New New Spin on Having "Enough" US Troops for Iraq Posted by Suzanne Nossel

Retired General Jack Keane is on Charlie Rose tonight and made an obvious point that's nonetheless an important footnote to President Bush's seemingly disingenuous remark in his speech last week that our commanders on the ground in Iraq keep insisting that they don't need more troops. 

The General explained that what was meant is not that more troops aren't needed:  in fact, Keane has seen first-hand that the officers in the theater are badly understaffed and over-tasked. 

He went on to say that there is powerful opposition to the American presence, and that our troops are having great difficulty with the cultural and social challenges of combating an urgan Iraqi insurgency that, in his words, has as its sanctuary the Iraqi people.  Thus, notwithstanding how overloaded our troops are, General Abizaid and others have concluded that more American forces would make the problems worse, not better.  Keane acknowledged that more troops are needed to expedite the training of the Iraqi defense forces.  But, here again, he indicated that having more American troops in-country would backfire.   Our friend Charlie didn't have the heart to ask about whether foreign troops could do the job.

These are a pretty startling statements from a member of the Defense Policy Board, who seems to be representing Administration views.  Among other things, it underscores just how damaging our failure to enlist significant, sustained international troop contributions has been.

Comments

[Cal]

All the reasons Keane gave for not increasing US troops would work for most foreign troops as well. None of them would be familiar with the language or the Iraqi tribes either.

BTW, I saw the show, and Keane didn't just spin -- he lied. He said that the Iraqis are willing to die for their country, which so far isn't true. They're willing to die for the insurgency or their own ethnic militias, but not for Iraq. Here's the Economist:

http://www.economist.com/world/displaystory.cfm?story_id=4079136

---"Asked to estimate how many of the academy's students were motivated by a desire to help their country, Major Donald McArdle, the American in charge, reckoned 5%; his colleagues thought this too high."--

[Carl Nyberg]

Mainstream Dems are peddling a fantasy when they talk about foreign troops bailing-out our botched Iraq policy.

Get out in 18 months (+/- 6 months) and let the chips fall where they may.

It may go to hell, but we'll have the capacity to go back in to address narrow, specific issues.

If we wait until public outcry forces us out, then we won't be able to go back to fix little stuff.

At some point Iraq has to be viable without the U.S. military.

[Minh-Duc]

It is just a little more than two years and already some people want to cut and run. Luckily, attitude of the two above commenters did not dominate during the Civil War. I would hate to see a modern version of the Confederacy, alive and well.

[Carl Nyberg]

Minh-Duc, what is the U.S. national objective in Iraq?

What is the U.S. strategy for achieving said objective?

How long can the United States military stay in Iraq with the current level of public support? How long if it continues to decline?

Why would the Iraq War and occupation beome more popular in the future?

Is it possible the Bush administration made a mistake in invading Iraq?

[Minh-Duc]

Our objective is clear: a viable Iraqi government. When that happen we will leave. The current Iraqi government is just a care-taker government. We are still waiting for a permanent government to form next year. Step-by-step, they will build their own governmental infrastructure (with our help). We are also helping them build the armed forces to counter the insurgency.

One do not build an armed force overnight. It is important for people to understand that in the US, it take us 2 years to build a functional US Army division from scratch. It take another 2 year for that division to be experience and competent. The Iraqi Armed Force came into existence about a year ago.

[exgop]

Maybe I'm just slow today, but what the heck is an "urgan Iraqi insurgency". Urgan? What language is that?

[Suzanne]

Sorry - that's urban

[Dan Kervick]

It may not lie within the power of the United States, or any other nation, to create a viable Iraqi government.

The existence of a viable democratic government requires that a substantial majority of the country possess at least a rough common vision of what such a government should look like. It is doubtful such a majority exists. Of course, if we are willing to tolerate a certain amount of ruthlessness, we might be able to get a viable non-democratic government based on the vision of a minority, either a minority of sectarians, or a minority of Western-oriented "liberal" technocrats or US clients.

Saddam, it might be recalled, once ruled over a viable government. The viability of that government was maintained by the ruthless application of force, mobilization against external enemies, and compelled transfer of populations. When scheming Islamist radicals, or Kurdish separatists, or Shiite sectarians got together and plotted their own very different conceptions of the Iraqi future, they were identified by the secret police, hauled into Abu Ghraib, tortured and killed. When uprisings occurred, they were brutally suppressed by means including even the use of nerve gas attacks. Sunni Arabs were resettled in Kurdish areas, as the Kurds were pushed out, in order to dissolve the culture-based internal geographical borders. The loyalty of the Sunni minority was purchased with petrodollars. Such were the principles of unity of the "Republic of Iraq". Iran and Kuwait served as convenient foils for appeals to national unity.

We have now followed a policy for a decade and a half designed to rip Iraq apart. Following the Gulf War, we encouraged ethnic and religious separatism, established and maintained no-fly zones, and weakened the power of the central government with sanctions. By weakening the hold of the center on the north and south, we empowered the Sunni Islamists, since the Baathist regime was forced to make gestures toward the Islamists, and let up on the suppression of those groups, in order to secure the loyalty of the Sunni Arab population. So the secular nationalist Saddam was forced to put "God is Great" on the Iraqi flag to placate these Salafist nuts. Then we invaded the country, disbanded the military and security forces, and depopulated the bureaucracy, on the theory that these existing national powers were all too evil to be allowed to continue to rule.

Iraq was an artifical entity formed from three culturally distinct Ottoman vilayets, each themselves beset by sectarian and national divisions. Those distinct regions were held together by numerous, but fragile, crisscrossing threads of oil-based economic prosperity and iron bands of raw power. But given that we have done everything in our power for some time now to wreck the economy and break up the power, to fray the threads and dissolve the bands, it's a bit late now to decide that there should still be a place called "Iraq" with a strong, competent and unified central government. The effort to find enough people who are still committed to the existence of such an entity may be a vain one.

We deposed the king, released the king's horses and scattered the king's men. Little wonder that we can't put Iraq back together again.

[Carl Nyberg]

Define "viable government".

Since invading in March, 2003, has Iraq gotten more or less governable?

If the current tactics haven't produced progress to date, why will more of the same work?

[Greg Priddy]

It's a tough situation. The only foreign forces which are going to do better than U.S. troops handling the "cultural and social challenges of combating an urban Iraqi insurgency" would be from other Arab countries. The problem there is that, of the Arab countries with which the U.S. has decent relations and which have reasonably well-trained and equipped militaries (Egypt; to a lesser extent and on a smaller scale Morocco, Jordan, Tunisia), all of them are majority Sunni.

When the situation being confronted is a Sunni insurgency and a low grade Sunni-Shi'ite conflict, it would, as a practical matter, be very difficult for U.S. forces to trust them in the field. It would be a lot different than, let's say, having two Egyptian divisions alongside the Marines in western Kuwait in 1991 -- almost comparable to someone asking Catholic Spain to supervise a ceasefire between the German principalities during the Thirty Years War.

Greg Priddy

[Minh-Duc]

(1) Why would people think that the Iraqi Government cannot be viable is beyond me. The current care-taker government is democratically elected and so will the next permanent government. Legitimacy is not the issue. The current issue is that presently the government cannot adequately provide security for the whole country. That can be remedied.

(2) Even security of Iraq as a whole is not in crisis. The three Northern provinces are secured. Most of the Southern provinces are safe. Only central-western Iraq (4 provinces) pose a problem. A reminder, once upon a time, the US government lost control half of the country. It took four years of bloody warfare for the federal government to reassert control.

(3) The sectarian argument is nonsense. So what if Iraq was carved out of the demised Ottoman Empire. The artificial country argument is completely silly because there are numerous such countries in existence - many prosperous and peaceful. Most modern states were carved from decayed empires. Most of them became stable entities. India with more than 40 major ethnic groups is viable. Singapore is prosperous. Unitary nation-states have collapsed as often (if not more) than multi-national states. I see no one argue that unitary states are not viable.

[Cal]

---"Why would people think that the Iraqi Government cannot be viable is beyond me. The current care-taker government is democratically elected..."-- Minh-Duc

The gov't doesn't have legitimacy among the Sunnis, and with the continuing de-Baathification program, the Sunnis will not have representation for the foreseeable future, and so the insurgency will continue.

Your argument that most of the country is quiet is irrelevant. Since a huge segment of the population lives in the terrorised areas -- including Baghdad -- we can't leave behind even a half-way stable country as long as those areas are insecure.

The American head of the military academy in Iraq says that 5% of the Iraqi recruits are willing to fight for the country. It's all very well for you to say it takes time to set up these forces, but our success depends on the Iraqis. If they're not willing to fight for this country, then success is not an option.

These are just facts, many of them reported by the conservative Economist magazine. You can dismiss me as a "cut and runner" but the fact remains that your stay the course strategy is untenable, as even Senator Hagel acknowledges. Something different needs to be done. If you have better ideas, let's hear them.

[Dan Kervick]

... "The current issue is that presently the government cannot adequately provide security for the whole country. That can be remedied." ...

This seems to me more of a challenge than you make out. It is not just a matter of "providing security" - which suggests clamping down on just a few wayward elements - but bringing a large section of the country under its control, a section where the *majority* of the people seem not to recognize the legitimacy of the government.

... "A reminder, once upon a time, the US government lost control half of the country. It took four years of bloody warfare for the federal government to reassert control." ...

A dreadful example if you're trying to reassure us. That war cost 700,000 lives and produced 1.3 million casualties overall. I doubt if you will convince many Americans Iraq is worth it.

... "Most modern states were carved from decayed empires. Most of them became stable entities. India with more than 40 major ethnic groups is viable. Singapore is prosperous. Unitary nation-states have collapsed as often (if not more) than multi-national states. I see no one argue that unitary states are not viable." ...

It is not because Iraq is multi-national and multi-ethnic that is the problem, since such divisions can co-exist with a broad-based consensus in facvor of political union. The problem, as I suggested in my previous post, is that these divisions have been provoked in recent years so as to create strong political drives toward disunion, and there is not a strong Iraqi nationalist camp to counter them. The Kurds appear to be biding their time. Many of the Shi'a seem to seek an Islamic Republic on the Iranian model. Many of the Sunni Arabs are unwilling to accept their de facto rule by a majority coalition of non-Sunni and non-Arab Iraqis.

[Carl Nyberg]

Minh Duc, did you deliberately duck my questions or just miss them?

[David Billington]

The possibility that more US troops might inflame the situation does not directly answer the question of what level of force (American or Iraqi) is actually needed to bring security to Iraq.

The proper strategy with a limited number of troops is to secure the areas that are least affected by violence and then to secure adjacent areas in increments. What is needed is not an aggregate troop level in the country as a whole but a sufficient presence in the places being secured. The vital task is to clear and hold areas one at a time, and not just clear areas and then abandon them as we did through most of 2004.

This strategy also requires a primary emphasis on expanding the Iraqi police, not on building up an Iraqi army. Army units should be on call to deal with groups of armed insurgents. But the job of securing a civilian area requires not killing insurgents but depriving them of their civilian support. This task requires a police presence, not soldiers. If an elected Iraqi government and its police maintain a permanent presence and provide good government to an area, the insurgents will eventually have to demobilize or leave.

Everything depends on the Iraqis. But the strategy that we encourage could make the difference between whether they succeed or fail. If we pump up an Iraqi army and then encourage the Baghdad government to deploy it in search-and-destroy operations that fail to really hold any areas cleared, we will create a regime that remains dependent on us and that cannot exercise jurisdiction over its own people. If we encourage a strategy that looks to secure parts of the country first and then adds new parts gradually but irreversibly, the Iraqi government will have the chance to prove its ability to administer what it controls fairly and effectively.

Whether it does so will (and should) determine whether we continue to support it. But we have an obligation, if we are not going to pack up and go home in the next year, to encourage a strategy that doesn't simply repeat our own mistakes of the last two years by substituting Iraqis for Americans.

[barry Ritholtz]

"What about Poland . . . ?"

[goonzu gold]

I once have a lot of goonzu money in the game and i will go to buy goonzu gold to add my stock. I like the game very much and i like to earn the goonzu online gold with my friends together. I want to join the cheap goonzu gold and i can get a lot of equipment to arm myself. I like the game very much come on to join us!

[eve isk]

I hope i can get eve online isk in low price.

[ghost gold]

I likeghost gold, it brings me many happiness. If you haveghost online gold, you can help others.

[buy eve online isk]

I hope i can get eve isk in low price,
Yesterday i want to buy eve online isk for my friend.

[requiem gold]

I like therequiem gold, my brother usually
requiem lant for me. I appriciate him.

[Chloe Handbags]

I hope i can get eve isk in low price,
Yesterday i want to buy eve online isk for my friend

[luxury watches]

I am so with you,rolex watch
luxury watch

[yargıc]

Thank you for your sharing.! seslichat seslisohbet

[cheap coach handbags]

Thank you for your sharing! I like i very much!

[nike air max]

0314
The Nike air max Shoe lives up to its name with plush cushioning and a sleek silhouette. It brings you just what you need to style it up wherever you go. you can look at the Air max 2009,air max 90,Air max 95,Air Max 2010
Features:
* Minimalistic construction of leathers and synthetics in the upper
* Nike Shox technology for optimal cushioning
* Rubber outsole for excellent grip