The Marine Corps Gazette, 06/01/2007

Swimming Upstream
Major Owen West, USMCR
Team Leader, MiTT 3-3-1

25 December, 2006

Al Khalidiya, Iraq

We cannot reincarnate our own men, but that’s exactly what we do for the enemy each month in Iraq. We cannot defeat an insurgency we knowingly repopulate.

Have We Met?
During a recent cordon-and-knock in Sadiqiya, a poisonous little town between Fallujah and Ramadi known as Sad City, an Iraqi captain interviewing a matriarch noticed a twenty-year-old man in a blue Adidas track suit hunched under the stairwell. The captain snapped on his Surefire. “I know you,” he said. “Come here, jackass.”

The man stood trembling, an instant supplicant. “Peace be upon you, sir.”

“I arrested you last year.”

“I served six months. I damned the insurgency,” Adidas said.

“He is a good son of Iraq,” added his mother.

The Iraqi captain looked at a Marine advisor. “He planted an IED on Tower Four Road. We caught him with a video camera. On the tape, he and his friends put on masks and celebrated. Guess this evidence was not good enough. What should I do next, shoot him? Where is al adallah?”

Indeed, where is the justice?

In Operation Iraqi Freedom—a war that has rumbled longer than World War II but has not seen a discernable course correction since 2004—the military has fallen victim to a deadly paralysis disguised as progress. We have chosen a populace-based strategy whose salient tactic endangers the people it is designed to protect. This type of self-reinforcing blind spot metastasized in several blue-chip companies swept up by the chaos of the internet in the early ‘90s, and was indicative of a deeper flaw: They no longer understood what business they were in.

In Iraq, the military’s obsession with modern, western Rule of Law at the expense of age-old laws of war imperils our entire strategy and is proving deteriorative for those men at the point of attack. We have chosen to swim upstream even though we control the current.

Like it or Not, You’re Coming With Me
Operation Iraqi Freedom has seen three fundamental shifts and we are now in COPS: Iraq. “COPS” indicates law enforcement but Iraq is a giant kill zone where only the law is self-imposed. At its core, the analogy pertains to a violent, intelligence-based environment where the enemy is hunted down individually with the help of local citizens—before or after the violent act—rather than shot down en masse, in the act.

The military has made overtures to address the shift with banal debates about “kinetic v. non-kinetic tactics” and new publications, but we have not framed the choice correctly. Worse, “kinetic or non-kinetic” philosophizing casts them as opposites, a binary decision when they are concomitant. The choice is not how to fight. It’s how to convince the Green Zone to support the method we’ve chosen.

The end product of today’s American and Iraqi infantry is the detainee, not the corpse. Unfortunately we have armed our men with neither the tools nor the tactical support this phase requires. The motto of the squad is no longer locate, close with and destroy; it is hunt down, solicit statements, and cringe.

The finality of close combat has been replaced by a legal system that exists only as gossamer and whose clear bias is release. We cannot reincarnate our own men, but that’s exactly what we do to the enemy each month. It’s time we accept this truth and fix it instead of grinding our collective teeth and abdicating responsibility.

I Fought the Law, and I Won
The 3rd Battalion, 3rd Regiment, 1st Iraqi Division was the first Iraqi battalion to control its own battlespace, gradually taking control of a tough urban wasteland of 20,000 people. It is experiencing what coalition units across Iraq have seen, an increasingly fleeting enemy that operates in twos instead of twenties, for five seconds instead of five minutes. Jundee and their brother Marines do not kill the enemy so much as police them.

Combat trends support this assertion. In the aftermath of Vietnam, we dismissed body counting because 8:1 ratios were self-inflationary. But in Iraq, where the enemy is now killing as many of us as we do of him, we should pay close attention.

At first glance this is an extremely alarming development. But when applied to the COPS template, it makes sense. We don’t wage total war in Iraq. We do not firebomb Ramadi. We treat detainees far better than we treated our college roommates. We require PID, EOF, and permissions upon permissions to enter mosques, drop bombs, and interrogate.

This is the correct course and represents an overarching, populace-based strategy that enables stability. But the combination of enemy tactics and the moral high ground from which we choose to attack has put our young men in the detention business.

As always, those walking the point have adapted most quickly. Iraqi and Marine infantrymen have become killer detectives instead of killer angels, and they are dominating the initial clash. Indeed, when enemy KIA/WIA/Captured are compared to friendly KIA/WIA/Captured, we’re at ratios exceeding 12:1. Unfortunately that ratio changes with time.

During a recent operation with its brothers in 3rd Battalion, 2nd Marines, 3/3-1 detained over thirty enemy fighters identified by local citizens. A Marine from 3/2 was killed in action during the effort. Who won the day? In 1944 that’s an absurd question. But in 2006 Iraq, we can’t answer until we win a second victory over a detention system whose inclination is freedom, not captivity. Unless something changes, twenty-eight of those thirty detainees will be free to fight within a year.


Lock ‘em Up and Give ‘em the Key
Imprisonment used to be an acceptable substitute for killing. The result was the same—the enemy was removed from the battlefield for the duration of the war—and it was less physically and morally exhausting. Even a cursory historical study of prisoners of war illuminates the madness in Iraq.

In order to receive a prison sentence, enemy detainees must be scrutinized by three separate teams of military lawyers—at local detention facilities (DiF), regional detention facilities (RDF), and theater internment facilities (TIF)—before an Iraqi judge conducts his own, distinct investigation at the Central Criminal Court of Iraq.

In the course of six months at one local DiF, over 700 captives were brought in by five units and approximately 425 were recommended for processing at the RDF. Approximately 300 of those men were, in turn, recommended for processing at a TIF, and ~85% were accepted. Statistical trends indicate that of the 250-odd detainees remaining, fewer than thirty-five will remain incarcerated longer than one year. In sum, in the course of a single deployment we release 95 out of every 100 battlefield captives. On D-Day, the Allies took two hundred thousand German prisoners. Did they release them to fight again at the Bulge?

1 out of every 72 American males is in jail. Because of self-generating prisoner release programs and our own unwillingness to solve a simple, cancerous problem, the ratio in Iraq is 1 out of 450 males. So it is incredibly troubling to consider that over the last two years fully 25,000 prisoners have been released by TIFs. On the front lines, every detainee who graduates to the RDF is considered dirty, let alone those successfully processed into a TIF. To release the latter in droves is to damage the country and imperil the citizens to whom we owe the greatest debt, the cooperative.

A Marine battalion recently had a case in which a fledgling source identified six terrorists in a tough area. These detainees were released by the TIF in a matter of weeks without warning the arresting unit or acknowledging their objections. Word of the release only came when a disheartened Marine recognized one of the men on the street. The source was subsequently murdered.

The TIF recapture rate is about 6%, but that should not be confused with recidivism. In the US, about 60% of violent criminals go on to commit another crime when they are released. Many in the NYPD believe the rate is higher, but as one detective explained, “60% is just the ones we catch.” Unless one believes the economic and philosophical incentives for recidivism are higher in the US than in Iraq, the 6% recapture rate is indicative of the sheer number of insurgents that need to be incarcerated just to bring the country into a semblance of societal balance.

When the rare detainee does reach the CCCI, 50% of the cases are dismissed, with many other prisoners receiving scattershot sentences in which the weighty charges have been tossed by judges who conduct independent investigations, often months after the interrogations. The number of convictions is stunningly paltry. In 2006, Iraq averaged 100 murders-per-day yet the CCCI convicted fewer than 800 criminals. New York State averages 2 murders-per-day and imprisons 2,400 criminals per week.

Any set of statistics can be attacked for minutia’s sake, but the fundamental truth leaves little room for debate: we are fighting the same men twice. Worse, the current detention system is strengthening many insurgents. And our supercops on point are suffering.

There has always been a natural tension between those who risk their lives to make arrests and those who judge. In the US, cops are convinced that DAs and judges are soft on crime. But when a criminal kills a cop, the bias dissolves and the case is prosecuted with extreme prejudice.

Iraq is a country full of cop-killers, but we have yet to unite. Instead we remain center-biased at the highest levels for the sake of either “political correctness” or “counter-insurgency’s best practices.” Both are problematic. The former constrains us with false fear (If we embarrass a suspect or jail him without impenetrable evidence, it will ultimately hurt the overall effort as did Abu Ghraib), the latter fills us with false hope (You can win the heart of a man who is, and always will be, your natural enemy). Together, they have produced a toxic haze that requires a simple treatment. It will not be without political side effects, however.

Help Yourself, That’s the First Step
As with any problem in Iraq, there are two solutions: an Iraqi solution and an American solution. We need both. Given the inquisition form of law Iraq practices, it is obvious hundreds more qualified Iraqi investigative judges are needed to join the 600-odd judges who are presently subjected to bribery, threats, and personal prejudice.

More critical is their location. Investigative judges should be assigned to each Iraqi Army brigade where they could work anonymously if they chose, as do many Army officers. Investigations would be conducted immediately, in concert with the arresting unit, so statements and confessions could be made permanent. Sentencing would swiftly follow. By living with a unit whose existence depends on detention operations, the judges will be hard-pressed to minimize or ignore clear signposts that today litter the trail summary dismissals.

Unfortunately, as with many Iraqi solutions, this is a long-term dream that needs an immediate American stop-gap. The TIFs are swiftly approaching capacity, with many individual facilities already surging to meet demand. Given this systemic constraint—and a withering, worldwide obsession with American detainees to which we have chosen to yield—facility managers are forced to approach the problem as any warehouse owner undergoing a company audit would, applying first-in, first-out accounting to placate proximate units while boosting workplace conditions to placate the internal workforce.

We need a mega-jail. And it should be built with a bias toward either isolation (for those who are candidates for re-introduction) or long-term incarceration. These may be most the obvious conclusions in Iraq. In a recent survey of 72 males conducted in Khalidiya, rationalizations differed (“you release insurgents because you make money in war” and “because Americans are thieves and work with thieves”) but local conclusions mimicked those of Iraqi soldiers and Marines: our foundering justice system is spilling poison back onto their streets each month.

In Iraq we are suffering from cognitive dissonance; we know what we must do militarily but publicly we advocate the opposite course, tip-toeing around like a dog hit once too many times with a rolled newspaper filled with headlines from Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo. We are struggling to find socio-political solutions to a classic martial problem: a core group of hateful young men that will continue to attack us and our charges—notwithstanding oil shares, reconstruction monies, and political participation—until they are ended.

We have chosen the correct path, focused on the people. The result is the arrest. But to trumpet a morality play during a pre-holiday mass release even while recognizing that soldiers, Marines, and jundee are dying by hands that were once zip-tied is itself immoral.

Turn the river around.

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