Three Options in Iraq

Officials: There ‘aren’t enough troops’ to fix problems in Iraq

The following article (excerpted below), while not containing any wholly new information, helped crystallize my thinking, as follows.

Our 140,000 troops cannot secure an area and population as large as Iraq. Perhaps a force that size could secure some countries of 26 million people, but not present-day Iraq. Outside the range of American guns, security is non-existent. (As a digression, if anyone claims that security is only a major problem in the mixed/Sunni provinces and the cities of Baghdad, Mosul, and Kirkuk, comprising about 10 million people, then the same facts, “not enough troops,” obviously applies to that portion of Iraq.) The task is too great for the forces deployed. It seems to me that that is a proposition that can’t reasonably be argued with, and the linked article makes the case quite clearly.

So, what to do? Here’s a thought … How about matching the forces and the mission?

1. Increase our forces, dramatically, not by a few thousand, or …

2. Call off the mission. Cut and run. Pull out. Declare victory or whatever. Call it what you like. If we don’t have, or will not commit, the numbers of troops needed, call it off, or …

3. Reduce the scope of the mission, by only trying to secure Baghdad, Kurdistan, the nine southern Shia provinces, and Diyala province (which is mixed, but strategically links the Kurdish and Shiite areas). My earlier proposal to abandon Sunnistan here.

Officials: There ‘aren’t enough troops’ to fix problems in Iraq excerpt:

The Bush administration’s decision to move thousands of U.S. soldiers into Baghdad to quell sectarian warfare before it explodes into outright civil war underscores a problem that’s hindered the U.S. effort to rebuild Iraq from the beginning: There aren’t enough troops to do the job.

Many U.S. officials in Baghdad and in Washington privately concede the point. They say they’ve been forced to shuffle U.S. units from one part of the country to another for at least two years because there haven’t been enough soldiers and Marines to deal simultaneously with Sunni Muslim insurgents and Shiite militias; train Iraqi forces; and secure roads, power lines, border crossings and ammunition dumps.

Aren’t there other options beyond trying to do too much with too little? I hope there aren’t any Dems reading this, because if I were a Dem political strategist, and had been reading things like this, I’d come up with a summary concept like, “Support the troops: match the forces and the mission.”

Comments

  1. BloodSpite wrote:

    This is sarcasm. It is only sarcasm. Please do not use it as flamebait or attack the authors credentials as it is meant only as a toungue in cheek solution to current issue’s

    Nuke Iran.
    Syria will very politely go away. We’ll have high gas prices for a while, but look at lovely Lake Tehran with its radioactive glass shores!

    Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 11:45 am

  2. frontinus wrote:

    Secure Kurdistan? I’d point out the presence of ~100,000 peshmergas but that might require you to add a #4 to your list and the number four is just so unwieldy in comparison. Forget I said anything.

    Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 3:50 pm

  3. The Colossus wrote:

    Are you completely discounting the Iraqi army? If so, on what basis?

    Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 4:38 pm

  4. commissar wrote:

    Colossus,

    In the first part, “i.e. not enough troops,” we could include the Iraqi forces. Whether they are counted or discounted, the security challenges are too much for the forces in place today.

    As for the second part, the options, those are American options. None of them really apply to Iraqi forces, except possibly #3.

    The post and the article are really about American forces and their tasks; note that one of the tasks is training Iraqi forces.

    Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 5:13 pm

  5. The Colossus wrote:

    Ok,

    I just wanted to know if you assign any value to them at all. For instance, if I were to say that an Iraqi Army unit, given its training and experience, were worth one quarter of a U.S. unit (hypothetically speaking), and you were to agree, than I could suggest that 120,000 additional Iraqi troops would be the equivalent of adding 30,000 U.S. troops.

    I agree there are not enough troops, but we have a pretty big factory in place making Iraqi troops. Their army was nonexistent 2 years ago, but is over 169,000 troops today, if General McCaffrey is to be believed.

    I think there are really two problems with the Iraqi army — qualitative and quantitative. If we were to attack the problem on both ends, and improve their quality (say to a hypothetical 1/3rd value of a like-sized U.S. Army unit) while also adding to their quantity on the back end, eventually we solve the problem — and without the addition of U.S. troops. (Assuming they are worth something, and are loyal, to some extent to the central government.)

    Granted, this leaves us with a short term problem — not enough security today. But of our enemies in Iraq, who is likely to wrest power away from the Iraqi government while this process is happening? Al Qaeda in Iraq has been badly hurt by the death pof Zarqawi and the subsequent rollup of his organization. That leaves the Mahdi Army and the strongest element among the Sunnis — whoever that might be — as the next strongest players.

    In your opinion, are either stronger than the Iraqi Army? Are either stronger than the Iraqi army plus 130,000 U.S. troops?

    I think if we left today — option 2 — that I’d give better than even money that Maliki emerges as the victor. I’m not advocating that. I think we send more troops into Baghdad, continue building up the Iraqi Army, hang a few sectarian leaders, and bide our time.

    Just my $.02; I do greatly respect and value your opinion and your thoughts.

    Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 6:49 pm

  6. Tulkinghorn wrote:

    Newbie here voting for option 3.

    It is way too late to raise and prepare the troops needed for option 1. Since we were apparently in a war for our long-term survival after 9/11, the failure to prepare the sort of army needed to occupy and pacify Iraq is puzzling. Until I remember that such a thing would have made some tax cuts impossible. So tax cuts seem to have trumped the War on Terror.

    Option 2 makes better sense than continuing in denial. Seems like a betrayal of the troops who have not lost a single tactical engagement for the civilian leadership to just back out of a strategy that cost so many lives. Still, it has the benefit of being honest.

    Option 3 would have made a pretty good strategy from the start, and is still pretty feasible. It has two major benefits:
    a) It puts a modest but secure political and tactical force up against the Iranian border. It would be nice to have some leverage against Tehran other than a strategic response.
    b) It would utterly piss off the Turks. The last minute refusal of the Turks to allow a northern front in the invasion of Iraq allowed the Iraqis some critical time to prepare for the occupation. It also made it difficult to support many more than the number of troops we have been able to field in Iraq. You could argue that the Turks are more to blame for our failures in Iraq than Rumsfeld is, not that I care to let Rummy off the hook.

    A free, secure, well-armed and American backed Kurdistan in control of the northern oil fields would be a real thorn in the side of Iran and a diplomatic disaster for Turkey. What is not to like?

    Posted 30 Jul 2006 at 11:24 pm

  7. Rodney A Stanton wrote:

    The plans drawn up by a former Clinton Marine Gen to invade Iraq called for 2 div of Marines backed up by a battleship and 4 cruisers. He has said the war would never be won without this amount of commitment as a min for 4 years(03 -06). His Name is Zinni. History is proving him right. I have always felt that had we sent over a battleship to support our troops in 03 we would have won the war before the election.
    It is looking too much like Korea - where we have part of the country and they have the rest. And more and more like the “quagmire” only with far less troops than the 800,000 we had there in 68.

    In 04 I blamed this on the fact that none of the top Bush people had ever actually been in a war (Rummy is a reserve 4 striper, never manned a 5 inch turret in combat). The fact that Rummy and Meyers were not fired right after the election leads me to think Bush never intended to win. He used the war as an election prop. Very well since he won by a big margin. But the lack of real commitment leads one to doubt his honesty.

    an old exJarhead
    Nam 67-68

    Posted 31 Jul 2006 at 6:04 am

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