Think Tank for Iraqi Brass?

The senior ranks of the Iraqi military are finally beginning to wrap their brains around the basic tenets of running of a modern-style military, according to one U.S. advisor. Navy Captain David Pine says that the Iraqi Joint Headquarters has recently assigned a general to do nothing but logistics (creaking supply lines being one major Iraq weakness) while others have worked on cutting paperwork. But does that mean Iraq's generals -- most of whom rose up through the ranks under Saddam's authoritarian influence -- are limber enough for the mental gymnastics of combatting an elusive, "open-source" insurgency?

Maybe, Pine said during a Pentagon tele-conference yesterday:

Some are very smart strategic thinkers. Some others are officers that are products of their einvoronment in the old regime, where if you were a creative thinker, it came back to bite you, hard. For many years, the entire [Iraqi military] culture was ... no one liked to stand out from the crowd, so that everyone can be blamed if something goes wrong. … We’re fooling ourselves sometimes [in saying] that they don’t have the ability [to fight insurgents]. What they don’t have is the attitude.

So what are we doing about that? With U.S. encouragement, the Iraqi Army chief of staff is considering forming what Pine called a "creative think tank," akin to the Heritage Foundation or Brookings Institute. “That’s the kind of thinking that the top-level leadership wants to do, but it has to break through its old way of doing things first.”