It seems that the U.S. Army has once again lowered recruiting standards in order to meet the manpower exigencies of the Iraq War. Fred Kaplan goes through what this is likely to mean in terms of the performance of our troops in Iraq. Read him for the gory details, but the short version is: nothing good. What’s more, the context for this is a prolonged counterinsurgency of the sort that, as General Petraeus’ field manual makes clear, requires soldiers who are smarter than we’ve usually relied upen even as, in reality, they’re getting less smart. Kaplan observes:

Petraeus and officers who think like him are right: We’re probably not going to be fighting on the ground, toe-to-toe and tank-to-tank, with the Russian, Chinese, or North Korean armies in the foreseeable future. Yet if the trends continue, our Army might be getting less and less skilled at the “small wars” we’re more likely to fight.

This is all true. But I also think that this turn of events is not only bad news for our prospects in Iraq, but bad news for counterinsurgency enthusiasts in general. After all, these recruiting issues aren’t something that just happened out of the blue. The proximate cause of the bad-for-counterinsurgency recruiting situation is the fact that we’re trying to wage a counterinsurgency. And it’s not just the rank and file, either. Lieutenant Colonel John Nagl, one of the Army’s handful of top counterinsurgency thinkers, decided he’d rather work at a think tank. The Army we had in 2003 didn’t have enough of the right kind of people to do counterinsurgency well, and the effort to do counterinsurgency has pushed the trends in the wrong direction.

Furthermore, the five years or so we’ve been fighting in Iraq is actually small beer by the standards that counterinsurgency theory suggests is necessary. So how are we supposed to prevent this kind of counterinsurgency-induced collapse in capacity to do effective counterinsurgency? The job is, after all, by its very nature pretty arduous and unpleasant the kind of thing that most people with bright prospects elsewhere are going to wind up avoiding in favor of more pleasant opportunities elsewhere. This is true of even very public-spirited people who are going to be able to think of plenty of other ways to serve their community, their country, or the world that don’t involve the kind of sacrifices entailed by repeated deployments to a war zone. There will be exceptions, of course, but an effective military requires more than exceptions — it’s by definition a mass institution.

The exception, of course, is that in a situation of genuine national emergency you can convince/conscript pretty much whomever you want into military work. But it’s hard to imagine the United States being faced with a serious domestic insurgency. And it’s also very hard to imagine an insurgency abroad rising to that level of threat.

Spencer Ackerman has the penetrating analysis of The New York Times‘s somewhat unclear reporting on efforts to negotiate a status of forces agreement for American troops in Iraq. Basically, as Spencer says, it would be a huge mistake to make a big deal out of the fact that the agreement won’t say “these bases of yours are permanent.”

It took the Philippines nearly 100 years to get the U.S. out of Subic Bay and the Clark Air Base. That’s because the fact of the U.S. presence creates additional, subordinate facts—economic dependency in the area around the base, for one, and more fundamentally, a political dependency on the U.S. for a security guarantee, which is the whole point of the bilateral deal. In Iraq, a weak central government requires the U.S. to keep it alive against its multitudinous armed adversaries, a weakness that Iraq’s sectarian quasi-democracy actually fuels. (Elections in Iraq tend to become sectarian census counts in a power struggle.) So while the Iraqis may push back, no Iraqi government that could actually take power—one led by the Sadrists, for instance, or the harder-line Sunnis—would actually kick the U.S. out. That in turn drives a divide between the fearful Iraqi government and the anti-occupation Iraqi populace, further entrenching the government’s dependency.

Meanwhile, I’d also note that there’s little sign that the training and equipping missions we’re doing in Iraq are actually geared to creating a situation whereby Iraq can defend itself without outside support. Instead, security institutions are being set up in such a way as to presuppose enduring American involvement. Spencer’s post, incidentally, appears in The Washington Independent a new and exciting online media venture dedicated to investigative reporting on a non-profit basis.

There’s nothing surprising about the fact that the Bush administration seems to be seeking to ensure that US mercenaries contractors serving in Iraq be legally unaccountable but it is shocking. That’s not something any genuinely sovereign government in Iraq or anywhere else would ever agree to, and it makes a mockery of the pretense that the purpose of our policy in Iraq is to help Iraqis (for a way to help Iraqis, check out this refugees bill) or that we’re doing everything we can to shield civilians from harm.