The Redhunter

More Troops?

New Sec Def Gates traveled to Iraq, and one of the things he discussed with commanders was whether more troops were needed. An AP story in the Washington Times has Abizaid noncommittal to the idea, and Casey more wary. Understandably, they want to know what their exact mission would be. Additional troops, they say "might only bring a temporary respite to the violence" while denuding other theaters of personnel who would be needed in a crisis.

Fox News "All Stars" Fred Barnes and Morton Krondake worried that if we do decide to send more troops, whether it will be enough to make any difference. Krondake refers to the Kagan-Keane plan that I reviewed in my "New Plan for Iraq" post on Tuesday, and says that it

... involves cleaning out the bad guys, holding the territory, having troops living in the neighborhoods to provide ongoing security, and then when the Iraqi security forces can take over, then you move on to Anbar. This is a two-year operation and the question is, is 30,000 enough to do it?

In other words, no more halfway measures.

The always insightful Mario Loyola also worries that more troops might not make any difference.

The generals know what they are talking about: There is no reason to believe that an increase in force levels will have any effect at all on the levels of violence in Baghdad. The violence is occurring in a security vacuum, but that doesn't mean that it's occurring because of a security vacuum. Remember Algeria in 1990s — a huge army was powerless against a modest insurgency. ...

The president has a problem: all the violence in Baghdad makes it look like we're losing the war, regardless the pace of reconstruction or political progress. Now the violence in Baghdad has become the political determinant of victory and defeat—and hence the primary focus of military strategy.

The generals have kept their eye on the ball: The deteriorating security situation in Baghdad is at root not a military problem but a political one. All the troops in the world will not reduce the violence if a political reconciliation continues to elude the major warring factions—and the increased presence of U.S. troops is more certain to increase the violence than reduce it. Occupation is a "toxin," as Abizaid points out, and "a wasting asset," as MacArthur once said.

On the other hand, Stanley Kurtz countered (on The Corner) that

Mario, the other day you said, “all the violence in Baghdad makes it look like we’re losing the war, regardless [of] the pace of reconstruction or political progress.” Yet it strikes me that there is no political progress, only regress. Baghdad is a Hobbesian anarchy of independent militias (see that Robert Zelnick article, “Iraq: Last Chance.”) In such an atmosphere, there can be no political stability and no hope for anything other than the dominance of militias. A troop surge may or may not work at this point, but I don’t see how we save Iraq without one. The current situation is not one of gradual military-political progress. It is one of hastening decline toward inevitable disaster if nothing substantially new is done to stop it.

Mario, you say that the “deteriorating security situation in Baghdad is at root not a military problem but a political one.” Well, that’s true in a sense. Yet politics, at its root depends on a monopoly of the legitimate means of force. In Iraq, there is no such monopoly on the national level. It exists–and then only tentatively–within tiny, local, militia controlled patches. So the root political problem is also, and simultaneously, a military problem. We either break the militias in the achingly slow, complicated, and methodical way recommended by Gerecht, or we concede that Iraq has fallen apart.

He also cites an editorial by Ruel Marc Gerecht in the New York Times, “In Iraq, Let’s Fight One War at a Time,” in which, after reviewing the situationwith the Shia militias, Gerecht's bottom line is that

The key for America is the same as it has been for years: to clear and hold the Sunni areas of Baghdad and the so-called Sunni triangle to the north. There will probably be no political solution among the Iraqi factions to save American troops from the bulk of this task. The sooner we start in Baghdad, the better the odds are that the radicalization of the Iraqi Shiites can be halted. As long as this community doesn’t explode into total militia war, Iraq is not lost, and neither is Mr. Bush’s presidency.

I tend to go with what Kurtz and Gerecht say. Loyola makes great points, and may well turn out to be right. To be honest the situation is so complicated, and I just don't have time to go through it all (it's amazing I get as much written here as I do), that I could be mistaken. But my impression is that waiting around for a political solution is not going to produce results.

So my assessment right now is to go with the Kagan-Keane plan, and replace the commanders.

Consequences of Failure

I know I keep harping on this, but it's so important that I think it a useful reminder whenever we're discussing Iraq strategy.

An article in yesterday's Washington Times tells of a CIA exercise in which some 75 analysists and outside experts conducted a simulation of what might happen if we were defeated in Iraq.

The CIA this month conducted a simulation of how the Iraq war affects the global jihadist movement, and one conclusion was that a U.S. loss would embolden al Qaeda to expand its ranks of terrorists as well as pick new strategic targets, according to sources familiar with the two-day exercise. ...

A source familiar with the simulation said it was a "red team" exercise in which participants played the role of global jihadists and war-gamed how the U.S. involvement in Iraq will influence their terror movement.

Although it takes no policy positions, the simulation's key finding appears to bolster Mr. Bush's contention that a U.S. loss in Iraq will have far-reaching ramifications.
...

Al Qaeda has made stopping democracy in Iraq a top priority, according to U.S. military officials. It has recruited hundreds of suicide bombers to come to Iraq and inflict mass casualties to spur a Sunni-Shi'ite Muslim civil war. The group wants to wear down U.S. troops to the point where they will retreat. Al Qaeda's ultimate goal is to turn Iraq and other Middle East countries into hard-line Islamic states, U.S. military officials say.

One key finding from the "red team" exercise is that al Qaeda will follow past practices. Jihadists perceived the victory over the Soviet Union in Afghanistan in 1988 as a seminal event that spawned the creation of al Qaeda under the direction of Osama bin Laden. Al Qaeda leaders thought that if jihadists could defeat a global power in one theater, it could bring down governments in other nations.

Update

Bill Roggio is in Iraq, embedded with the Marines. While there, he's also been able to spend some time with the Iraqi Army. He reports on their shortcomings and successes. Check it out; what he says may not be quite what you expected.

Previous
Here's the New Plan for Iraq