Why Should Megalomaniacs Detest 'Realism'?
JHM
23 November 2006
(Was that a rhetorical question the man asked, Mr. Bones?)
Retreat would win us no friends and lose us no adversaries.
by Robert Kagan & William Kristol
<<
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Utilities/printer_preview.asp?idArticle=12993&R=EEC31DDC9
>>
Foreign policy realism is ascendant these days, we are told. This
would be encouraging if true, because our foreign policy must indeed be
realistic. But what passes for "realism" today has very little to do
with reality. Indeed, if you look at some of the "realist" proposals
on the table, "realism" has come to be a kind of code word for
surrendering American interests and American allies, as well as
American principles, in the Middle East.
(( Do we really need more preëmptive retaliation from the
tank-think classes against [decoding begins] that horrible Hambaker
Report [decoding ends] that has not been written down yet? ))
Thus, the "realists" advise us to seek Syria's help in Iraq even as the
Syrian government engages in a concerted campaign of assassinating
every Lebanese political leader who opposes the return of Syrian
hegemony in Lebanon. Presumably, the "realist" position is that we
should give Lebanon back to Syria, or at least turn a blind eye to its
murderous efforts to regain control there, as an incentive to Syria to
help us in Iraq, where Syria is also engaged in supporting terrorists.
"Realism" is letting dictators get away with terror and murder--and, in
particular, letting them get away with the murder of our friends.
(( "Innocent until proven guilty" is takin' the holidays off, it
looks like, with "O what a splendid pretext to invasionize" filling
in. But cheer up, gentlemen, perhaps the Hambakerites will now be
swayed by tender recollections of M. Pierre Gemayel and choose to
betray their country instead of their friend. Have you checked with
Major Leaker in the last twenty-four hours or so? ))
The "realists" advise seeking Iranian help in Iraq as well. They are
coy about suggesting what the United States could give Tehran as an
inducement for such assistance, but the implications of their position
are clear. After all, the Bush administration has already offered to
talk to Iran, provided the Iranians agree to suspend enrichment of
uranium. That has also been the position of the Europeans. The
Iranians have refused.
So the "realists" are adapting to the reality of Iranian intransigence.
They are in effect suggesting that the administration drop its
long-standing position and begin negotiating with Iran despite the
Iranian regime's refusal to agree to the common U.S.-European demand.
What the realists have in mind, then, is that the United States should
turn a blind eye to Iran's nuclear weapons program, in exchange for
Iran's help in easing our retreat from Iraq. Who cares if this would
destroy U.S. credibility, weaken those in Europe who are trying to be
strong, undermine the effort to prevent Iran's acquisition of nuclear
weapons, and lead to a cascade of additional nuclear states in the
region? It would at least make possible further "realistic"
accommodations to these new and deadly realities.
(( What chance has Hamilton Baker, Baron Realism, against these
loud-mouthed creeps? Kristol and Kagan can make up anythin' they like
and attribute it to his lordship without stint or limit or rebuttal.
His lordship's only hope for survival appears to be that the weekly
standardizers surely must run out of shudder-quotes eventually. ))
The "realists" also advise putting pressure on Israel to deal in a more
forthcoming way with the Hamas-dominated Palestinian government.
Israel should be induced to make concessions despite the ongoing
violence and the refusal of Hamas to ratify even Yasser Arafat's
acceptance of Israel's right to exist. Thus, in order to conciliate
Arab dictators and radicals, Washington should retreat from
long-standing principle and hand a dramatic victory to the forces of
violence and extremism in Palestine.
(( Name that principle, Mr. Bones, and remind the class how long
it has stood. ))
So let's add up the "realist" proposals: We must retreat from Iraq, and
thus abandon all those Iraqis--Shiite, Sunni, Kurd, and others--who
have depended on the United States for safety and the promise of a
better future. We must abandon our allies in Lebanon and the very idea
of an independent Lebanon in order to win Syria's support for our
retreat from Iraq. We must abandon our opposition to Iran's nuclear
program in order to convince Iran to help us abandon Iraq. And we must
pressure our ally, Israel, to accommodate a violent Hamas in order to
gain radical Arab support for our retreat from Iraq.
This is what passes for realism these days. But of course this is not
realism. It is capitulation. Were the United States to adopt this
approach every time we faced a difficult set of problems, were we to
attempt to satisfy our adversaries' every whim in order to win their
acquiescence, we would rapidly cease to play any significant role in
the world. We would be neither feared nor respected--nor, of course,
would we be any better liked. Our retreat would win us no friends and
lose us no adversaries.
(( Morale seems to be a bit fragile, or rather, brittle, in _libido
dominandi_ circles. If you can't win 'em all, that's "capitulation,"
and if the Little Brother Party is now to "capitulate" under the
auspices of Hambakerite realism, then the Kagans and Kristols would
need to look for some other host to parasitize and urge forwards to
make the next snatch at _Weltmacht_ for them. On the whole they'd do
best to move to Beijing, it seems to me, once Crawford and Beltway City
have unmistakably become "neither feared nor respected." ))
What our adversaries in the Middle East want from us is very simple:
They want us out. Unless we are prepared to withdraw, not just from
Iraq but from the entire region, and from elsewhere as well, we had
better start figuring out how to pursue effectively--realistically--our
interests and goals. This is true American realism. All the rest is a
fancy way of justifying surrender.
== 33 ==
You will notice that there is no need for a pious weekly
standardizer to waste five seconds figurin' out what her faction's
"interests and goals" substantively are. There is no question
whatsoever as to where There is located, only about the best choice of
route from miserable here to happy There. Spineless Hambakerites may
raise questions about whether to make the great trek at all, but
_K-und-K_ [A] will instantly dump scorn and shudder-quotes on that!
Since they take their faction's Happy There for granted, they
excuse themselves from givin' the rest of us the latitude and longitude
thereof. If one really had no idea, that final paragraph would invite
one to misunderstand and conjecture that the neo-thuggery of the
_Weekly Standard_ is at bottom mere petulance: the natives, especially
Arab and Muslim natives, would like to see "us" go away, and THEREFORE
"we" must hang around and irritate them as much as possible. If that
were the whole story, "to pursue effectively [or] realistically" would
simply be a matter of makin' sure that "we" are so strongly entrenched
as to be impossible for any conceivable conspiracy of natives to
dislodge. But if that is the proper operational and tactical pursuit
of the Maximum Irritation Strategy, the Crawfordites must have been
doin' somethin' different ever since Victory-in-Iraq Day, 1 May 2003.
The stumblebums have produced plenty of native irritation, Father Zeus
knows, but where's the bloody entrenchment?
Little Brother and Oilslick Dick and the former Rumsfeld at the
very apex of GOP genius and potency were not themselves of the neo-thug
persuasion, to be sure, for all that the aggression is often blamed on
that faction, and names like "Feith" and "Wolfowitz" and "Perle" and
"Wormser" and "Adelman von Cakewalk" are adduced for us in the
neo-appeasement crowd to hiss and boo at, thus to pass the time while
everybody awaits the Hambaker Committee Revelation. Unlike the troika
on top of them, that mob did have somethin' like a strategy about the
aggression, but it demonstrably was not the Maximum Irritation Strategy
and it did not involve any notable amount of entrenchin'. _Au
contraire_, the consultin' firm of Feith, Wolfowitz thought the natives
would be pleased to meet "us" and that "we" would be out of the joint
in a jiffy. The former Rumsfeld concurred in the quick exit delusion,
although not fully, I believe, in the grand strategy of the dread
neo-con cabal, and perhaps he did not concur in it at all.
That is to say, _K-und-K_ are not in this article tryin' to rewind
the tape of their Party's blockbuster film _Aggression Mishandled_ back
to the very beginnin' and start over and this time stand firmly on
Frame One, but rather it is Frame 1001, so to speak, that takes their
fancy, the point at which native irritation becomes the main thread of
the narrative and thus "What our adversaries . . . want from us is very
simple: they want us out" becomes a sensible observation for the film
critic (or wannabe _Weltherrscher_) to make. That is the juncture at
which the Maximum Irritation Strategy and its associated entrenchment
tactics should have been brought into play, and presumably would have
been, had anybody hyperpowerful actually believed in them. In real
time, one might rather arbitrarily pick 1 December 2003, six months
after Little Brother's tasteless and fate-temptin' aircraft carrier or
"mission accomplished" _shtik_, thirty-six months (minus a few days)
before the present -- even though the former Rumsfeld along with Feith,
Wolfowitz had hoped for a jiffy shorter still.
Perhaps if they had actually found a few of Mr. Blair's
terror-tipped 45-minute specials, the perps would in fact have left and
we'd all be better off, except for the _libido dominandi_ crowd.
Undoubtedly their WMD fantasies detained the Crawfordites in their
Peaceful Freedumbia long after they should have sobered up and behaved
more "realistically" than they did about the matter, yet oh, what a
dreadful loss of face for the Big Management Party to admit that they
had been wrong, and the unspeakable Dr. Hans Blix right, all along!
I'd make that Rancho Crawford's stumble of stumbles, the _fons et origo
malorum_, although Sultan Bremer's inability to big-manage his way out
of a paper bag did not help either. Still, the natives did not give a
hoot what Saddam had had or lacked in the terror weapon line, or what
the Bushevik conquistadors did or didn't cart away as booty. Even
Jerry the Jerk was not deliberately tryin' to irritate his neo-subjects
the way Kagans and Kristols might have.
Between them, those two stumbles sufficed to advance the
Crawfordite clowns from Frame 1 to Frame 1001, and the WMD lunacy has
to have been the more important, unless we madly suppose that part of
the original intent of the aggression had been to empower Ambassador
Bremer. Neither stumble had anything much to do with military
considerations (or with factional neo-thug considerations either).
Both stumbles were egregiously non-reality-based, yet not connected
with the trade-marked foreign policy realism of the
Morgenthau-Kissinger-Hambaker school either by attraction or by
repulsion. Doubtless such distinguished CFR gentry would have handled
the post-aggression situation more skillfully than the GOP geniuses
actually did, but that difference exists entirely because the CFR
team's IQ's are higher, not because their peculiar doctrines are more
correct.
After Frame 1001, we're in modern times: the plight of the
cowpokers' Peaceful Freedumbia keeps deterioratin' but its nature has
not fundamentally changed since "they want us out" came to the fore.
Both the _K-und-K_ neo-thug realists and the CFR-brand "realists"
could have said much the same things three years ago as they said
yesterday, and possibly some of them did. It doesn't in practice
matter whether they spoke out then or not, however, because their
Little Brother would not have paid any attention to them before 8
November 2006 in any case. It is not clear that he's gonta pay any
serious attention to them even afterwards; he's tossed the former
Rumsfeld off the Party sledge and he may well consider that that
sacrifice is quite enough to concede to the wolves and the realists and
the "realists." Now the Dynasty Boy can return to his accustomed
sleepwalkin' and stumblebummin' and micawberizin'. Who can say, who
knows for sure, maybe somethin' _will_ turn up?
(It's ridiculous to call that behavior pattern "stay the course,"
but I daresay we are stuck with the malaprop cliché as long as we're
stuck with Little Brother himself.)
Neocomrades R. Kagan and W. Kristol are likely to be disappointed
in their Little Brother, but not because he's gonta let the loathed and
dreaded Hambaker Hobgoblin take over his brain and frogmarch us all
straight to "capitulation" and "surrender" and God's Country bein'
"neither feared nor respected." The CFR gentry are likely to be about
equally disappointed, at least unless their superior realism or their
higher IQ's have taught them not to count on unhatched chickens too
much. Indeed, unless Jesus or St. Micawber or some other _deus ex
machina_ does suddenly turn up for them, the core Crawfordites seem
headed towards disappointin' pretty well everybody in Peaceful
Freedumbia and everybody in Greater Texas as well. Hopefully we
Democrats will know how to take proper advantage in 2008 -- yet how
about _that_ for an unhatched chicken, Mr. Bones?
In the mean time, in between time, all "our" neo-Iraqi subjects
will be waiting for "the Americans" to go away, and most Americans,
even many of the Party base-and-vile, will, as I conjecture, be reduced
to waiting for Little Brother to go away. Stasis, paralysis, gridlock:
the Lame Duck World Order. In principle it would be an ideal
opportunity for the fiendish Muslim neo-religionizers and the fiendish
Qommies and the fiendish Damascene 'Alawites to do something really
deplorable, but for various reasons we need not go into here, probably
those folks will be disappointed also.
Still, no cloud without a silver lining: surely _somebody_ abroad
must find an exploitable opportunity in Crawford's extremity? Perhaps
the Qadimans and Likudniki and Beitenuites? Perhaps Mr. Gordon Brown
once he inherits Airstrip One? Perhaps General Mubárak or General
Musharraf? Perhaps Señor Chávez or the antimonrovian left in Latin
America more generally? Plus _ex officio_, as it were, Beijing and
Moscow and Paris (though probably not the EU as such). _Nous verrons_
. Please stay tuned.
BGKB. Bomby days.
_____
[A] _Kaiserliche und Königliche_, doncha know?
JHM
23 November 2006
(( _Libido dominandi_ and contempt of "realism" won't win it for the
neo-thug gentry at _The Weekly Standard_ unless some hired hand worries
about the details. Fortunately for them, they've got Freddie, and
here, without more ado, I give you their Freddie: ))
We Can Put MoreForces in Iraq . . . and they would make a difference.
by Frederick W. Kagan
<<
http://www.weeklystandard.com/Content/Public/Articles/000/000/012/994zsofb.asp
>>
Many months into the debate over finding a new strategy in Iraq, two
myths continue to cloud the discussion. The _Washington Post_ recently
proclaimed: "The United States and its allies in Iraq would need at
least 500,000 and perhaps more than 1 million troops" to bring order to
the country. Incoming House majority leader Steny Hoyer declared: "As
a practical matter, there are no troops to increase with." Neither of
these statements is true. The persistence of these myths forecloses
serious consideration of the only option likely to bring peace to Iraq.
Relevant historical examples do not support the notion that hundreds of
thousands more troops are needed to improve security in Iraq. A study
of post-conflict operations in the Balkans, Afghanistan, and elsewhere
conducted by Ambassador James Dobbins showed that success in those
operations--characterized by severe ethnic and sectarian
violence--required force ratios of 1 soldier per 100 inhabitants. Iraq
poses challenges that are in some respects more severe, at the moment,
but it also offers its own rules-of-thumb. Successful clear-and-hold
operations in Tal Afar required a force ratio of around 1 soldier
(counting both U.S. and Iraqi troops) for every 40 inhabitants. On the
other hand, in 2004 Major General Peter Chiarelli suppressed a
widespread uprising in Sadr City (an area inhabited by about 2.5
million Shiites) with fewer than 20,000 U.S. soldiers--a ratio of about
1 to 125.
Then there's the question of the size of the population to be pacified.
Most of Iraq is relatively calm. Instances of violence in the Kurdish
north and the Shia south are rare. No responsible analyst advocates
sending large numbers of troops into either area--they are not needed
and would not be welcomed. Disarming the Shia militias is a process
that must be undertaken only after the Sunni Arab insurgency is under
control, and it cannot be undertaken primarily by American forces
directly confronting the Shiite population. Using all of Iraq's 27
million people as a baseline for estimating force ratios is, therefore,
an invalid approach.
The U.S. command repeatedly and correctly points out that about 80
percent of the violence in Iraq occurs within a 35-mile radius of
Baghdad, among a population of perhaps 10 million. Baghdad itself has
roughly 6.5 million inhabitants, including the 2.5 million Shiites in
Sadr City. These figures provide the basis for a more realistic
estimate of the force levels needed. Applying the high-end ratio used
in Tal Afar over the entire metropolitan Baghdad area would generate a
requirement of 250,000 troops--both U.S. and Iraqi. There are
currently about 100,000 Iraqi army troops that the U.S. command
considers trained and ready. There are almost 150,000 American troops
in Iraq now, including perhaps 70,000 combat troops. Conducting Tal
Afar-type operations across the entire capital region all at once would
require concentrating all available forces in the area and a "surge" of
about 80,000 U.S. soldiers--a large number, to be sure, but very far
from the "hundreds of thousands" or even "millions" generated by the
use of specious historical examples.
But the situation is not even this dire. Not all areas of the capital
region require such an intensive deployment. Indeed, previous
successful operations even in Baghdad did not require such high force
ratios. What's more, skillful military planners conduct operations in
phases, and that is exactly how this one should be prepared and
executed. The recent unsuccessful effort to secure Baghdad, "Operation
Together Forward II," was broken into a series of phases. U.S. and
Iraqi troops working together succeeded in clearing the neighborhoods
they entered one after the other. But that is not why the operation
failed. The problem, according to much anecdotal evidence and the
recent testimony of the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency,
General Michael D. Maples, is that the U.S. military command did not
leave American forces behind in the areas that had been cleared. That
mistake allowed insurgents to reinfiltrate those neighborhoods and
begin the cycle of violence again.
There is every reason to believe that a reformulated operation,
proceeding in phases to clear Baghdad neighborhood by neighborhood, but
with sufficient force levels to leave significant American troops
behind in the cleared areas, would be much more successful. It is
impossible to estimate precisely how many more U.S. troops would be
needed in the capital area, or in Iraq, without proposing a detailed
military plan. But since the high end of estimates for doing the whole
area at once produced the requirement for a surge of 80,000 or so, it
is very likely that a surge of 50,000 American troops would be
sufficient to stabilize the capital. Subsequent phases of the
operation would then move on to stabilizing al-Anbar and other restive
areas of the country, although we must keep in mind how much the
situation in Iraq would be transformed for the better if violence in
the capital were brought under control.
This approach is not just a matter of throwing more troops at the
problem. It involves a fundamental change in U.S. military strategy in
Iraq. The U.S. military has never set itself the goal of establishing
and maintaining security. It has always prioritized training Iraqi
forces and allowing them to undertake such operations on their own.
This strategy might have had some merit when the principal problem in
Iraq was the Sunni Arab insurgency (although it was dubious even then).
It has little or no merit today, when sectarian violence is the most
important challenge. More resources are needed to support a changed
strategy, but changing the strategy is essential. [A]
Establishing security in Iraq should be our primary objective, with
training Iraqi forces a close second. The U.S. military, partnered
with Iraqi army units capable of assisting, needs to clear and hold
troubled neighborhoods in order to bring the sectarian conflict under
control. At the same time, the coalition must reinvigorate its efforts
to reconstruct cleared areas, bringing jobs, food, and water to the
Iraqi people along with safety. Only in this context will it be
possible to recruit an effective Iraqi police force or more Iraqi
soldiers and to develop effective Iraqi institutions of central,
regional, and local government. And only in this context will the
Iraqi government be able to disarm militias that now derive their
primary justification from the ongoing attacks on their communities.
Many who oppose the idea of sending more troops to Iraq have abandoned
the argument that more troops wouldn't help and retreated to what they
believe is a more defensible position: that there are simply no more
troops available to send. This view, supported to some degree by the
testimony of CENTCOM Commander General John Abizaid, is wrong.[B]
To begin with, the Defense Department has just announced plans to
deploy over 50,000 troops to Iraq this spring, including more than
20,000 combat troops, as part of a rotational plan to relieve forces
currently in the theater. If, instead of bringing those forces home,
we extended their tours, we would immediately have generated a surge of
20,000 combat troops.
In truth, we could send more. As of October 1, there were
approximately 81,000 active Army soldiers in Iraq, 21,500 active duty
Marines, 15,600 Army National Guard, and a little more than 7,000 Army
and Marine Reserves--in all about 125,000 troops (13,000 sailors and
airmen and a number of other reserves brought the total up to 139,500).
Since then, another 8,000-9,000 soldiers and Marines, mostly active
duty, have also been committed to the theater. There are another
24,000 members of all services now in Afghanistan as well.
Looking just at basic numbers, it would seem obvious that there are
many more troops to send. The active Army numbers about 500,000
soldiers, the Marines 150,000, and the Army National Guard 346,000.
That's a pool of almost one million ground forces to draw from. This
kind of argument may seem simplistic, but it is supported by no less a
personage than the current chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
General Peter Pace, who declared this spring: "We have just over
200,000 U.S. service members in the [Persian] Gulf region right now. We
have 2.4 million U.S. service members available to the country--active,
Guard, and reserve. So you've got about 2 million U.S. service members
who are not currently involved directly in the Gulf region. . . . We
have sufficient personnel, weapons, equipment--you name it--to handle
any adversary that might come along." Including, presumably, a surge
of 50,000 troops into Iraq.
It's important to parse these numbers more closely, since soldiers,
sailors, Marines, and airmen are not interchangeable parts. The active
Army today has about 350,000 deployable combat troops, including combat
and support (logistics) troops. The combat troops are organized into
about 43 brigades, numbering around 170,000 soldiers. Marine combat
forces usable in Iraq are organized into nine active and three reserve
regiments (the Marine equivalent of the Army's brigades) totaling
around 36,000 troops. The Army National Guard, currently undergoing a
significant reorganization, has a combat force of 60,000-80,000
soldiers. In sum, counting only deployable units, there are at least
64 combat brigades available in the ground forces, of which around 15
are now in Iraq and another 3 in Afghanistan. Adding a further 10
brigades (40,000 combat troops with perhaps another 10,000 logistical
troops) is definitely a realistic undertaking.
Sophisticated critics will argue that the devil is in the details.
Almost all of the Army units not deployed or deploying to Iraq are
rated not combat-ready. They would have to be trained before
deploying. Many would have to be sent to Iraq less than a year after
leaving the combat zone, violating the Army's current policy of
requiring at least a year between deployments. Soldiers now in Iraq
would have to stay there--many for considerably more than their
expected one-year deployment. And the National Guard would have to be
used more heavily than current plans call for. All of these facts
would lead, it is asserted, to a significant fall in morale in the
ground forces and to recruiting and retention problems. Such a "surge"
would break up the planned rotational schedule for these forces, making
it impossible to relieve them in a year if the situation still required
a large-scale ground forces presence in Iraq. It is, some senior
officers say (usually off the record), an unsustainable plan and would
impose too much pain on the military.
These criticisms warrant serious consideration. As for training, it is
certainly true that only the 20,000 or so troops now programmed to
deploy to Iraq in the spring are ready to go. Others could be made
ready only in months, and would require accelerated training schedules.
Two solutions: Send forces that are not as well trained as one would
like, or conduct the surge itself in phases, accelerating the
deployment of the troops preparing to go in in the spring and sending a
follow-on wave behind them. [C] There are a number of ways of
mitigating the resulting difficulties in Iraq. The most unsatisfactory
would probably be to delay the beginning of the major security
operations until the second wave was nearly ready. Another would be to
proceed more slowly, spacing the clear-and-hold phases further apart to
gain time. Still another would be to accept greater risk in areas
outside the capital such as al-Anbar province or the north in order to
concentrate forces in the capital now, counting on the arrival of
reinforcements in a number of weeks or months to repair any damage done
in those areas by the temporary withdrawal. A variant of this approach
would be to deploy U.S. forces at slightly lower levels of readiness
into the more pacified areas of the country where they could complete
their training _in situ_ while also providing a basic military
presence. This, incidentally, was what was done following Saddam's
invasion of Kuwait in 1990, when many Army units completed essential
training in Saudi Arabia (not in combat conditions but under sporadic
missile attack) before launching the ground attack in February 1991.
All such approaches carry risk; none is impossible or inconceivable.
The problem of sustaining the surge deployment is also real, but there
is a solution. Almost every major defense analyst, many retired
generals, congressmen, senators, and even the _New York Times_ now
believe the size of the U.S. military--especially ground forces--should
be expanded. Recruiting and training more volunteers and forming them
into units will take time. But if we started right now, we could have
new soldiers coming on line within a year, with more on the way behind
them. Simply starting the process of expanding the force would go a
long way to addressing the basic issue eating at the morale of the
ground forces today: the sense that no help is on the way. Combining
the promise of relief from repeated deployments with clear efforts to
win in Iraq might well offset soldiers' frustrations with extended
tours and reduced time home.
There are, indeed, certain mysteries about why the military is having
such a hard time managing the current deployment anyway. A force of 15
combat brigades requires, in principle, a base of 45 brigades to
sustain a one-year-in-three deployment cycle. The Army is now using a
one-in-two cycle, which should require only 30 combat brigades. Going
up to a 25-brigade deployment should require a base of only 50 or 75
deployable brigades, depending on the frequency of deployment. Even
counting the ground forces elements in Afghanistan, the necessary base
shouldn't climb higher than 60 or 80 brigades at the most. There are
more than 50 brigades in the active Army and Marines right now, not
counting the National Guard and Reserves. It would be worth examining
what impediments are preventing us from making full use of currently
available resources. That might be a worthy first challenge for the
new Secretary of Defense.
This brief examination shows two things. First, that a surge of on the
order of 50,000 soldiers into Iraq is highly likely to be meaningful if
it supports a changed strategy. Second, that such a surge is doable
with the forces currently available. There is risk in any military
operation, and it might prove to be the case that securing Baghdad or
Iraq is impossible or would require more force than this. It is also
true that deploying more forces to Iraq would require accepting greater
risk elsewhere. These concerns are worth discussing. Any surge,
moreover, should be accompanied with a massive effort at
reconstruction, political undertakings, possibly even regional
negotiations. Risks and costs of all kinds must be weighed before a
decision is made. I have argued elsewhere that the situation in Iraq
today both requires and justifies taking such risks and accepting such
costs, but that is not the point here. The point is that a surge of
forces accompanying a change in strategy is possible and offers the
promise of being very helpful. The ultimate decision must be taken on
the basis of that reality.[D]
Frederick W. Kagan is a resident scholar at the American Enterprise
Institute and author of _Finding the Target: The Transformation of the
American Military_ (Encounter).
____
[A] Notice
(1) that in the very unlikely event that Little Brother actually
ships out 40K or 60K or 80K more warm bodies and then the "surge"
still does not result in glorious success and total victory for the
GOP, Freddie's own ass is pretty well covered by that sentence, and
(2) that Freddie is in effect tellin' the violence pros on the
ground that they don't understand their own business, which is perhaps
not the ideal way to recommend his REMF notions to them.
[B] Like I just said.
[C] "Spring" is perhaps not strictly defined by the solstice on or
about 21 March, but in any case Col. Kagan does not seem impelled to
surge very urgently.
[D] "'Must' is not a word to use to princes, little man." And when the
substance of one's 'must' is reality-basin', to throw it before Little
Brother brings us to the very border of pearls and swine country.