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