[Marxism] "Trainers" and "advisers" will continue American occupation of Iraq

[Louis Proyect]

NY Times, December 22, 2008
Pentagon Memo
Trying to Redefine Role of U.S. Military in Iraq
By ELISABETH BUMILLER

WASHINGTON — It is one of the most troublesome questions right now at 
the Pentagon, and it has started a semantic dance: What is the 
definition of a combat soldier? More important, when will all American 
combat troops withdraw from the major cities of Iraq?

The short answers are that combat troops, defined by the military as 
those whose primary mission is to engage the enemy with lethal force, 
will have to be out of Iraqi cities by June 30, 2009, the deadline under 
a recently approved status-of-forces agreement between the United States 
and Iraq.

The long answers open up some complicated, sleight-of-hand responses to 
military and political problems facing President-elect Barack Obama.

Even though the agreement with the Iraqi government calls for all 
American combat troops to be out of the cities by the end of June, 
military planners are now quietly acknowledging that many will stay 
behind as renamed “trainers” and “advisers” in what are effectively 
combat roles. In other words, they will still be engaged in combat, just 
called something else.

“Trainers sometimes do get shot at, and they do sometimes have to shoot 
back,” said John A. Nagl, a retired lieutenant colonel who is one of the 
authors of the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual.

The issue is a difficult one for Mr. Obama, whose campaign pledge to 
“end the war” ignited his supporters and helped catapult him into the 
White House. But as Mr. Obama has begun meeting with his new military 
advisers — the top two, Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates and Adm. Mike 
Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, are holdovers from 
the Bush administration — it has become clear that his definition of 
ending the war means leaving behind many thousands of American troops.

One reason is that Mr. Obama is facing rapidly approaching, and 
overlapping, withdrawal deadlines, some set by the Bush administration 
and the Iraqis, and some set by him.

After June 2009 looms May 2010, 16 months after Mr. Obama’s 
inauguration, the month he set during the campaign to have American 
combat forces out of Iraq entirely. Next comes December 2011, the 
deadline in the status-of-forces agreement to have all American troops 
out of Iraq.

To try to meet those deadlines without risking Iraq’s fragile and 
relative stability, military planners say they will reassign some combat 
troops to training and support of the Iraqis, even though the troops 
would still be armed and go on combat patrols with their Iraqi 
counterparts. So although their role would be redefined, the dangers 
would not.

“If you’re in combat, it doesn’t make any difference whether you’re an 
adviser: you’re risking your life,” said Andrew Krepinevich, a military 
expert at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a research 
group. “The bullets don’t have ‘adviser’ stenciled on some and ‘combat 
unit’ on another.”

There are 146,000 American troops in Iraq, including service and support 
personnel. Gen. Ray Odierno, the top commander in Iraq, declined to tell 
reporters this month how many troops might remain in cities after the 
June 2009 deadline, and said the exact number still had to be negotiated 
with the Iraqis.

But some experts, like Michael E. O’Hanlon, a senior fellow in at the 
Brookings Institution, argue that roughly 10,000 American troops should 
remain in Baghdad after next June, with thousands more in other cities 
around the country.

For his part, General Odierno made clear that the Iraqis still needed 
help — and that the United States would hardly disappear. “What I would 
say is, we’ll still maintain our very close partnership with the Iraqi 
security forces throughout Iraq, even after the summer,” he told reporters.

Military officials say they can accomplish that by “repurposing” 
whatever combat troops remain. Officially, a combat soldier is anyone 
trained in what are called combat-coded military occupation specialties 
— among them infantry, artillery and Special Forces — to engage the 
enemy. But combat troops can be given different missions. From the 
military’s point of view, a combat soldier is not so much what he is 
called but what he does.

For example, in an area south of Baghdad that was once called the 
“triangle of death” because of the Sunni insurgents there, a combat 
brigade of 4,000 to 5,000 soldiers of the 101st Airborne Division has 
been replaced with what the Army calls a transition task force of 800 to 
1,200 troops with the mission of training and advising the Iraqi Army.

“It’s no longer Americans providing the muscle,” Colonel Nagl said. “Now 
it’s Iraqi patrols with a small group of American advisers tucked inside.”

Either way, no one expects the American presence to end soon, clearly 
not Defense Secretary Gates. When asked by Charlie Rose in a PBS 
interview last week how big the American “residual” force would be in 
Iraq after 2011, Mr. Gates replied that although the mission would 
change, “my guess is that you’re looking at perhaps several tens of 
thousands of American troops.”