The Redhunter

First off he talks about the natural inclination not to "throw good money after bad." Looking at Iraq the same way one would look at a financial investment, one could be excused for thinking it's time to cut our losses and pull out. But of course, Iraq is not a financial investment. Unlike in financial matters, in war a "willingness to raise the stakes often wins the game."

Why do insurgent gangs, who have vastly smaller resources and manpower than the American soldiers they fight, continue to try to kill those soldiers? The answer is, because they believe they only have to kill a few more, and the soldiers will leave. They need not inflict a military defeat (which would be impossible, given the strength of the American military)--all they need to do is survive until American voters decide to throw in the towel, which might happen at any moment.

The proper response to that calculation is to make emphatically clear that the fight will not end until one side or the other wins, decisively. That kind of battle can only have one ending, as Abraham Lincoln understood. In a speech delivered a month after his reelection, Lincoln carefully surveyed the North's resources and manpower and concluded that the nation's wealth was "unexhausted and, as we believe, inexhaustible." Southern soldiers be gan to desert in droves. Through the long, bloody summer and fall of 1864, the South had hung on only because of the belief that the North might tire of the conflict. But Lincoln did not tire. Instead, he doubled the bet--and won the war.

In other words, now is the time to ratchet things up by sending in more troops. Stuntz continues

Send just enough soldiers and guns and tanks to do the job, and you may soon find you have sent too few. The enemy concludes that if it can raise the marginal cost of the conflict just a bit, if casualties are a little higher or the expense a tad greater than you imagined, you'll quit the field. On the other hand, send vastly more soldiers and materiel than required to the battlefield, and the enemy soon decides that the fight is hopeless--that, as Lincoln so elegantly put it, our resources are unexhausted and, as we believe, inexhaustible.

Maybe. One certainly has to think that the insurgents (and yes I know they're a mixed bunch) are just trying to wait us out, always figuring that if they can kill just a few more Americans we'll give it up.

Possibly referring to the policy review led by Gen Pace, Ralph Peters says that

One proposal under discussion within the administration is to "send everything we've got" - to deploy every possible Army and Marine unit, no matter how worn and weary, for six months to "clean things up.

Let's hope that it's at least under consideration. I'm tired of half-measures. So is Rich Lowry.

Richard Fernandez over at Belmont Club cites a post at Westhawk in which the latter runs through a point-counterpoint regarding the benefits of fighting in Iraq.

What contribution has offense made to preventing another terror attack on the U.S. homeland? This gets into controversial territory. The U.S. invasion of Afghanistan in 2001 seemed to shut down the Al Qaeda terrorist training factory that had produced thousands of trained cadres. Critics of the Iraq war claim that the terror training factory just moved to Baghdad and al-Anbar province, as a result of the American decision to invade Iraq.

Proponents of the “fly paper” theory argue that many foreign terrorists have been drawn to the Iraq jihad, only to die shortly after arriving. Critics counter by asserting that the Iraq war has energized a new generation of Islamic youth to take up arms against the U.S.

But, war proponents say, bringing a long and nasty war into the heart of a dysfunctional Arab world has accomplished two positive things for the West. First, it has shown the Arabs what a monster Al Qaeda really is. Second, it will force the Arabs to reform their neighborhood.

This remains to be seen.

I reprint this not to refight our justification for being there but because of what Westhawk says in the second sentence in the second paragraph; if Iraq is simply energizing Islamists and swelling their ranks, perhaps a troop drawdown would be best.

Moving to a bit more complicated analysis and suggestions, we go next to Armed Liberal. His post is rather long, and much of it quotes an article by Phil Carter at Slate. Following are excerpts from Carter's piece

First, the U.S. military must reverse its trend of consolidation and redeploy its forces into Iraq's cities. Efficiency and force protection cannot define our military footprint in Iraq; if those are our goals, we may as well bring our troops home today. Instead, we must assume risk by pushing U.S. forces out into small patrol bases in the middle of Iraq's cities where they are able to work closely with Iraqi leaders and own the streets....

Second, the United States needs to reinforce the most successful part of its strategy so far - embedding advisers ($) with Iraqi units. Our embedded advisers achieve more bang for the buck than any other troops in Iraq; one good 12-man adviser team, living and working with an Iraqi unit, can bolster an entire Iraqi battalion. Without these advisers, Iraqi army and police units remain ineffective - or worse, they go rogue....

To combat the insurgency, America must adopt a more holistic approach than simply building up the country's security forces. We have the seeds of this in Iraq today - the State Department's Provincial Reconstruction Teams. I worked closely with the PRT in Diyala to advise the Iraqi courts, jails, and police, and I saw their tremendous potential. However, having been hamstrung by bureaucratic infighting between the State and Defense departments, these teams now lack the authority, personnel, and resources to run the reconstruction effort effectively....

Lastly, we're going to have a report from the Baker Commission pretty soon. Unlike some, I'm not optimistic about what it's going to propose. My guess is they're going to recommend some version of "declare victory and leave." Mario Loyola seemed to agree in a post yesterday at NRO's The Corner

In today's Wall Street Journal, Reuel Marc Gerecht has a great editorial (subscription) on the problems facing the new Secretary of Defense — and all of us — in Iraq. Among other things, it's time to begin massively diminishing the expectations for Baker's Iraq Study Group, which looks likely to confirm the dilemma we face in Iraq without resolving it:

As will soon be apparent, the Iraq Survey Group [sic*] of which Mr. Gates is a member and to which I'm an adviser, has not discovered any way for the U.S. to exit Iraq — except under catastrophic conditions. Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn't exist.

If one works through the different scenarios, they all return quickly to a Rumsfeldian position that the U.S. needs to do more in Iraq with less — a position that has been proven flatly wrong since the spring of 2003. This is why Washington has not been able to draw down even though the president, his defense secretary and his generals have dearly wanted to do so. Any meaningful reduction of U.S. forces is very likely to collapse the Iraqi Army into Shiite and Sunni militias and bring on massive carnage, the likes of which the Middle East has not seen since the Iran-Iraq War. If Mr. Gates signs off on the ISG's recommendations, which will probably be completed before he assumes office, he will be party to a doomed strategy — and everyone in Washington and abroad will recognize it as a failure as soon as they start to work through it — before he even sets foot in the Pentagon. It may not be easy for Mr. Gates to recover from this initial flop.

However, when the ISG bombs, the Bush administration may finally get serious about correcting its mistakes in Iraq.

Daniel Henninger nearby makes another interesting point. Baker's Iraq Study Group is weighted away from "neocons" and towards "realists" from the Bush I administration — the same people who betrayed Iraq's Shiites in 1991 by coldy standing on the sidelines while Saddam slaughtered them. It seems odd that this group of people (whom I generally admire) thinks maybe we should abandon them again.

[* An ironically Freudian slip — He means the Iraq Study Group — The Iraq Survey Group was the one that figured out that there are no WMD in Iraq]

And I post this not to slam Baker, as Loyola and I will hopefully end up being mistaken, but because it touches on the question of consequences if we draw down troops.

An no reader will be surprised, my inclination is to rachet things up along the lines of what Stuntz and Carter propose. Whether the Democrats will allow any of this is another discussion entirely. I suppose the Administration could just act quickly and hope for a quick resolution, but that would completely destroy relations with the Democrats and it's doubtful that we could win quickly in Iraq in any event. More likely Bush will wait for the Baker Commission's report, and then will consult with the new congressional leaders before acting.

But I'm not optimistic on the latter, because the AP reports that "George McGovern, the former senator and Democratic presidential candidate, said Thursday that he will meet with more than 60 members of Congress next week to recommend a strategy to remove U.S. troops from Iraq by June.".

At this point a critic from the left or right would be forgiven for saying "if ratching up the pressure is such a good idea, why didn't Bush do it 2 years ago when he had the political capital?" Unfortunately I don't have a good answer to this. Bush had 3 and a half years to fight the war with GOP majorities in Congress, and they pretty much let the Administration do what it wanted in Iraq.

In an earlier post I mentioned that the big battle in the Democrat party was going to be between the new breed of pro-gun socially conservative congressmen like Heath Shuler, and old-time lefties like Charlie Rangel. How that battle is resolved may determine the fate of Iraq.