“White House Considers Plan to Let Iraqi Forces Opt Out of Military Operations Ordered by the U.S.: Hoping to confer legitimacy on a caretaker government,” by Steven R. Weisman, New York Times, 20 May, p. A13.
The new proposal from the Bush Administration to allow Iraq’s new, rehabilitated army to “opt out” of any military operation ordered by American commanders inside Iraq is a implicit attempt to indigenize the Sys Admin force function within that country. In effect, our force will do the real warfighting against insurgents, and the Iraqi army will be restricted—for political legitimacy reasons—to the “everything else.” Of course, our forces in theater will still perform—along with allies not really suited for anything else—all sorts of Sys Admin stuff, like construction, security, medical, legal, etc. But over time, we need to be able to shift these “other than war” functions to the Iraqi army because the bulk of legitimacy is to be found there for the Iraqi government: if they can’t do all the little things, there can never be trusted on the big things. Yes, the U.S. force still in occupation will do the war stuff largely on its own for quite some time, but the Sys Admin side of the equation must progressively shift into Iraqi hands.
This division of labor is a microcosm of America’s exporting of security all over this world as globalization grows and expands into the Gap: we specialize in providing the high-end warfighting function because—frankly—no one else can, but we work far more with others when it comes to the Sys Admin policing function—at first providing the critical mass of troops and capabilities but over time ceding that role to locals.
But make no mistake: this is no simple hand-off. We need to provide the bulk of the Sys Admin function at first—perhaps for the first year or so. Meanwhile, by letting the Iraqi army off the hook on the high-end stuff, they can focus their attention on the “everything else” that will allow Iraqi the internal security it needs to rejoin the world.
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