Why Surge Won't Work
January 10, 2007
In his new strategy for Iraq, President Bush has discovered that security in Baghdad is critical. Four years ago, military and diplomatic professionals warned that the U.S. was embarking on a war with insufficient troops and inadequate planning. President Bush never heard this advice, choosing to rely on the neoconservative appointees who assured him that the Iraq war would be easy.
By proposing to increase the number of troops in Iraq, Bush has again ignored his professional military advice as well as the bipartisan Iraq Study Group. Generals Casey and Abizaid, the military commanders in the field, have doubted that additional troops will make any difference in Iraq. They are being replaced by surge advocates. The Iraq Study Group unanimously recommended troop withdrawals, not escalation.
Even more amazing is the source of Bush's new strategy: the neoconservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). Four years ago, AEI beat the drums for war led by Richard Perle, who served double-duty as Chairman of the Pentagon's Defense Advisory Board. Ken Adelman, another neoconservative, asserted the takeover of Iraq would be a "cakewalk." In the December 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, Perle, Adelman, and several lesser AEI figures trashed Bush as an incompetent blaming him for screwing up their Iraq war. Perle went so far as to say that had he known of Bush's deficiencies, he would not have supported the war.
Bush, not usually known for swallowing his pride, seems to have done so in order to embrace the surge strategy of AEI military historian Frederick Kagan. The Kagan plan calls for U.S. troops to secure Baghdad's toughest neighborhoods and to take the fight to the insurgency in Anbar. Kagan would like 30,000 additional troops but Bush will probably send less.
At this late stage, 30,000 additional troops cannot make a difference. U.S. troops are ill prepared to do the policing that is needed to secure Baghdad (among other problems, they lack language skills). But, the fundamental problem is political. Bush continues to imagine that Nouri al-Maliki heads a national unity government. Everyone else understands he is a sectarian Shiite politician allied with the Shiite militias and bent on vengeance.
The surge strategy depends on the Iraqi police and military eventually taking over from the U.S. forces. This in turn assumes that Iraq's army and police are somehow exempt from the country's sectarian and ethnic divisions and can therefore be neutral guarantors of public safety. But, of course, Iraq's security forces are as polarized as the country itself, with the important distinction that the police and army have weapons and are trained to use them. The Shiite police include the death squads while the Sunni police are insurgent sympathizers or the insurgents themselves. The army is not quite as bad, but still, most battalions are more loyal to their religious or ethnic leaders than to a civilian chain of command that is itself mostly sectarian. The Saddam execution illustrated just how pervasive is the militia penetration of Iraq's security services. Since the surge proponents have no idea how to make Iraq's police and army Iraqi, they simply pretend the problem doesn't exist.
President Bush will have a tough sell for his new strategy. Aside from the plan's authors, almost no one thinks it will work. Nancy Pelosi, the new Democratic Speaker of the House, and Harry Reid, the new Democratic Senate Majority leader, sent Bush a letter opposing a surge before it had even been announced, and plenty of Republicans (especially those up for reelection in 2008) are deeply skeptical. The Bush plan is a poke in the eye of the American voters who made the 2006 election a referendum on his Iraq War.
