Bing West served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs in the Reagan administration. A graduate of Georgetown and Princeton Universities, he served in Marine infantry in Vietnam. His books have won the Marine Corps Heritage Prize, the Colby Award for Military History and appeared on the Commandant's Reading List. West appears regularly on The News Hour and Fox News. He is a member of St. Crispin's Order of the Infantry and the Council on Foreign Relations. He lives in Newport, RI.
He recently released The Strongest Tribe: War, Politics and the Endgame in Iraq, the result of fourteen trips to Iraq embedded with front-line units over the entire course of the war, and agreed to be interviewed by the CCO on the lessons he learned from writing the book.
1. Your assessment of the national Iraqi security forces, including the Army and the Police, is pretty bleak. An important aspect of counterinsurgency is working with indigenous partners, but given that their inability to take control of the counterinsurgency effort was a major part of our change in strategy in early 2007, do we need to rethink our basic assumptions as to how best to work with the host nation? Would it have been better to adopt a grass-roots approach from the beginning, putting all our effort into working with groups from each town, city and region to secure their own areas before looking to create national forces?
President Obama has declared a total pull out by Aug of 2011. So US advisers have about two years to improve the Iraqi security forces. But the leverage of advisers has been tremendously weakened – discounted – because the date certain for their departure has been agreed by the US and GOI. It’s too late for significantly more strengthening by US mentoring. We will provide technical training, staff procedures and logistical support. The greatest defect in our approach is the lack of police techniques appropriate to an insurgency.
