OPINION:
A quick way to lose a war is to pretend it doesn’t exist. That’s the kind of fantasy that results in a government adopting fantastic policy - like Washington’s renewal of American support to Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) that now include Iranian proxies with a history of killing Americans and a promise to kill more in the future.
Need proof? Check the 2018 US Defense Authorization bill that passed Congress Nov. 16. It authorizes $1.259B in American support to the ISF, the collection of armed groups in Iraq that have been overtly co-opted and dominated by Iranian interests. Previous US support to the ISF indisputably made its way into the hands of armed groups that are aligned with Tehran. Continued US support will surely make it into their hands, too.
That certainty is largely a direct result of recent action by the Iraqi Parliament. By overwhelming vote in November 2016, it enacted legislation that adds the Shia militiamen of the Popular Mobilization Forces (PMF) to the ranks of the ISF. These Shia militias were raised by fatwa of Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani in 2014 and are supported and cadred by members of Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps (IRGC). President Trump designated the IRGC a terror group on October 13. Despite Washington’s admonitions to Baghdad to prevent transfers of previously supplied US weapons into PMF hands, M1 tanks and up-armored Hummers delivered to the ISF were subsequently photographed flying Iranian and Hezbollah flags or being manned by PMF crews in their October offensive against our Kurdish allies in Kirkuk. The ISF also includes the Iraqi Army, which is so thoroughly dominated by Iranian interests, that General Qassim Soleimani, commander of the Quds Force of the IRGC, boasted in July, “The Iraqi Army has become a Hezbollah Army.”
Remarkably, these serious new realities drove no fundamental change to the support authorized in the DoD bill. It left conference on November 16 and is now on its way to the President for signature.
It began its journey in May with the DoD submission of its budget justification for the Counter-Islamic State of Iraq and Syria Train and Equip Fund (CTEF) for 2018. In it the Pentagon asks for a total of $1.769B it asserts is needed to build “key security force capabilities” in Iraq and Syria and to “help professionalize their security forces and promote long term stability.” DoD expressly purposes the CTEF “to continue the ongoing fight to defeat ISIS.”
Here’s the problem with this singular focus on the war with ISIS – we’re in a war with Iran, too.
Just ask Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. “Appeasement toward the Americans emboldens them,” he stated in remarks reported by the IranObserved Project of the Middle East Institute. “Therefore, the only path is to resist and confront them.” He delivered his comments on Iran’s National Day of Fight Against Global Arrogance, held this year on November 4, and celebrated annually on the anniversary of the seizure of the US Embassy in Tehran in 1979. As if to emphasize his point, this year’s celebration also included the unprecedented display of a Sejjil medium-range ballistic missile. Its solid fuel propellant is capable of launching conventional or nuclear payloads to a range of 2,000 kilometers, sufficient to reach any US military base in the region.
As the Pentagon’s CTEF request gestates in Washington, Iranian confrontation of Americans on the battlefield has intensified. On October 1, for the first time in six years, an American soldier in Iraq was killed by a roadside bomb incorporating an explosively formed penetrator (EFP), a particular technology considered the signature design of Iranian-supported armed groups in Iraq. Factories inside Iran are the primary sources for EFP production. The return of the EFP to the battlefield is interpreted as a message from Tehran of its willingness to impose lethal cost on continued American presence in Iraq.
Since then, elements within the PMF have announced they will begin targeting Americans, and Hadi al-Ameri, commander of the Badr forces of the PMF, issued a demand for all US forces to leave Iraq. The demand was foreseeable, as Iranian foreign policy (and that of Tehran’s Russian allies) has long been purposed to displace the United States from the region.
Yes, Iran is at war with us. We either admit that, and then do something about it, or we lose. Things have changed, and so CTEF must change. That advocates of CTEF argue its cancellation will create opportunity for Tehran and Moscow to step in ignores the fact that Tehran is already in and is holding the door open for the Russians. Those same advocates are struggling to respond effectively to a report of the DoD Inspector General that determined $1B of last year’s support went lost and is now unaccounted.
Here’s a practical alternative – send the new money to our Kurdish allies in Erbil. The CTEF already earmarks $365M for the Kurds in Iraq, but give them the ISF balance, too. Use it in the Kurdish Region to build a persistent counterforce, including a permanent US base, to disrupt Iranian and Russian ambitions in the region. Coordinate the effort with US support to our Kurdish allies in Syria.
In fairness to Washington, there is some recent hint of alarm within the Beltway. In remarks delivered on November 28 at the Wilson Center, Secretary of State Rex Tillerson asserted American commitment “to addressing the totality of the Iranian threat,” and expressed unease “with Iran’s attempts at hegemony in the Middle East through support for terrorist organizations, militias on the ground in Iraq and Syria, and an active ballistic missile development program.”
Those are encouraging words, but given the CTEF for 2018, plenty in Washington are still pretending otherwise.
• Ernie Audino, Brigadier General US Army (Ret), is a Senior Military Fellow at the London Center for Policy Research. He is also the only American general officer to have previously served a full year in Iraq as a combat advisor embedded with Kurdish peshmerga forces.
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