Troop Surge in Iraq: Just Another Escalation
January 10, 2007
The reemergence of the discredited neoconservatives who promoted the invasion of Iraq and the elevation of Lt. Gen. David Petraeus to the top command position in Iraq means that President Bush is poised to escalate U.S. troop levels in Iraq, a policy the majority of the American public opposes.
Most prominent among advocates of escalation are Frederick Kagan and Gen. Jack Keane (Ret.), who penned an American Enterprise Institute (AEI) report, "Choosing Victory: A Plan for Success in Iraq," that is exerting disproportionate influence over Bush's new Iraq policy. Kagan and Keane's recommendation to "secure the Iraqi population" dovetails perfectly with the focus of the new Army counterinsurgency field manual principally written by none other than Lt. Gen. Petraeus.
With Petraeus about to run the military show in Iraq, Kagan and Keane's proposal to pump additional American soldiers into Baghdad and al Anbar province seems to have gained a strong foothold within an administration grasping for straws.
The problem is, after years of flawed strategy and bad tactics that alienated the vast majority of Iraq's population, troop escalation is too late.
The escalation policy calls for two measures: injecting five brigades into Baghdad to protect the capital city's population while simultaneously adding two brigades in al Anbar to focus on aggressive, offensive counterinsurgency missions.
An obvious weakness of this plan is that focusing on securing Baghdad could simply push insurgents out of the city and into the surrounding provinces of al Anbar, Diyala, and Salah ad Din. Since the force ratios required to protect civilians in these sparsely populated regions are beyond American capacity, the U.S. will get stuck playing provincial "whack-a-mole": insurgents will be suppressed in one area only to reemerge somewhere else.
For evidence that a troop escalation will probably fall short, just look at recent history. Besides Operation Together Forward, which failed to secure Baghdad during fall 2006, the U.S. added at least 10,000 additional soldiers within a single month on three previous occasions in Iraq: March 2004 to prepare for the Iraqi Governing Council signing the interim constitution; December 2004 to prepare for electing the National Assembly; and October 2005 to prepare for the constitutional referendum.
These three "surges" all turned out the same: no effect the first month, drastically increased violence the second month, and a temporary reduction in insurgent activity the third month. The data suggest that a troop surge is not a permanent fix--it is a renewed military commitment that will likely catalyze more violence against both American soldiers and Iraqi civilians during the initial and transition phases. In layman's terms, things will get worse in Iraq and there is no guarantee they will ever get better.
Sectarian violence has also intensified since the American troop increase in October 2005. Sparked in large part by the bombing of the al Askariya "Golden Mosque" in Samarra on February 22, 2006, the insurgency is now estimated to be 20,000-30,000 strong, including numerous renegade militias and up to 2,000 foreign fighters. Injecting additional American soldiers into this raging tempest is a gamble that will undoubtedly fail once again.
The danger that Iraq will slip even further into chaos if the U.S. leaves is a legitimate concern, but three quarters of Iraqis believe that violence will subside once American troops leave. An unstable Iraq doesn't just threaten the U.S. but all the surrounding Middle Eastern countries. Anyone who depends on Gulf energy resources has a stake in the outcome.
The difficulty up until this point has been that the free rider problem is plaguing the international community just as much as it is plaguing the Iraqi Security Forces. If American allies insist on free riding when it comes to the emerging humanitarian crisis in Iraq, they will be historically correct in blaming the U.S. but morally wrong if we pull out and Iraqi Security Forces fail, opening the floodgates of spreading violence in the Middle East.
As prideful as we are as Americans, it is time to admit that we need help in Iraq. Chaos will continue unless the international community lends a hand. The U.S. must begin leaving Iraq to force both the Iraqis and the international community to step up to the plate. The U.S. will be castigated and our international reputation may suffer, but we can lick our wounds, recover, and reemerge as a wiser superpower more cognizant of the role multilateralism should play in future American foreign policy.
