The Surge
to Defeat
February
02, 2007
President
Bush, whose poll approval ratings have now sunk
below 30%, is going to go for one last gamble
in Iraq. Instead of accepting that his adventure
has failed and it is time to get out, he wants
to keep playing by sending another 21,500 soldiers
into Baghdad in one final attempt to win this
war. However, this approach has been roundly rejected
by the American people, which is why the Democrats
won the last election, and is doomed to failure.
The basic problem in Iraq is that Bush made so
many huge errors early on that the situation can
only be salvaged now with a massive application
of American force, and another 21,000 troops is
far too little and too late.
In addition to more soldiers, Bush is sending
a new commander to Iraq, General David Petraeus.
General Petraeus did an excellent job with the
101st Airborne Division early in the occupation,
and is an expert in counterinsurgency. He just
finished rewriting the Army’s counterinsurgency
manual. What is most interesting is that General
Petraeus clearly spells out how inadequate Bush’s
surge of troops is.
Petraeus explains how in effective counterinsurgency
and stability operations, the ratio of soldiers
to the civilian population needs to be about 1
to 40, or about 25,000 soldiers for every million
people. This was about the size of the force deployed
in Bosnia in the 1990’s.
Applying that logic to Baghdad and Iraq would
mean at least 150,000 soldiers in Baghdad alone,
and over 500,000 for the entire country. In fact,
General Eric Shinseki floated numbers similar
to this before the Iraq war in testimony to Congress,
and the Bush administration fired him for his
honesty. This occupation has been done with too
few soldiers, which created a security vacuum
that led to all the other problems. Without security,
reconstruction failed and a united country could
not be created. The Kurds and Shias instead maintained
their separate militias and the Kurds have essentially
seceded. The lack of security allowed the insurgents
to become fully entrenched, and eventually sectarian
warfare took over. This culminated in the last
12 months in widespread ethnic cleansing, the
flight of the Iraqi middle class abroad, and the
widespread lawlessness and criminal activity that
has worsened the situation. Adding 21,000 soldiers
will not reverse all those failures.
Baghdad in fact has now been partitioned along
the Tigris River. There are only two Shia neighborhoods
left on the west side of the river, and only one
significant Sunni/mixed neighborhood left on the
east side. The old Baghdad is now gone and the
US is too late.
So why is Bush doing this? Why is he throwing
good lives after bad? Why is he totally ignoring
the advice of the Baker Commission to start drawing
down forces and engaging in real regional diplomacy?
Because Bush cannot admit defeat. He does not
want the loss of this war on his hands, so needs
to keep going till 2009 when he can hand the problem,
and blame for the defeat, on to his successor.
The other problem for Bush is that the US does
not have the resources to actually win the war.
The army is out of soldiers, and the reserves
and national guard units have already served too
much time. To deploy another 100,000 to 200,000
soldiers to Iraq would require Bush to reinstate
the military draft, and there is no way that can
be politically feasible for a war that has lost
the support of the American people and with a
hostile Congress. Since he can’t get the
soldiers he really needs, he has to send a small
force and pretend that it will make a real difference.
The 21,000 soldiers are just enough to keep the
war going, but far too few to make any difference
to the outcome. They buy Bush plenty of time though.
It will take until the summer to send those additional
soldiers, and then Bush can plead that they need
at least six months to see if they can succeed
in their mission. This gets Bush into 2008, and
he can then avoid defeat before the next election.
The biggest error of this war was cutting the
Sunnis out of the new Iraq right from the start.
There were two main national institutions in Saddam’s
Iraq, the government bureaucracies and the army.
The first act of the Bush administration in Iraq
was to disband the army and to do a widespread
de-Baathification of the ministries that essentially
kicked Sunni Iraqis out of the bureaucracy. By
doing these two inane things, Bush created the
insurgency that is now defeating him. It was not
Al-Qaeda or “terrorists” that caused
the loss of the Iraq war, it was Bush’s
own hubris and complete lack of understanding
of how to rebuild Iraq after the war. Comments
can reach me at Nali@socal.rr.com.
