I am getting very nervous about Bush’s plan to increase troop levels in iraq. It seems to me that most of our losses are due to bombs (IEDs) planted on the roads, bboby-trapped houses , etc. how will increasing troop levels do anything about these kinds of attacks? Its looking more and more like 'Operation provide targets". !
Its hard to say. I suppose it gets down to HOW those additional troops will be used. If you do the same old things we’ve been doing, just with more troops, then you are probably right…it won’t do much except for providing more targets. If you used the additional troops in a more effective way AND perhaps you also used the presence of more troops as a political lever to get some of the less rabid groups to the table (and if you were smart enough to also be willing to make some concessions to those groups), then perhaps it would be a good thing.
It all gets back too…how will those additional troops actually be used, have we learned any lessons…or are we just throwing more bodies at the problem and hoping it will go away by sheer luck? I’m not very confident myself…
-XT
I think so. It doesn’t sound like they’re talking about a very large number of soldiers, so this screams “too little, too late.”
Sadly, yes. Here’s how I can imagine the decision being made:
Bush: So, Generals… do you need more troops?
Generals: Mr. President, yes we do need more troops, but it won’t really help unless you can send over 100,000 or more.
Bush: 100,000? Are you crazy? That’s impossible!!! But since you say you need more troops, I’ll send over 10,000. Now, why is it that people keep saying I don’t listen to the Generals? And I’m bipartisan, too. Some folks want a lot more troops sent over, and some want to bring them all home, so I’m splitting the difference.
Bush always HAS seemed to have a tenuous grasp of numbers anyway. Maybe its an honest mistake on his part John. 
-XT
So this is that “fuzzy math” we heard so much about in 2000?
It’s noted in the book “Fiasco” that the U.S. had violated pretty much all the rules of fighting a successful anti-insurgency war. Adding more troops will not change that.
Ricks notes that one of those rules is that the occupying force must gets its troops out amongst the people, actually living amongst them; the experts he cites refer to pretty much every successful anti-insurgency effort in recent history to support this notion. The U.S. is doing exactly the opposite in Iraq, putting all its people in a few huge fortresses, separated from the people. One (American) observer in the book notes that this means that Iraqis, who have less electricity now than they did four years ago, get to sit in the dark and look at the brightly lit fortress their occupiers live in, “and the message couldn’t be clearer.”
Another few thousands troops ain’t gonna change that.
Well, its certainly fuzzy SOMETHING. I don’t think its exclusively related to math however. 
-XT
I haven’t read the book, but this makes a great deal of sense to me. Maybe this book would be worth reading at that.
-XT
He is losing the generals and experts that he keeps saying he is listening to.
HuffPost - Breaking News, U.S. and World News | HuffPost General Casey for one. I have read there are many others. Finally,even the soldiers are questioning the policies. If the troops are being increased to retake Baghdad, it could get ugly. If they will sit in the green zone they will be irrelevant.
That’s right out of the Bush play book:
from here.
I’m not so much worried about the numbers as the mission. What looks to be “trial balloons” have been floated, a typical ploy to guage possible public reaction in advance of making a huge blunder.
On the one hand, the “80% solution” has been bandied about, the notion that we ought to throw our resources behind the Shia led government and, essentially, cooperate in the oppression of the Sunni minority. The whole purpose of such a venture would be to establish stability at any cost, which offers the opportunity to declare victory and get the hell out of Baghdodge.
It has also been suggested that the thrust of the mission would be to rout the “Mahdi militia” and the Sadrist death squads, to reassure the Sunni of our beneficit attention to their rights and needs. Theory being, if the Sadrists are routed and the “death squads” put paid to, reconciliation and moderation will bloom. Given that for all practical purposes the power of Greenzonia is dependent on precisely the Sadrist faction, this strikes me as strictly from Fantasy Island.
The third, and most insane, prospect would be to interject ourselves between the warring factions as armed umpires. Really too silly to comment upon, unless someone else would like to.
Clearly, the Ditherer has one of these missions in mind, since they are mutually exclusive. But which one? Conjecture becomes much more fascinating when the focus of conjecture has no obligation to, nor connection with, reality.
Footnote: as I’ve stated elsewhere, I believe that the whole purpose of the execution boondoggle was to provoke a desperate Sunni reaction, flush out the “Sunni insurgency” while American troops are still available to be sacrificed, errr, deployed. Even if Bush can’t read the writing on the wall, Maliki can. And it says the Americans are leaving, if you want to use them, you better use them now.
You really think al-Maliki is that clever? Saddam wasn’t that clever, and al-Maliki is no Saddam.
He doesn’t have to be. All he needs is to know somebody that clever. And if it can occur to a granola muncher like me…
Apparently Casey might be the next scapegoat.
What’s scariest about those “trial balloons” that elucidator mentions is that if the object is to obtain a more favorable outcome on the ground in Iraq, there’s no need for trial balloons here.
I know, I know - it’s really been about domestic politics for pretty much the whole time, and Iraq as an actual country with people and stuff living there has always been an afterthought. But they’re hardly bothering to hide it anymore.
Odd thought: anyone remember the November 2005 National Strategy for Victory in Iraq? That sure held up real well. Less than three months later, the Golden Dome Mosque blew up, and our strategy was defunct overnight. Fortunately, there was no urgency to come up with a new one. :rolleyes:
Riverbend’s last few posts have been, well, shrill. You can hardly blame her: her country’s gone to hell. I just pray she gets out alive.
Allow me to expand upon that (trans: let me bore you to tears with my current fixation…)
There’s nothing all that clever about it, if I could think of it, somebody else could as well. And it has a dead pony for everybody!
It has a ready-made pious rationale for the Bushiviks. The Maliki government was elected, the Iraqi people have spoken. Maliki is the legitimate ruler of an entirely sovereign nation, he has every right to crush an insurrection bent on disrupting that legitimate order.
And he would succeed. It would be bloody as all get out, house to house, root out and destroy. Maliki would be in a position to direct American firepower wheresoever he chose, collateral damage be damned. (Reminder: a form of ethnic cleansing has already proceeded, the Sunni neighborhoods…er, “insurrectionist enclaves”, much better…are more monocultural, what few Shia remain would beat feet toot sweet.) If the intelligence of Iraq swears that a particular set of buildings in chock full of “insurrectionists” and could use a nice 500lb bomb, who are we to question them? Even were we inclined to.)
If Maliki waits until the US leaves (and we will, and he knows it), he will still almost certainly win, the Sunni are outnumbered, outgunned, and isolated. But if such a counter-insurgency were to devolve into a genocide, that might invite intervention by neighboring Sunni states (Saudi, Egypt, etc.) Given the state of the Iraqi army, he would have a difficult time coping *unless * the Americans are there to cover his ass. Which they won’t be, if he waits too much longer. And they damned sure won’t come back to pull his chestnuts out of the fire.
If he figures he has to fight the Sunnis sooner or later, the time to do that is sooner. Soonest.
For the Bushiviks, it means that they can, with a straight face, claim to have established order in Iraq, mission accomplished, and if it goes straight to Hell after that, its probably Hillary’s fault. Thin gruel, to be sure, but beats abject and total humiliation.
That’s the one thing they seem to have proven they don’t want, even now, when they could use it. Things may play out this way for all I can tell; the easiest way to get stability in Iraq is either a partition or murder the Sunnis - but I don’t think anyone is planning it. If al-Maliki has smart advisors, they’re probably telling him “take the money and get thee to Tahiti!” And the word is that the Bush administration didn’t want Saddam offed this quickly, maybe because of the holiday issue or maybe because they realized how the Sunnis would feel about this rush to execution - which raises the scary possibility that the administration has a better idea of what’s going on than the Iraqi government.
Just bring them home.
If we let this devolve even further into a Sunni-Shia thing, with America on the Shi’ite side, we’d better be prepared to take into account that, outside Iran and Iraq, the Muslim world is overwhelmingly Sunni, both in the MENA region and beyond. Prince Bandar won’t want to be called “Bandar Bush” anymore.
That aside, I think the best the Shi’ites can do is push the Sunnis out of Baghdad. They’d get their asses kicked in Anbar, even more than we have. But even ‘cleansing’ Baghdad would make those Saudi princes pretty unhappy with us.