So the President is planning a surge, is he? All the warning signs are there–Dad’s friends on the Iraq Study Group embarrassed him, and he knows he has to announce some kind of change, so why not go for broke and double down on America’s military future?
So The SurgeTM gets floated in some neoconservative rag, like the Weekly Standard:
Relevant historical examples do not support the notion that hundreds of thousands more troops are needed to improve security in Iraq. A study of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those operations–characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian violence–required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants. Iraq poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment, but it also offers its own rules-of-thumb. Successful clear-and-hold operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier (counting both U.S. and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the other hand, in 2004 Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5 million Shiites) with fewer than 20,000 U.S. soldiers–a ratio of about 1 to 125.
OK, Iraq has about 26,074,906 people, according to a July 2005 estimate. Of course, the Iraqi government estimated last week that something like 25,000 Iraqis have been killed since then. (“But here’s something you’re unlikely to read about in the Post — Iraq is making substantial economic strides,” Powerline informs us in the same breath). That leaves 26,049,906; which makes the Tal Afar standard for successful ‘clear-and-hold operations’ Iraq-wide is… any hands? 651,247.65 troops (that 65/100th of a soldier was wounded–just kidding!). But wait, Kagan says, the Sadr City standard needs only 208,579 troops to ‘suppress widespread uprising’ Iraq-wide.
Then there’s the question of the size of the population to be pacified. Most of Iraq is relatively calm. Instances of violence in the Kurdish north and the Shia south are rare. No responsible analyst advocates sending large numbers of troops into either area–they are not needed and would not be welcomed. Disarming the Shia militias is a process that must be undertaken only after the Sunni Arab insurgency is under control, and it cannot be undertaken primarily by American forces directly confronting the Shiite population. Using all of Iraq’s 27 million people as a baseline for estimating force ratios is, therefore, an invalid approach. The U.S. command repeatedly and correctly points out that about 80 percent of the violence in Iraq occurs within a 35-mile radius of Baghdad, among a population of perhaps 10 million. Baghdad itself has roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, including the 2.5 million Shiites in Sadr City. These figures provide the basis for a more realistic estimate of the force levels needed. Applying the high-end ratio used in Tal Afar over the entire metropolitan Baghdad area would generate a requirement of 250,000 troops–both U.S. and Iraqi. There are currently about 100,000 Iraqi army troops that the U.S. command considers trained and ready. There are almost 150,000 American troops in Iraq now, including perhaps 70,000 combat troops. Conducting Tal Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would require concentrating all available forces in the area and a “surge” of about 80,000 U.S. soldiers–a large number, to be sure, but very far from the “hundreds of thousands” or even “millions” generated by the use of specious historical examples.
Translation: the Kurdish militias work for us. So we’d only need 162,500 combat troops to patrol Baghdad if we want to go with the lower ‘Sadr City’ standard of 125 Iraqis per soldier (watch for this, it’s going to become a theme) and about 120,000 troops for the rest of the country (less 17.5% of the population for the Kurds, less 6.5 million in Baghdad), totalling 282,500 troops on the ground.
Kagan says we have 70,000 combat troops and the Iraqis have 100,000, so we’d only need another 112,500 troops shipped to Iraq pronto to make the place ‘Sadr City’ safe (Kagan says 80,000; someone’s math is wrong–probably mine).
The problem, according to much anecdotal evidence and the recent testimony of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency, General Michael D. Maples, is that the U.S. military command did not leave American forces behind in the areas that had been cleared. That mistake allowed insurgents to reinfiltrate those neighborhoods and begin the cycle of violence again.
So, we need to clear out Iraq burg by burg and stay there. But it’s not an escalation, it’s a “surge,” which Wikipedia defines as ‘a citrus soft drink first introduced in Norway.’ I don’t trust everything on the Internet, but something tells me the intensification of the foreign occupation from a Muslim country is going to go down Iraqi throats like a refreshing orange soda.
Note the use of ‘anecdotal evidence’–it’s a good thing this is a serious analysis piece that will become the basis of policy affecting actual people’s lives, otherwise I wouldn’t trust this kind of thing. (Were that Iraq itself were like ‘hunger’ according to Ed Meese, eh boys?)
Sigh. Wait! There’s more:
There are a number of ways of mitigating the resulting difficulties in Iraq. The most unsatisfactory would probably be to delay the beginning of the major security operations until the second wave was nearly ready. Another would be to proceed more slowly, spacing the clear-and-hold phases further apart to gain time. Still another would be to accept greater risk in areas outside the capital such as al Anbar province or the north in order to concentrate forces in the capital now, counting on the arrival of reinforcements in a number of weeks or months to repair any damage done in those areas by the temporary withdrawal. A variant of this approach would be to deploy U.S. forces at slightly lower levels of readiness into the more pacified areas of the country where they could complete their training in situ while also providing a basic military presence. This, incidentally, was what was done following Saddam’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when many Army units completed essential training in Saudi Arabia (not in combat conditions but under sporadic missile attack) before launching the ground attack in February 1991. All such approaches carry risk; none is impossible or inconceivable.
Webster defines ‘surge’ as “to rise suddenly to an excessive or abnormal value ” Those wacky pinkos at Webster have it right on the nose–thousands more fresh, untrained recruits are going to be GREAT PR. From Haditha to Abu Ghraib, we’ve learned that untrained troops are actually handier cannon fodder in the courts and media than on the ground. They can blame all the latest atrocities on the new recruits–who because we will have to lower standards to up recruitment, will likely have its share of ‘bad apples.’ But remember:
This approach is not just a matter of throwing more troops at the problem. It involves a fundamental change in U.S. military strategy in Iraq.
Oh! I think I got it! Is what’s different about this approach that we’re going to acknowledge there’s a problem?
In a further blow to the President’s speechwriters, Kagan issues a direct challenge to Bush:
The U.S. military has never set itself the goal of establishing and maintaining security. It has always prioritized training Iraqi forces and allowing them to undertake such operations on their own. This strategy might have had some merit when the principal problem in Iraq was the Sunni Arab insurgency (although it was dubious even then). It has little or no merit today, when sectarian violence is the most important challenge. More resources are needed to support a changed strategy, but changing the strategy is essential. Establishing security in Iraq should be our primary objective, with training Iraqi forces a close second.
Translation: we need to keep more troops on the ground for a much longer time, because the benchmark of training Iraqi troops and police is too scary a prospect for the planners of a long invasion.
The U.S. military, partnered with Iraqi army units capable of assisting, needs to clear and hold troubled neighborhoods in order to bring the sectarian conflict under control. At the same time, the coalition must reinvigorate its efforts to reconstruct cleared areas, bringing jobs, food, and water to the Iraqi people along with safety.
Translation: even though the schools our contractors build are literally falling apart, they need more money. But more importantly, we must prevent Iraqis from getting enough wealth to funnel any more towards the insurgency.
To begin with, the Defense Department has just announced plans to deploy over 50,000 troops to Iraq this spring, including more than 20,000 combat troops, as part of a rotational plan to relieve forces currently in the theater. If, instead of bringing those forces home, we extended their tours, we would immediately have generated a surge of 20,000 combat troops.
This is what President Bush is widely expected to announce. I won’t subject you to any more of Kagan’s Weekly Standard article, which goes on to suggest that we merely strand the rest of the troops going to Iraq there until we stabilize the country (cough).
Now, according to a recent Gallup poll, 15% of Americans surveyed favor immediate withdrawal, 39% say withdraw within a year, 31% say to take as many years as needed, 12% say send more troops (the surge’s natural constituency) and 2% had no opinion.
So speaking as one who favors immediate withdrawal, we still beat the surgers by 3 points. And that feels good, I have to admit, after being in the minority for so long.
It must be noted that any sensible victory involves withdrawing from Iraq at the end, as the President has stated. But he has also stated the inverse–the only way we lose by leaving. As long as we stayed, we used to be winning, but lately we’ve been ‘not winning and not losing.’ As NASCAR shows, not winning and not losing will let you keep your corporate sponsorship in any case. (How long before the troops start wearing branded gear? come on–that’s potential millions, maybe billions in ad revenue!)
