Will Iraq Have an Army after the American Military Withdrawal from Iraq? A Lesson from Germany: Every Country has an Army
By Ambassador J.D. Bindenagel

After three years of war, increasing numbers of Americans are calling for rapid American military withdrawal from Iraq.  While that is a domestic debate in the United States, the outcome in Iraq will have profound effects on Euro-Atlantic Relations and should be on top of the transatlantic agenda.

At the 42nd Munich Conference on Security Policy in February, Chancellor Angela Merkel addressed the threats from "the erosion of state structures, terrorism, weapons of mass destruction in the hands of unreliable regimes."  Merkel asked rhetorically what can be done and endorsed NATO as the key institution that remains the bond keeping together the transatlantic community of shared interests and values. But if it is to retain that function, say, in ten or twenty years' time, we must in my opinion discuss quite openly what NATO has to do. If we accept her view that NATO "must be a body which constantly carries out and discusses joint threat analyses. It must be the place where political consultations take place on new conflicts arising around the world, and it should . . . be the place where political and military actions are coordinated," then we need to address security and stability in Iraq following the withdrawal of American forces.

Germany is committed to stability in Iraq and supports the creation of democratic and economically viable structures.  The training of more Iraqi soldiers and police officers, in close cooperation with the new Iraqi Government, should become the priority of this new NATO committee on threat analysis and action.  Euro-Atlantic cooperation is helping, as the Chancellor reported, to assist the Iraqi authorities in building up the justice system, in establishing a free press, in training university tutors and engineers, and especially in developing vocational training. Germany is providing considerable financial support for Iraq by canceling debts to the tune of 4.5 billion Euros.

However, those tasks will fail unless the Euro-Atlantic Community makes establishment of an Iraqi Army its most important consideration.  While some Europeans are eager to see Americans leave Iraq, they should remember that the issue is not only the withdrawal of the American military, but also critically the issue of whose army replaces it.

Germany's recent past has a very relevant lesson for the debate over the departure of the U.S. military from Iraq and the stability that needs to replace it; namely, that "every country has an army."  Before that fact was forgotten and the 2003 decision to disband the Iraqi Army was taken, the U.S. and Germany had understood that every country must have an army. In the 1980's Cold War confrontation with the Soviet Union, German Chancellors Helmut Schmidt and Helmut Kohl asked the United States to station Pershing Missiles in Germany.  Millions of anti-war, anti-army protesters took to the streets, led by Willy Brandt and other prominent political leaders, and objected to the American missile deployments and the Bundeswehr that seemed more to threaten than to protect peace. 

At the time, a Bundeswehr advertisement in Spiegel Magazine as I recall carried a vivid message of the Bundeswehr's role in providing security.  In that advertisement, a Bundeswehr swearing-in ceremony for new recruits was pictured with the simple caption: "Every country has an army, either its own or a foreign one."  Today in Iraq the American Army is the army; only when the Iraqis have an army to take the place of the American Army can the U.S. military go home with honor.  If not, the U.S. military will be replaced by another army, even the unthinkable: a Hezbollah-led force, a Hamas-like or domestic insurgent army or preferably a national army defending Iraq from outside threats.  It is not too late to leave a functioning national Iraqi Army in Iraq as the U.S. departs.

American political patience is slipping away as the U.S. congressional withdrawal debate has begun with Senators Carl Levin, Russ Feingold, Jay Rockefeller and Congressman John Murtha.  Over the next few months, if America is to find a military strategy to provide security and ensure a peaceful future in Iraq, it will be based on an Iraqi Army.  At the recent 42nd Munich Conference on Security Policy, neither the Americans nor the Europeans took up the debate, noting only that training efforts to rebuild the Iraqi Army continue.  Illinois Senator Barack Obama, speaking recently at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations before that meeting, laid out a framework of issues for the Congressional withdrawal debate and addressed three steps:  "One, stabilize Iraq, avoid all out civil war, and give the factions within Iraq the space they need to forge a political settlement; two, contain and ultimately extinguish the insurgency in Iraq; and three, bring our troops safely home."  The Iraqis, too, need to commit to creating their Army as the most important priority.

In the American debate, the precipitous 2003 U.S. decision to disband the Iraqi Army was a costly one that now must be rectified by making the training and deployment of a new Iraqi Army the highest Euro-Atlantic and Iraqi priority.  Without security, reconstruction and democracy will be lost. Without an army, there is no security.

Can we let the enormity of the task following the disbanding of Saddam Hussein's Iraqi Army prevent us from achieving security in Iraq?  Surely that would be the goal of the insurgents.  Despite the dissolution of Saddam's Army, based on a premise that its loyalty to a new, democratic Iraqi Army could not be certain, this should not block the way to a future army loyal to the new government.  In 2003, of course, the loyalty of former Baathists was doubtful, and they were not to be trusted.  However, many other soldiers were seeking money to survive and could have been trained to provide dedicated military service to a new Iraqi government.  Now, the new Iraqi government urgently needs to win the loyalty of as many soldiers as possible and to train them for national defense.  As for the insurgency, the departure of U.S. forces may remove the unifying force among the insurgents and help Iraqi special operations forces and police forces defeat them through quality intelligence.  In any case, a national army is needed to avoid feeding the insurgency and to defend the country from new threats, including Iran.

Can a loyal army still be raised in time to ease the way for the American military withdrawal?  Despite the argument by Walter Slocombe, a former Clinton Administration official responsible for this issue in Iraq, who argued in the December Atlantic Monthly that Americans do not pay defeated armies to deliver loyalty, we did in the case of German unification and can still today help establish loyalty from new recruits.  Another American and German experience relevant in the debate is found in the historic conversion of East German soldiers into NATO allies, as well as the successful and honorable departure of Soviet Forces from East Germany following the 1989 revolution and unification of Germany.  These are both cases worth considering as Iraq makes its commitment to democracy.

What was that German lesson from its unification?  In 1990, East German Army loyalty was transferred from the former East German Army to the Bundeswehr, while at the same time the Soviet Forces in Germany prepared for and carried out an orderly departure.  Winning the loyalty of a former enemy was accomplished through brilliant diplomacy.  In the transformation of the East German Army, generals and senior officers were retired, with pensions, neutralizing their influence and threat.  Tens of thousands of company grade officers and soldiers were offered jobs in the Bundeswehr in a separate command -- Bundeswehr Ost -- that was not part of NATO until all the Soviet soldiers left in 1994. 

At the same time, the Soviet Army's departure from East Germany was helped by German willingness to pay for Soviet soldiers' stationing and transportation costs from German unification in 1990 until they peacefully departed four years later in 1994. The peaceful solution enabled those soldiers to provide for themselves and their families, while accepting a new political order. For four years Soviet/Russian soldiers were paid stationing costs of a few German Marks per month, while they packed up their equipment, tanks and munitions, and departed in an orderly withdrawal.  In addition, Germany agreed to build housing in the Soviet Union for Soviet officers for billions of Marks, giving them reason to return home peacefully.

The transformation of the East German Army was a solid deal.  James Woolsey, then the U.S. negotiator for the treaty on Conventional Forces in Europe, came to visit me as deputy chief of mission in East Germany in September 1990.  We called on East German Army State Secretary Marzinek, who was appointed to the East German Defense Ministry after the March 1990 East German democratic elections.  We met at the "National Volksarmee" headquarters. Woolsey asked the State Secretary just what would happen to all the East German soldiers. Marzinek told us that all the details had been worked out and on the evening of October 2, 1990, the East German soldiers would hang their East German uniforms in their lockers and in the morning of October 3 they would dress in their Bundeswehr uniforms.  That was the transition.  Loyalty to Germany from unification day forward meant a job, pay and respect.

Politically, the honorable departure of the Soviet/Russian Forces from Germany was breathtaking.  Four years later after Germany had been unified, Chancellor Kohl hosted Russian President Yeltsin on August 31, 1994, at a ceremony similar to a military change of command at the Gendarmenmarkt in Berlin.  The Russian Commanding General reported on the peaceful, honorable Soviet withdrawal to the two leaders: "Mission Accomplished."  Diplomacy worked then and can work in Iraq now.

The lasting effects of the peaceful transition in Germany are many.  Shortly after the Russian troop withdrawal from Germany in 1994, as acting American Ambassador in Germany, I signed the agreement with our German and our NATO Allies to extend NATO territory to the Polish border in the first NATO expansion. By 1997, that successful 1994 NATO enlargement led to Polish, Czech and Hungarian NATO membership.  The loyalty of the German Army in the East helped keep the 1989 democratic revolution peaceful.  The benefits of the peaceful change continued; European borders changed peacefully, former communist governments became democratic and laid foundations for economic prosperity.

Chancellor Merkel envisions NATO to be the organization where "political consultations take place on new conflicts arising around the world, and it should... be the place where political and military actions are coordinated."  NATO should take up the mission to train Iraqi soldiers to help create a functioning Iraqi Army. 

Iraqi leaders should understand that American patience for a never-ending commitment of the U.S. military to provide security is limited and depends increasingly on Iraqi progress on creating its own security forces. The lesson from Germany's peaceful unification for success in Iraq is in creating an army loyal to the democratically-elected government with milestones and a timetable for the creation of the Iraqi Army.  That is the next step to Iraq's peaceful transition as the American military withdraws from Iraq.  America's European allies, notably Germany, have helped train the Iraqi Army with the support of Arab leaders in the region and now Europeans and Americans should make that training the centerpiece of the Euro-Atlantic agenda to secure and stabilize Iraq.

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J.D. Bindenagel is a former ambassador and served in West Germany, East Germany and united Germany on various diplomatic assignments for the United States from 1972-2002.  He is currently Vice President for Community, Government and International Affairs at DePaul University in Chicago and a member of the AICGS Senior Advisory Council.  The views are his own.

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This essay appeared in the March 3, 2006 AICGS Advisor.