# Posted 11:57 PM by Ariel David Adesnik  

FROM THE HORSE'S MOUTH: TRAINING THE IRAQI ARMY. In spite of his fairly harsh criticism of American efforts to stand up an Iraqi army, Jim Fallows writes that LTG David Petraeus brought an unprecedented level of concern and competence to his role as trainer-in-chief of the Iraqi armed forces.

Given my sense that Fallows preoccupation with what went wrong has prevented him from seeing what is now going right, I thought it might be a good idea to hear directly from Gen. Petraeus himself how the training regimen is going.

Now, perhaps because the general has a Ph.D. from Princetion, his discussion of the Iraqi armed forces this month went on and on and on and on. But that's a good thing, since I wanted to learn as much as I could about the subject. The problem, I found, was that Petraeus' report was so relentlessly upbeat that I found it almost impossible to believe.

Although there is no question that Petraeus is under a lot of pressure to demonstrate that the president's program is working, I think (although what do I know about military politics?) that Petraeus could have been a lot more even-handed without hurting his chances of becoming a four-star general.

In fact, I think that the military has a lot to learn about enhancing its credibility and therefore advancing its effort to prevent the disintegration of support for its mission on the domestic front. When it comes to public relations, the military has to accept the fact that it is permanently outgunned.

No matter what the generals do or say, journalists will decide what images and opinions predominate. But if the generals develop a better understanding of those journalists, they can get their message across much more effectively. First and foremost, the generals have to learn that the media reflexively punishes those who present only one side of a case, no matter how much merit that side has.

My suspicion is that because the generals are so resentful of media misrepresentation, they make the mistake of thinking that the only way they can get even some of their message across is to exaggerate. Yet ironically, exaggeration only makes the problem worse since it provides the media with a pretext to question the generals' credibility even more intently.

Given that there have been enough obvious failures in Iraq, it really wouldn't hurt the generals to admit a lot of things that everyone knows anyhow. If they did that first, the media might actually listen to the very strong case they can make for things going well.

Now back to Petraeus. The foremost strength of his presentation was its abilityt to convey the staggering complexity of training an army almost from scratch. Often, people seem to wonder why it takes only a few months of basic training to train an American soldier, but Iraqis can't do the same. Consider the following question from Sunday morning on Meet the Press:

MR. RUSSERT: Senator Biden, what's the problem when kids here in the United States sign up and go to boot camp and get ready, and we've done it in World War II, we did it in Korea, We did it in Vietnam, we did it Kosovo, we do it in Iraq--they can be ready for combat within a matter of months. Why is it taking the Iraqis some two and a half years and they still have not put together an army that can replace the United States?

Even though I'm one of Russert's biggest fans, that is a ridiculous question. The US armed forces have tens of thousands of officers, commissioned and non-commissioned, whose job it is to train the raw recruits and then lead them in battle. In Iraq, there are a few remnants of Saddam's officer corps, but how much is that worth?

In Iraq, we have to train the trainers, and Petraeus does a very good job of describing just how tough and complex that job is. We have to train the Iraqis to do everything from engineering to logistics to battlefield medicine. We have to create the entire support structure on which the Iraqi private with an AK-47 depends when he goes up against the insurgents.

Still, Petraeus has a long way to go. At one point, while talking about the importance of being able to call for backup, he wandered off on a revealing tangent:

I'll talk about the importance of the concept of backup for police in a station that comes under attack. If they don't know that there's someone going to back them up, who's coming to the rescue, obviously they're not going to hang tough. We saw that -- back in the November time frame was the most recent case, I think, of one where they -- once they realized that nobody was coming to the rescue, they went out the back door. That has not happened -- we know of, in any case, since, at the least, 30 January, the elections, from which the Iraqi security forces took an enormous lift. (p.11)

Petraeus and others need to recognize that Iraqi police running out the back door is the dominant image Americans have of Iraqi security forces. This is where his presentation has to start. He has to lay out the stereotypes and then organize his evidence as a refutation of such caricatures.

In a way, this involves admitting nothing. If Petraeus is right that Iraqi units haven't cut and run for almost a year now, he has nothing to hide. Later on in his talk (p.17), Petraeus described how there has been a visible progression in the role Iraqi forces have played in major battles in Najaf in August 2004, Fallujah in November 2004, and Tall Afar in September 2005. The trajectory is toward increasing independence. But this critical point gets lost in the 30-page transcript of Petraeus' talk.

Both military and civilian spokesmen for this administration need to build up this kind of simple narrative about Iraqi progress. Statistics won't work. No one believes them. But the difference between Iraqi forces running out the back door in Mosul, following US soldiers in Najaf, fighting at their side in Fallujah and leading in Tall Afar is much more comprehensible. The average newspaper reader won't remember the names of those four cities, but the narrative of progression will remain if it is advertised forcefully and defended with evidence.

Looking back, I see how critical this post has been of Gen. Petraeus and his colleagues. But I am not criticizing their ability to perform the critical, perhaps even heroic, tasks to which they have been assigned. By all accounts, their performance has been superb.

But our democracy demands that soldiers also perform in the field of public relations, and I offer this criticism, harsh as it may sound, because I want Gen. Petraeus and his colleagues to get not just the credit they deserve, but the active support of the American public. (6) opinions -- Add your opinion