Dopers who know about military stuff, what do you think about the "surge"?

Great Debates
1

Let’s make it short: I’m a liberal, I hate Bush, I hate his stupid war, etc. But I also hate the idea that we invaded Iraq, completely fucked it up, and now we’re leaving the mess for someone else to clean up. Not because it gives “aid and comfort to our enemies”, but because the Iraqi people deserve better. The whole thing is criminal.

Anyway, I generally don’t have any opinions on military matters, because what do I know about military stuff? Absolutely nothing. But if this “surge” idea would work, and stabilize Baghdad, I think it would be worth it, and be the honorable thing to do, considering how completely badly we have screwed up.

What do people who actually do understand warfare think about it?

P.S. I’ve got to run, and I probably won’t be able to respond much until tomorrow. But I really am interested in reading your answers.

2

Moving thread from IMHO to Great Debates.

3

In December of 2005 during the Parlimentary elections we had 160,000 troops in Iraq. I don’t remember any significant decrease in US losses, there were 68 killed during the month. Iraqi casualties are not counted as closely, if at all, but I suspect that their numbers were as high or higher than during periods of lower troop strength.

If the extra troops didn’t provide greater security in '05, what makes you think it will do it now? On the other hand, I’m no military expert, maybe it’s reasonable to do the same thing and expect a different result. It’s hard for me to see that a surge without a fundamental change in strategy will make a difference.

4

I see no enthusiasm for it in the military. It seems a prescription for ‘more of the same.’ It seems the Pentagon is going to cook the books and counts a couple of reserve brigades in Kuwait as in Iraq, some other accounting tricks. Further, a ‘surge’ means a temporary rush of troops in. Temporary does not work.

Still it could be one part of something important.

Surge + US draft. (Yeah, right.)
Surge + Pull out date (maybe)
Surge + pull to the borders and let Iraqis sort it out (immoral, but tempting)

Still this President seems to be slow to accept new ideas. I predict:

Surge + let the next Democratic president pull out and take the blame.

5

  1. Do you actually think a permanent or long-term addition of 20,000 troops would work any better in this case?

  2. Just because they’re calling it that doesn’t mean it’s actually going to be temporary.

6

If it’s really temporary that’s true. The other side will simply lie low for a while.

However, once the additional troops are there, who says they will be withdrawn? After all they will then be “troops in the field” who everyone agrees are to be “supported.” Congressional support is in the form of the money needed to sustain them.

After the added forces have been there for a few months everyone will be used to their being there and to take them out might very well be portrayed as “cut and run.”

7

The frog in the slowly heating pan of water analogy becomes more apt by the day.

8

I think it’s pitworthy.

9

I would recommend you read Machiavelli’s The Prince ; he spends quite a bit of time on methods of pacifying newly acquired states. In his opinion, occupying troops are worse than useless (chapter 3) and only make matters worse. He suggests that economic control is the key – “colonists”, which would translate into “American corporations” in our modern world, should be building facilities in Iraq and employing the Iraqi people. He also says that we need to establish relations with the surrounding states (Iran, Syria) so that the Iraqi insurgents cannot hope for support from them. If we cannot establish friendly relationships with them, then they must be at least made to fear to help the insurgents. Either way the insurgents must not have any hope of outside aid.

10

I’m no expert on military matters, but Slate had an interesting article on Gen. Petraeus (the new commander in Iraq) and the troop surge. Apparently, Petraeus is the person responsible for current counter-insurgency doctrine that says you need a minimum of 20 troops per 1000 civilians if you’re going to try the “clear, hold and build” approach. The 20,000 extra troops won’t bring forces in Baghdad to anywhere near that level – and that’s just looking at Baghdad alone.

The prospects don’t look good.

11

I was listening to NPR last night and they were discussing this. Apparently it is 20 combat troops per 1000 civs. The speaker stated that even if they pulled every combat troop from Iraq and put them in Baghdad along with the additional 20,000 troops (generously assuming they too were combat troops) they’d still be well short of the amount necessary needed for Baghdad ALONE.

12

So…bumping up US forces in Iraq (yes, I understand they’ll be concentrated in Baghdad) by a whopping 13% won’t suddenly make the Bad Guys give up?

Huh. Who’da thunk it?

-Joe

13

This is what I really don’t get and probably the biggest ‘well duh’ in the whole thing: Why haven’t we been hiring Iraqis to rebuild the Iraqi infrastructure and just providing security for them?

14

Because then you couldn’t give the lucrative rebuilding contracts to American cronies.

15

It’s the idea of a frustrated idiot who can’t quite understand what he did wrong. It’s taken longer for George Bush to effectively lose the military occupation of a single country than it did for us to do our part in winning World War Two. And his only answer is that a little bit more of the same should do the trick. Either he’s an inexcusably corrupt and murderous Halliburton puppet, or he’s just not capable of grasping how stupid and inept he really is. Either way, the “surge” is a dumb idea without a shred of military justification that I can see.

(I sometimes visual him in his White House bathroom, alone at night and staring into the mirror, howling in incoherent monkey rage at his inability to understand concepts like strategy and forethought.)

16

And because some of the Iraqis hired inevitably would be insurgent saboteurs.

17

Given the demographics they would more likely be Shi’ite militia beholden to Sadr.

This is a dilemma. You avoid a dilemma by grasping one horn or the other, or by going between them.

  1. Grasping the Shia horn. We could assume the Shia will, and should, rule Iraq as the majority. This will put us on the side of Shi’ite Iran, and piss off places like Sunni Saudi Arabia.

  2. Grasping the Sunni horn. This will piss off the Shia and we will be replacing Saddam in supressing the majority of the Iraq population in favor of a minority.

  3. Going between them. We can begin to pull out.

Or we can go on for another 10 years saying, “As soon as the Iraqi’s make a political peace among themselves, we will leave. But they aren’t quite there yet.”

18

First, when I saw this thread had been moved, for one horrible moment I thought it had gone to the Pit. Whew. (Although there is a Pit thread on this same topic there.)

I still don’t feel like I know enough to form an opinion, although right now I am leaning against the project, from the numbers in this thread. I will go through and read the links when I have time. (And it didn’t even occur to me that The Prince was online! I’ve been wanting to read it for awhile. I am so dumb, it’s not like I’ve never heard of Project Gutenberg before.)

19

Without a clearly defined enemy, then the number of troops is (at best) irrelevant.

One could intern (or shoot) all males between the ages of 13 and 60, but I don’t think that would go down very well - PR wise.

I suppose one could increase the size of the ‘safe haven’, but that makes it less safe, and everything outside remains very unsafe.

One could use the extra troops to run convoys of Sunnis into Jordan or Kuwait, although it sounds like people are scarpering, regardless of religion.

I would be inclined to pull out, and do so very fast and unexpectedly.

As the police know, getting involved in a ‘domestic’ is a thankless task.

20

The U.S. is in a real pickle now, due to mistakes made earlier. For example, back when Moqtada al-Sadr was cornered, the U.S. allowed the Shiite-sympathizing interim government force them to back off, let the guy go, and allow him to join the ‘political process’. This raised Sadr’s stature immensely, made him stronger, and now he’s got a huge following in the Shiite community and backing from Iran.

Iran and Syria continue to stir the pot, provide gateways for arms and terrorists to enter the country, provide funding for the insurgency, etc. Neither of them have an interest in a stable, democratic Iraq, and they are doing everything in their power to prevent that from happening.

The conundrum is that if the U.S. goes heavily against the Sadr brigades, it’s going to enrage large swaths of the Shiite community and undermine the current government. If they don’t, Sadr and his boys are going to continue wreaking havoc, with the support of Iran. On the other hand, if the U.S. tries to ally with the Shiites now, that’s just going to give Iran that much more influence and it could very well re-establish a link between al-Qaida and the Sunni insurgency, giving al-Qaida a haven in places like Anbar province where currently the Sunnis are working with the U.S. to get rid of them.

Frankly, the only solution I really see here leads back to Iran primarily, and Syria secondarily. The only part of the Bush plan I really liked was his claim that they were going to cut off supply lines from both countries and stop them from being a haven for insurgents. But that’s easier said than done.

The time to deal with the Iran/Shiite connection was back when Moqtada al-Sadr first started causing problems. He had lilttle support in the Shiite community other than among his fanatical followers, and was seen by many Shiites as somewhat of a young upstart trading on his father’s reputation. The U.S. should have crushed him like a bug then, and sent a strong message to the Shiite community that their future lay in supporting a moderate government. At the same time, they should have reacted much more strongly against any Iranian influence, especially the smuggling of weapons and money. Instead, they inflamed a firebrand and let his stature grow, and by failing to curb Sunni viiolence early on they radicalized a lot more Shiites. Then they compounded the problem by failing to protect the Sunnis against Shiite retribution, causing them to continue their insurgency.

So… If this new surge includes extremely tough actions against Iran and Syria, such as following supply lines right back into those countries and hitting them with precision strikes, patrolling the borders with UAVs, and even, if necessary, setting up a naval blockade to punish Iran, then maybe there’s still faint hope that the Shiites can be pulled away from Iran’s influence, Sadr smashed, and everyone forced to the table for another round of reconciliation.

The next little while will be interesting. The Iraqi government claims that it is giving the U.S. a free hand to take on insurgents of all stripes, including the Sadr brigades. But will the Iraqi army comply? Or will they be seen by the population as beholden to various factions rather than to Iraq?

At the very least, the next little while will tell us whether there’s even a glimmer of hope in Iraq or not.

I do like the idea of an oil trust for all Iraqis. We’ve discussed that years ago on this board, and I thought it was a good idea then, and it’s a good idea now. Give the Iraqis tangible rewards for sticking with the government and working for the good of the country. Let them all understand that they all have a stake in making the future work. Give them some cash to spend so they begin to build an infrastructure themselves and build up assets that they’ll have a vested interest in defending.