An Interview with Stanley McChrystal

What did we get right and what did we get wrong in Afghanistan and Iraq?

McChrystal: In both cases we didn’t understand either the problem or our objectives going in.

.. Afghanistan in particular was a case of finding a problem of much greater complexity, much deeper roots, and much more difficult issues than we appreciated

.. Iraq was a war of choice versus a war of reaction. And yet, interestingly enough, we didn’t understand the problem there either. Most leaders knew about the Kurds, Sunni, and Shia. But once we got inside we found that the dynamics were actually far more complex. The idea of removing the Baathist regime of Saddam Hussein and replacing it with a government of our making, and the functions of state just continuing on was based on a fundamentally flawed assumption.

.. In the case of Afghanistan, immediately after 9/11, in terms of military action we should have done nothing initially. I now believe we should have taken the first year after 9/11 and sent 10,000 young Americans—military, civilians, diplomats—to language school; Pashtu, Dari, Arabic. We should have started to build up the capacity we didn’t have.

.. I would have made our case around the world that this is a global problem and that the whole world has to deal with it. I would have spent the full year in preparation. I would not have been worried about striking al-Qaeda that year; they weren’t going anywhere.

.. The Islamic State is the symptom, not the cause. Some argue that if the Islamic State were eliminated the problem would be solved. I would counter-argue that if the Islamic State suddenly vanished, most of the problems in the region would still be there and they would be just as intractable as they are now. The Islamic State is a reaction to the chaos and the weakness of the existing regimes in the region, the lack of legitimacy, not just of the Bashar al-Assad government, but in Iraq and elsewhere. The weakness of these regimes is the absence of a compelling narrative that signals to the people that there will be political, economic, and social opportunities in the future. ISIL is a rejection of the status quo.

.. That is also what the Arab Spring was about. It wasn’t a move to democracy, it was a rejection of the status quo.

.. The great tragedy of the Arab Spring was that there was no compelling narrative around which the people could coalesce. There was no pan-Arab nationalism as there was in the past, nor any other compelling narrative. The only counters to the ISIL jihad narrative have been the narratives of status quo organizations and governments that, in the minds of populations, are, at best, 20th century entities. People don’t want to maintain that; even though they might not want ISIL they haven’t seen another option yet

.. Those autocratic regimes may not have been good but they were stable, as was the presence of the United States since we were so tied to the flow of oil. Today a mother in Ohio is not going to be nearly as willing to send her daughter or son to protect the lanes of oil delivery in the Middle East as she might have been in 1978 because we frankly don’t need Middle East oil today.

.. It means a guaranteed level of participation and a willingness, when necessary, to apply strong economic and military pressure to show that we are a player in the region; that we are a permanent fact of life here. To most people that is a desirable thing. They will always complain about us. But like America in Europe after World War II we were a very stabilizing factor.

.. A European war is not unthinkable. People who want to believe a war in Europe is not possible might be in for a surprise. We have to acknowledge great power politics; we can’t pretend they are gone.

.. . The problem with the rise in power of these individuals—which really didn’t exist in the past—is that individuals in very small groups have a disproportionate ability to act. But they don’t have the vulnerabilities of a nation state. Nuclear power and nuclear strategy were always based on holding each other at risk. The problem is you can’t hold an individual or terrorist group at risk because you might not be able to find them—or they may not care. As a consequence, deterrence in its traditional sense doesn’t work. How can you prevent people from doing harmful things if you can’t deter them?

.. Technology has created the problem because it empowers individuals to do unprecedentedly destructive things. On the other hand technology empowers society to track and monitor people as never before. We are beginning an era in which our ability to leverage technology to track people and control populations is going to create a lot of tension; I think we are going to see a lot more population control measures. We are going to have to give up a lot more of our precious civil rights than most of us imagine because we want security. In other countries that haven’t had the freedom that we have, they may not notice as much, but we are entering a period where we will have to make those choices. And the choices are likely to go in the way of surrendering civil rights for security.

.. The special forces that were formed under President John F. Kennedy were regionally focused; they were taught foreign languages, and the idea was that they would know the people, they would know the culture, and they would be able to operate effectively because of that knowledge. But then we started deploying those groups all over the world and they lost their unique specialized knowledge and skills.

.. The indirect approach on the other hand is when you are essentially leveraging things, for example leveraging the feelings of the local population. You are trying to leverage the capacity, or increase the capacity, of local defense forces. Or if you’re in a guerrilla insurgency mode, you are trying to support an insurgency and leverage that. The indirect approach allows you to get much more scale than you can get with the direct approach alone. A few people if trained properly can have massive effect. More importantly if you use the indirect approach effectively, the local population you are training is owning and solving its own problems. This is hard to do, but if you don’t do it, the moment you’re out of there, there is a huge gap in capacity.

.. On the surface it looks as though for a relatively small investment, and no Americans killed, we beat the Soviet Union. We gave the Soviets their Vietnam. In so doing though, we changed Afghanistan. We created these warlord groups that fought a civil war that then allowed the rise of the Taliban. We created problems that we are now facing.

.. 0Traditional terrorist organizations are hierarchical, pyramid-shaped organizations with tight control and a set of unique attributes, in some ways very similar to a U.S. corporation. We were designed to go after that kind of organization. Al-Qaeda was organized like that, and still is.

.. Unless we step back and implement a fundamentally different approach, and create a fundamentally different environment, nothing will ultimately change. Sometimes you need new organizations or structural changes, but I am always a little suspicious of those because they are never as effective as you expect them to be. Process and culture are more important

.. Just 25 years ago, just being big was good enough, because size and scale created barriers to entry. But one after another, look at Sears and Roebucks, Walmart, Chrysler under stress.

A Bigger Problem Than ISIS?

The Mosul Dam is failing. A breach would cause a colossal wave that could kill as many as a million and a half people.

 For a statement written by diplomats, it is extraordinarily blunt. “Mosul Dam faces a serious and unprecedented risk of catastrophic failure with little warning,” it said. Soon afterward, the United Nations released its own warning, predicting that “hundreds of thousands of people could be killed” if the dam failed. Iraq’s leaders, apparently fearful of public reaction, have refused to acknowledge the extent of the danger. But Alwash told me that nearly everyone outside the Iraqi government who has examined the dam believes that time is running out: in the spring, snowmelt flows into the Tigris, putting immense pressure on the retaining wall.
.. If the dam ruptured, it would likely cause a catastrophe of Biblical proportions, loosing a wave as high as a hundred feet that would roll down the Tigris, swallowing everything in its path for more than a hundred miles. Large parts of Mosul would be submerged in less than three hours. Along the riverbanks, towns and cities containing the heart of Iraq’s population would be flooded; in four days, a wave as high as sixteen feet would crash into Baghdad, a city of six million people. “If there is a breach in the dam, there will be no warning,” Alwash said. “It’s a nuclear bomb with an unpredictable fuse.”
.. successive teams of geologists reached the same conclusion: no matter where they looked, the prevalence of gypsum would make maintaining a dam difficult.
.. “The engineers wanted to show Saddam that they could build something huge,”
.. Iraq’s leaders feared that they were due for another flood, which would strand the Army. “It was of the utmost importance to begin construction of the dam as quickly as possible,”
.. Nasrat Adamo, a former senior official at the Iraqi Ministry of Irrigation, told me that a consortium of Swiss firms hired to oversee the process assured government officials that the gypsum problem could be managed. “We listened to the top experts,” he said. “Everybody agreed that this would not be too serious.”
.. the Iraqis should have been more cautious: the Swiss explained clearly that the site was problematic, and geologists working in the area had raised concerns for decades. They also noted that Soviet and French companies bidding on the project had asked for further surveys and been told that there wasn’t time. Iraqi officials were terrified of disappointing Saddam. Adamo told me that the Minister of Irrigation feared for his life: “If the dam failed, he would be hanged.”
.. Today, a stone memorial on top of the dam commemorates nineteen Chinese nationals who died during its construction; the memorial, inscribed in English and Chinese but not in Arabic, does not give the cause of their deaths.
.. Iraqi officials rushed to build a second dam, near a town called Badush, which could help prevent flooding in case the Mosul Dam collapsed. By 1990, just six years later, the new dam was forty per cent complete. Then Saddam sent his Army into Kuwait, sparking the Gulf War, and he ordered all the earthmoving equipment stripped from the Badush site and sent to the front lines. When the United States and its allies arrived to expel the Iraqis from Kuwait, they bombed all the equipment. After the war, inspectors from the International Atomic Energy Association discovered stockpiles of nuclear materials near Badush, apparently part of Saddam’s secret weapons program. The U.N. imposed economic sanctions on Iraq, impoverishing the country for a decade. Work on Badush never resumed.
.. “In terms of internal erosion potential of the foundation, Mosul Dam is the most dangerous dam in the world,”
.. A senior American official who has spent years working in Iraq confided that the deal may have stalled after Trevi refused an Iraqi demand for a kickback.
.. Mohsen al-Shammari, then the Minister for Water Resources, told reporters that there was no chance that the dam would collapse: “Whoever is saying it’s about to collapse is only talking.” Shammari is a follower of Moqtada al-Sadr
.. In private, some Iraqis pose conspiracy theories. “I know a lot of Iraqis who think this is just a big psyops operation by the U.S. government—senior officials, not just Iraqis on the street,”
.. Part of the problem, he argued, is a tradition of inertia, begun during Saddam’s dictatorship, in which officials live in fear of being penalized for taking initiative. “Iraqis will ignore the problem until the day the dam collapses,” he told me. “I’ve seen it over and over and over again. If the boss says there’s no problem, then there is no problem. And the day there is a problem, it’s, like, ‘Help!’ ”
.. The potential disaster has presented American officials with a public-relations quandary: the people they are trying to help won’t publicly concede that there’s a problem.
.. “We don’t want to publicly embarrass the Iraqis,” the senior American official told me.
.. Since the dam opened, in 1984, engineers working in the gallery have pumped close to a hundred thousand tons of grout—an average of ten tons a day—into the voids below.

.. “The grouting work stopped for eighteen months.”

..

A “tsunami-like wave” would rush through Mosul, carrying away everything in its path, including bodies, buildings, cars, unexploded bombs, hazardous chemicals, and human waste. The wave would almost certainly catch most of the people trying to outrun it. Residents of Mosul, scrambling on foot and by car through a citywide traffic jam, would need to travel at least three and a half miles to survive. In less than an hour, those who remained would be under as much as sixty feet of water.

.. The wave, the Embassy’s report predicted, would move rapidly through the cities of Bayji, Tikrit, and Samarra, wiping out roads, power stations, and oil refineries; damage to the electrical grid would probably leave the entire country without power. At least two-thirds of Iraq’s wheat fields would be flooded.

.. “Less than six inches of moving water is strong enough to knock a person off his feet,”

.. Within four days, the wave would reach Baghdad, depositing as much as sixteen feet of water in many areas of the city, probably including the airport and the Green Zone, the site of government buildings and most of the embassies.

.. By the time the flood wave rolled past Baghdad and exhausted itself, as many as one and a half million people could be dead. But, some experts told me, the aftermath would prove even more harrowing. “I am not really worried about the dead—because they’re dead,” Alwash said. “What worries me is everyone else. How do you feed six million people in Baghdad when it’s flooded? How do you give them electricity? Where do they go?”

.. A third option, which has lately gained currency, is to erect a “permanent” seal of the existing dam wall—a mile-long concrete curtain dropped eight hundred feet into the earth. This would cost an estimated three billion dollars.

Saddam Hussein should have been left to run Iraq, says CIA officer who interrogated him

When I interrogated Saddam, he told me: “You are going to fail. You are going to find that it is not so easy to govern Iraq.” When I told him I was curious why he felt that way, he replied: “You are going to fail in Iraq because you do not know the language, the history, and you do not understand the Arab mind.”

.. Nixon now reckons Hussein had a point and that a ruthless strongman like him was necessary to “maintain Iraq’s multi-ethnic state” and keep both Sunni extremism and the power of Shiite-led Iran, a Hussein foe, at bay.

.. “Although I found Saddam to be thoroughly unlikeable, I came away with a grudging respect for how he was able to maintain the Iraqi nation as a whole for as long as he did,” wrote Nixon. “He told me once, ‘Before me, there was only bickering and arguing. I ended all that and made people agree!'”

Many Arab commentators, though, reject the simplicity of the assumptions here — that if not ruled by tyrants, their nations would automatically turn into breeding grounds for militancy. That’s a logic, after all, that serves the autocrats. Moreover, there’s a direct connection between the heavy-handed policies of the region’s autocrats and the conditions that spawn extremism and deepen sectarian animosities. Pluralistic, multi-ethnic societies have been the norm, not the exception, for centuries.

US ‘got it so wrong’ on Saddam Hussein, says CIA analyst who interrogated dictator

‘We never thought about using weapons of mass destruction,’ former Iraqi ruler told CIA

Mr Nixon also criticised the conduct of George W Bush, under whose leadership America invaded Iraq, saying the former president heard “only what he wanted to hear” on the topic.

..

During the interrogations, Mr Nixon asked Hussein if he’d ever thought of engaging in a pre-emptive strike with WMDs against US troops based in Saudi Arabia.

According to Mr Nixon, writing in the Mail on Sunday, the former dictator’s reply was: “We never thought about using weapons of mass destruction. It was not discussed. Use chemical weapons against the world? Is there anyone with full faculties who would do this? Who would use these weapons when they had not been used against us?”