"We'll try to include Iraqi officers in our staffs. We will do everything we can to empower Iraqi security forces to stand up on their own and operate where they can alone"
About this Quote
The promise here is managerial, almost procedural: include Iraqi officers, empower Iraqi forces, let them “stand up” and “operate” independently. Coming from John Abizaid, the top U.S. commander in the Middle East during the Iraq War, that tidy ladder of verbs is doing heavy political work. It’s not just a plan; it’s a rationale.
“Include” is the giveaway. It signals that Iraqis are not yet inside the room where decisions are made, and that their participation is conditional, curated, and reversible. The language is integration-by-invitation, not sovereignty-by-right. Then “empower” arrives with its familiar development-and-counterinsurgency sheen: the occupier as mentor, the occupied as trainee. The phrase flatters American intentions while quietly conceding the central problem of legitimacy. If Iraqi forces were already seen as legitimate, you wouldn’t need to sell empowerment; you’d talk about authority.
The “stand up/stand down” pairing (ubiquitous in that era) carries a paternal, almost gym-coach cadence. It reduces nation-state security to a muscle-building metaphor, implying progress is measurable, linear, and ultimately controllable. That rhetorical neatness also functions as insulation: if things fail, the blame can slide toward the trainees who didn’t “stand up,” rather than the architects who redesigned the entire system mid-conflict.
Context matters: the U.S. had disbanded major Iraqi security structures and was facing a widening insurgency. This quote tries to stitch together two conflicting imperatives - appearing committed to Iraqi self-rule while retaining operational dominance long enough to claim a workable exit. It’s a sentence built to sound like de-escalation, even as it preserves the hierarchy that made de-escalation so hard.
“Include” is the giveaway. It signals that Iraqis are not yet inside the room where decisions are made, and that their participation is conditional, curated, and reversible. The language is integration-by-invitation, not sovereignty-by-right. Then “empower” arrives with its familiar development-and-counterinsurgency sheen: the occupier as mentor, the occupied as trainee. The phrase flatters American intentions while quietly conceding the central problem of legitimacy. If Iraqi forces were already seen as legitimate, you wouldn’t need to sell empowerment; you’d talk about authority.
The “stand up/stand down” pairing (ubiquitous in that era) carries a paternal, almost gym-coach cadence. It reduces nation-state security to a muscle-building metaphor, implying progress is measurable, linear, and ultimately controllable. That rhetorical neatness also functions as insulation: if things fail, the blame can slide toward the trainees who didn’t “stand up,” rather than the architects who redesigned the entire system mid-conflict.
Context matters: the U.S. had disbanded major Iraqi security structures and was facing a widening insurgency. This quote tries to stitch together two conflicting imperatives - appearing committed to Iraqi self-rule while retaining operational dominance long enough to claim a workable exit. It’s a sentence built to sound like de-escalation, even as it preserves the hierarchy that made de-escalation so hard.
Quote Details
| Topic | Military & Soldier |
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