[derrida]

I hate doing point by point rebuttals of opinion pieces, (too many unqualified assertions and red herrings) but I'm gonna do it anyway:

"Many of us were skeptical of a surge/bump/increase for an obvious reason: Our military problems in Iraq have been tactical and strategic (too-slow training too few Iraqis, arrest/release of terrorists, too many targets off limits, patrolling in lieu of attacking, worry over our own force protection rather than securing the safety of Iraqi citizens, open borders with Syria and Iran, etc.) — and not a shortage of manpower. "

Most of these "tactical" and "strategic" military problems aren't such at all. Even if we could train a a whole nation of Iraqi young men in four weeks, it wouldn't keep them from maintaining whatever factional loyalty they have (fleeing combat, abrubtly switching sides mid-battle, demanding the release of insurgents from their chosen faction because US troops got "the wrong guys"). As for targets being "off limits," how is that anything other than a political problem stemming in part from a carte blanche policy towards the Iraqi government by the Bush admin.? "Patrolling in lieu of attacking"? Attacking what? The big building with the sign reading "Insurgents." Our intelligence gathering or our propaganda needs to be enhanced before we can start sending in those Bob Kerrey quiet guys who got 1500s on their SAT's and 0 on their personality tests to start kicking down doors and wasting motherfuckers. As for force protection, yeah, I'll give him that one, but if inevitable public backlash or costs doomed this war from the start where the fuck was VDH? Finally, Iran and Syria. I'm sure there's been an infusion of manpower and material from those countries, but Iraq already had all that, the hate and the guns, left over from the now-defunct fourth-largest military in the world.

"So the increase — no one knows whether the 20,000 number is adequate — could make things far worse by offering more targets and creating more Iraqi dependency if we don’t change our operations. But if the surge ups the ante by bringing a radical new approach on the battlefield as the president promises, then it is worth his gamble. "

I'm one of those people who is actually more conservative when I'm gambling with someone else's money, but that's just me.

"All the requisite points were made by the president, almost as if were quoting verbatim Gen. David Petraeus’s insightful summaries of counterinsurgency warfare — an Iraqi face on operations, economic stimuli, clear mission of clearing terrorists out of Baghdad, political reform, a “green-light” to go after killers — while addressing the necessary regional concerns with Syria and Iran. "

Like the last paragraph, not too much substance to address here.

"Will these “benchmarks” work? Only if the Maliki government is honest when he promises that there will be no sanctuaries for the militias and terrorists. So when the killing of terrorists causes hysteria — and it will, both in Iraq and back here at home — the Iraqi-American units must escalate their operations rather than stand down. "

Benchmarks are what you're supposed to arrive at when what you're doing is working.

"The American people will support success and an effort to win, whatever the risks, but not stasis. We saw that with the silent approval of Ethiopia’s brutal rout of the Islamists in Somalia, and our own attack on al Qaeda there.

The subtext of the president’s speech was that our sacrifices to offer freedom and constitutional government are the only solution for the Middle East — but that our commitments are not open-ended if the Iraqis themselves don’t want success as much as we do."

Here he threatens the once-treasonous act of "cutting and running." Is he suggesting that the only effective stick we have to use against the Iraqi government is threatening withdrawal from the country?

"But why believe that this latest gamble will work? First, things are by agreement coming to a head: this new strategy will work, or, given the current politics, nothing will. Second, the Iraqis in government know this time Sadr City and Baghdad are to be secured, or it is to be “see ya, wouldn’t want to be ya,” and they will be on planes to Dearborn. Finally, note the pathetic Democratic reply by Sen. Durbin, last in the public eye for his libel of American troops (as analogous to “Nazis, Soviets in their gulags, or some mad regime — Pol Pot or others”). There was no response."

Yes, yes he is. Stunning.

This is probably the dumbest paragraph. Apperently he gives even less of a shit than he let on earlier in the piece whether this makes everything worse.

If the Iraqi government gets it's way, most of the operations will be against Sunnis. They will be weakened against the Shiites who terrorize them and attempt to drive them out of their neighborhoods, and will turn ever more to al-Qaeda.

I'd really rather now just post my own thoughts on this shit. If VDH can do it, why can't I?

Saddam deployed the army to get these same factions under control, the Stalinist aspects of the state were almost all linked to the use of the army as a giant military intelligence unit on Iraqs own population. An ordinary western style army, with a small cutting edge combat force and a giant support trail on it doesn't even remotely come close to intersecting with the police and human intelligence bits that seem to be needed of an army tasked to keeping a lid on Iraq.

It's not only that peacekeeping training is no longer the focus the way it was for dealing with other theatres, the army arrived, then deployed itself for force protection and concentration and left the rest to fuck off and die. The US army has a different idea of what risk is and how best to avoid it than many others and particularly the British army. Walking around in the open and treating each attack as an individual case needing witness reports and an investigation (something they have recently started to do for US casualty cases) exposes the troops to danger in one way, but is generally more effective at eliminating single operators behind many attacks - that kind of attitude to things. Setting off this death blossom of rifle fire, killing everything that runs and hoping they get lucky (and adding the dead up as likely insurgents) was always a completely fucking ridiculous way of dealing with this, it produces the same reaction as excessive police shootings as it does anywhere else. Riots first, and if the response is kept solely to broken bones and live fire a genuine insurgency will typically emerge out of that. Saddam turned his army into the russian model political/military intelligence machine to deal with it. The US has had, well, no approach, very little none at all til recently other than self defense and bullshit PR exercises. This approach may have simply been used too long for any new decisions to be made in the minds of Iraqis about the role of the US in their country.

Unfortunately, the last decision most of them made was that the US has little positive role to play and that it does little to intervene for their protection. The raw total percentage rate of support for US presense is misleading in one way, in that everywhere they are deployed in strength they are rated poorly - not at the nearly evenly split of the whole country, but by 60 plus and over percent negative. That is not good if you are going to try and sell these people an idea of a national direction and policy using the army as the salesman, noone is going to want to buy, and, well, they haven't been, they've instead reverted to people like themselves who they trust, all of whom have quite different ideas on what is to be done. Once you have ten thousand guys with hundreds of thousands to millions citizens behind them per side, with a couple of dozen splits between them, you are getting beyond the point at which this can be tracked without reverting to ye olde fasioned police state, or turning the american armed forces into the military intelligence beast that seems to inevitably come out of very dirty occupations. If you suddenly were able to magically transport every actual real live trained cop in the US to iraq and somehow brainwash them into wanting to stay it might not even be enough to deal with the kinds of numbers of trained operatives now running around and killing each other.

Personally I think the war was lost by mid 2003, past that it was only going to go one way, a bunch of dummies had set the whole thing up so that as many different parts of the system would poke as many people in the eye as possible, as often as possible, and got rid of anyone with the temerity to suggest doing things differently. This was then all left to rust and the problems were denied and and passed on for a very long time. We are now at the point with this Rube Goldberg machine of stupid where everyone subjected to it has tetanus and severed limbs and is really pissed off at the designer. I don't think there's much useful to be done at this point, at least directly. Getting a couple of internal and external iraqi proxies up to act in the US's interests is about as much as can be usefully done now, and you don't need the whole fucking foot part of the military there for that. Leaving would be bad, though, huh?

Is victory going to look like half the country in refugee camps and the other half dead or deported?