U.S. security contractors like Blackwater or DynCorp — which is GLS’ parent company — none explicitly discusses Iraqi governmental power over Iraqi employees of U.S. companies. Ebner would not point to specific portions of the SOFA that prompted the recent negotiations between GLS and the Iraqi government.

For its part, the U.S. military said that the SOFA did not require companies to turn over Iraqi employee identification. “The Security Agreement does not, however, mandate any such disclosure with regards to U.S. contractors,” said Lt. John Brimley, a spokesman for the U.S. military command in Iraq. Brimley said that the military was not a party to negotiations between the Iraqi government and GLS.

Neither Ebner nor Brimley anticipated a linguist exodus because of the interpreters’ fears. “We cannot absolutely predict the future, of course, but no, based on what we have seen to-date, we do not anticipate significant loss of employees,” Ebner said. “We are confident we will continue to meet the linguist and interpretation needs of our military units in Iraq.” Brimley added, “The salaries of these positions are competitive with today’s market and thus we do not
anticipate any shortfalls.”

But some interpreters said they were already taking steps to leave Iraq. One interpreter, who said he lives with several colleagues, said in an email that he and his friends were preparing their paperwork and their passport information to flee the country. “We feel [we] got betrayed by GLS,” the interpreter said. “We are not going to continue working for GLS and absolutely we’re not staying in Iraq, we have to leave soon.”

He continued, “We all know the potential of getting killed if we stayed in Iraq, we all read history and know what we are talking about here. We never attempted [to] flee Iraq before, because most of us spend all their [lives] here! But not any more.”

All these operations will be conducted with the necessity of fully respecting the Iraqi Constitution and Iraqi Law, and conducting these operations will be without overstepping the sovereignty of Iraq and its national interests as determined by the Iraqi government. It is the duty of the U.S. to respect the laws of Iraq, its customs and traditions and valid international law.

The Iraqi constitution is a massive and unclear document. How does a company commander in Arab Jabour or Mosul follow this instruction? And these aren’t the only restrictions by a long shot. As McClatchy’s Nancy Youssef notes, the Iraqis now control even the mail sent to the troops. (Your copy of Fallout 3 is no longer secure…)

Youssef has a fantastic piece about military commanders’ concerns in this regard. They think that George W. Bush basically sold out their operational flexibility in his odd zeal to get an agreement in place. And sure enough, even though his insistence on a deal gave the Iraqis all the leverage and undid his plans for what Youssef calls “a semi-permanent occupation,” Bush didn’t reject the agreement.

As Obama’s chances to be elected president improved, the White House felt it was under more pressure. Neither the administration nor the Iraqis wanted to extend the U.N. resolution. “It turned into a very peculiar political predicament,” the officer said.

Someday I want to report out what was going through the administration’s collective mind when it opted to stick with the SOFA process despite the Iraqis’ undermining the administration’s rationale for the deal.