[BretLudwig]

Surging to Defeat

Petraeuss strategy only postponed the inevitable.

by Andrew J. Bacevich

"The United States today finds itself with too much war and too few
warriors. We face a large and growing gap between our military commitments
and our military capabilities. Something has to give.

Although violence in Iraq has decreased over the past year, attacks on
coalition and Iraqi security forces continue to occur at an average rate
of 500 per week. This is clearly unacceptable. The likelihood that further
U.S. efforts will reduce violence to an acceptable level€”however one
might define that term€”appears remote.

Meanwhile, our military capacity, especially our ability to keep
substantial numbers of boots on the ground, is eroding. If the surge is
working as some claim, then why not sustain it? Indeed, why not reinforce
that success by sending another 30 or 60 or 90,000 reinforcements?

The answer to that question is self-evident: because the necessary troops
dont exist. The cupboard is bare.

Furthermore, recent improvements in security are highly contingent. The
Shiite militias, Sunni insurgents, and tribal leaders who have agreed
to refrain from violence in return for arms, money, and other concessions
have by no means bought into the American vision for the future of Iraq.
Their interests do not coincide with our own, and we should not delude
ourselves by pretending otherwise.

It is as if, in an effort to bring harmony to a fractious, dysfunctional
family, we have forged marriages of convenience with as many of that
familys members as possible. Our disparate partners will abide by their
vows only so long as they find them convenient.

Unfortunately, partial success in reducing the level of violence has not
translated into any substantial political gains. Recall that the purpose
of the surge was not to win the war in a military sense. Gen. David
Petraeus never promised victory. He and any number of other senior
officers have assessed the war as militarily unwinnable. On this point,
the architects of the surge were quite clear: the object of the exercise
was not to impose our will on the enemy but to facilitate political
reconciliation among Iraqis.

A year later, signs of genuine reconciliation are few. In an interview
with the Washington Post less than a month ago, General Petraeus said that
€œno one€� in the U.S. government €œfeels that there has been sufficient
progress by any means in the area of national reconciliation.€� While it
may be nice that the Kurds have begun to display the Iraqi flag alongside
their own, to depict such grudging concessions as evidence of an emerging
national identity is surely to grasp at straws.

So although the level of violence has subsided somewhat, the war remains
essentially stalemated. Iraq today qualifies only nominally as a sovereign
nation-state. It has become a dependency of the United States, unable to
manage its own affairs or to provide for the well-being of its own people.
As recent events in Basra have affirmed, the Iraqi army, a black hole into
which the Pentagon has poured some $22 billion in aid and assistance,
still cannot hold its own against armed militias.

The costs to the United States of sustaining this dependency are difficult
to calculate with precision, but figures such as $3 billion per week and 30
to 40 American lives per month provide a good approximation.

What can we expect to gain in return for this investment? The Bush
administration was counting on the Iraq War to demonstrate the viability
of its Freedom Agenda and to affirm the efficacy of the Bush Doctrine of
preventive war.

Measured in those terms, the war has long since failed. Rather than
showcasing our ability to transform the Greater Middle East, Operation
Iraqi Freedom has demonstrated just the opposite. Using military power as
an instrument for imprinting liberal values in this part of the world has
produced a failed state while fostering widespread antipathy toward the
United States.

Rather than demonstrating our ability to eliminate emerging threats
swiftly, decisively, and economically€”Saddam Husseins removal
providing an object lesson to other tyrants tempted to contest our
presence in the Middle East€”the Iraq War has revealed the limits of U.S.
power and called into question American competence. The Bush Doctrine
hasnt worked. Saddam is long gone, but were stuck. Rather than
delivering decisive victory, preventive war has landed us in a quagmire.

The abject failure of the Freedom Agenda and the Bush Doctrine has robbed
the Iraq War of any strategic rationale. The war continues in large part
because of our refusal to acknowledge and confront this loss of strategic
purpose.

The great theologian Reinhold Niebuhr observed, €œEven the wisest
statecraft cannot create social tissue. It can cut, sew, and redesign
social fabric to a limited degree. But the social fabric upon which it
works must be €˜given.€�

In Iraq, to the extent that any meaningful social fabric has ever existed,
events have now shredded it beyond repair. Persisting in our efforts to
stitch Iraq back together will exhaust our Army, divert attention from
other urgent problems at home and abroad, and squander untold billions,
most of which we are borrowing from foreign countries.

To close the gap between too much war and too few warriors, we must reduce
our commitments. That means ending the U.S. combat role in Iraq. It means
exerting ourselves, primarily through diplomatic means, to limit the
adverse consequences caused by our ill-advised crusade in Iraq. It also
means devising a new strategy to address the threat posed by violent
Islamic radicalism, to replace the failed strategy of the Freedom Agenda
and the Bush Doctrine.

This reformulation of strategy should begin with an explicit abrogation of
preventive war. It should include a candid recognition that invading and
occupying an Islamic nation in the hope of transforming it qualifies as a
fantasy.

There are people of good will who will disagree with this assessment. They
will insist that we have no choice but to persevere in Iraq€”although to
say that the worlds sole superpower has €œno choice€� in the matter
suggests a remarkable failure of imagination. They will insist further
that restoring the social fabric of Iraq€”engineering the elusive
political reconciliation that will stabilize the country€”remains an
imperative. Such counsel seems certain to exacerbate the problem of having
too much war and too few warriors. War is the realm of uncertainty,
however. Theres always some chance of catching a lucky break. Perhaps
next year the Iraqis will get their act together and settle their internal
differences. Perhaps next year Congress will balance the federal budget.
Such developments are always possible. They are also highly unlikely.

When it comes to Iraq, a far more likely prospect is that if the United
States insists on continuing its war there, it will get what it wants: the
war will continue indefinitely. According to General Petraeus, a
counterinsurgency is typically a 10 to 12-year proposition. Given that
assessment, and with the €œsurge€� now giving way to a €œpause,€� U.S.
combat operations in Iraq could easily drag on for another five or 10
years. A large-scale U. S. military presence might be required for two or
three decades.

In that event, a conflict that already ranks as the second longest in our
history will claim the title of longest. Already our second most expensive
war, it will become the costliest of all. On one point at least, Donald
Rumsfeld will be able to claim vindication: Iraq will indeed have become a
€œlong slog.€�

For the United States to pursue this course would qualify as an epic
misjudgment. Yet if our political leaders insist on the necessity of
fighting this open-ended war, then they owe it to those who have already
borne five years of combat to provide some relief.

Bluntly, if the countrys leaders in Washington are unable or unwilling
to reduce the number of wars in which U.S. forces are engaged, then surely
they ought to increase the number of warriors available to fight them.

Today, in a nation that according to President Bush is €œat war,€�
approximately one half of 1 percent of the population is in uniform. The
present course, which involves soldiers going back for their third and
fourth combat tours while the rest of the country heads to the mall, will
break the Army before it produces policy success. Worse, our present
strategy€”in which a few give their all while most give nothing€”is
morally indefensible.

If the war in Iraq is as important as some claim, then sustaining that war
merits a commitment on the part of the American people, both to fight the
war and to pay for it. If neither the American people nor their political
leaders are willing to make such a commitment, then the war clearly does
not qualify as genuinely important. Our loudly proclaimed determination to
€œsupport the troops€� rings hollow.

The choice is one that we can no longer afford to dodge: its either
less war or more warriors."

http://www.amconmag.com/2008/2008_04_21/article1.html

--
Message posted using http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/group/rec.audio.opinion/
More information at http://www.talkaboutaudio.com/faq.html