Security

'Abandon the Green Zone': Former Pentagon Staffer

The U.S. is mulling over the idea of turning Baghdad’s "Green Zone" enclave into a billion-dollar luxury zone, complete with high-end shopping and five-star hotels. Sam Brannen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Defense Department policy planner, has another idea: "abando[n] the Green Zone and donat[e] the monstrous embassy […]

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The U.S. is mulling over the idea of turning Baghdad's "Green Zone" enclave into a billion-dollar luxury zone, complete with high-end shopping and five-star hotels. Sam Brannen, a fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies and former Defense Department policy planner, has another idea: "abando[n] the Green Zone and donat[e] the monstrous embassy just completed" to the Iraqi people.

"Still crowded with the gaudy war memorials and palaces of Saddam’s regime that are too big to tear down, it is for many Iraqis the icon of
U.S. occupation and a telling window into a post-surge security environment that looks more likely to loop back than move forward," Brannen writes over at the Small Wars Journal.

The onetime seat of Paul Bremer and the Coalition
Provisional Authority, the Green Zone is now shared by the sprawling
Embassy Baghdad, the core of Iraq’s central government, and thousands of international contractors, including the infamous Blackwater security details. Green Zone denizens live in trailers, sometimes stacked one on top of the other, accustomed to the blare of the incoming round siren and ducking for cover in evenly spaced cement bunkers that are a bizarre juxtaposition to swimming pools, palm trees, and marble buildings.

Outside the Green Zone, American troops are fighting pitched battles in the high-density urban slums of Sadr City. Their objective is to reduce the mortar and rocket fire that has lately rained down on the Green
Zone...

It is worth asking whether the Green Zone would be attacked absent such a pronounced U.S. presence tucked behind elaborate security checkpoints and layered defenses... [As] the U.S. Army Counterinsurgency Field Manual [writes], “Ultimate success in COIN [counterinsurgency] is gained by protecting the populace, not the COIN force.
If military forces remain in their compounds, they lose touch with the people, appear to be running scared, and cede the initiative to the insurgents.”

You might think, then, that
Brannen's solution would be to have the Green Zone's military attaches and foreign service officers move to downtown neighborhoods, where they'd be closer to the people. (After all, this kind of shift, by U.S.
combat troops, was considered one of the key steps that helped quell the violence in Iraq.) Instead, Brannen advocates pushing American forces further away -- "simply leav[ing] the Green Zone for either the more remote airport complex or elsewhere outside the city."

The problem is, this approach has been tried before, by the British in Basra. And once UK forces repositioned themselves to the city's airport, Basra was "essentially divided up among Shi'ite party mafias, each of which had its own form of extortion and corruption," as Brennan's CSIS colleague, Anthony Cordesman, put it.

UPDATE: "Please keep in mind that I am calling for the Green Zone to be shut down; not to end COIN operations in Baghdad through the Joint Security Stations and other approaches to embedding U.S. advisors... with Iraqi units," Brannen writes in to say. "Your point about what the British did is solid. But keep in mind that the Green Zone is mostly contractors and State, not soldiers."

[Green Zone Photo: Noah Shachtman]

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