Iraqi Special Police Commandos article

[Airbornelawyer]

From Sunday's New York Times Magazine, "The Way of the Commandos" by Peter Maass. It is a pretty long article and has a fair leavening of NYTimes bias, but is otherwise a good first person account. It draws heavily on the El Salvador analogy, which is probably to be expected given COL James Steele's presence.

Link requires subscription, I think.

A couple of excerpts:

General Adnan, as he is known, is the leader of Iraq's most fearsome counterinsurgency force. It is called the Special Police Commandos and consists of about 5,000 troops. They have fought the insurgents in Mosul, Ramadi, Baghdad and Samarra. It was in Samarra, 60 miles north of Baghdad in the heart of the Sunni Triangle, where, in early March, I spent a week with Adnan, himself a Sunni, and two battalions of his commandos. Samarra is Adnan's hometown, and he had come to retake it. As the offensive to drive out the insurgents got under way, the only area securely under Adnan's control was a barricaded enclave around the town hall, where he grimly presided over matters of war and peace, but mostly war, chain-smoking Royal cigarettes at a raised desk in the mayor's office. With a jowly face set in a permanent scowl, Adnan is perfectly suited to the grim realities of Iraq, and he knows it. When an admiring American colonel compared him to Marlon Brando in ''The Godfather,'' Adnan took it as a compliment and smiled.

Before the show began that evening, Adnan's office was a hive of conversation, phone calls and tea-drinking. Along with a dozen commandos, there were several American advisers in the room, including James Steele, one of the United States military's top experts on counterinsurgency. Steele honed his tactics leading a Special Forces mission in El Salvador during that country's brutal civil war in the 1980's. Steele's presence was a sign not only of the commandos' crucial role in the American counterinsurgency strategy but also of his close relationship with Adnan. Steele admired the general. ''He's obviously a natural type of commander,'' Steele told me. ''He commands respect.''

Most of the Pentagon's official statements in the past two years about the ability of Iraqis to police their own country have been exaggerated. But now reality is beginning to catch up with rhetoric. In the months that followed the January elections in Iraq, attacks on allied forces reportedly fell to 30 to 40 a day in February and March, from 140 just before the vote. It's hard to tell whether this trend will continue; in late April the insurgency showed signs of renewed strength. But the successes that the counterinsurgency has enjoyed are in no small part because of Adnan's commandos. With American forces in an advisory role, the commandos, as well as a few other well-led units, like the Iraqi Army's 36th Commando Battalion and its 40th Brigade in Baghdad, inflicted more violence upon insurgents than insurgents inflicted upon them. That is much of what fighting an insurgency amounts to. But successful counterinsurgencies, if history is a guide, tend not to be pretty, especially in countries where violence has been a way of life and rules governing warfare and human rights have been routinely ignored by those in uniform.

[Peregrino]

Despite the NY Times this could be good news. I was in El Salvador during COL Steele's regime. He might actually be the right man for this job. I had no complaints and he seemed very capable/effective when it came to influencing the locals - which was more important, and harder to do, than the naysayers wanted the world to know. (Though the Arab mindset is radically different from the LatAm one - I assume based on the article that COL Steele has adapted appropriately.) Of course it took 12 years to arrive at a negotiated settlement in El Sal - a fact that the American people would not have tolerated if the involvement had been anywhere near what we face in Iraq. God help us if we abandon this one before it's finished. My .02 - Peregrino