General, can I follow up on that? Western Iraq, in Anbar province, there's been a number of stories in recent weeks quoting Marine officers, on the record, saying quite simply there aren't enough troops in Anbar province to deal with the threat and to deal with the size of Anbar province and the territory. And yet, from the podium we hear all the time that there's plenty of U.S. troops in Iraq and that there's no shortage of troops. Can you explain the disconnect? I mean, are you hearing anything similar from Marines in Anbar province, that they're just short men?
They've resurrected their complaint that we invaded Iraq with too few troops and that this is the reason for our continuing problems in Iraq.
Nice theory, but it founders on two basic flaws. First, the call to add more troops—to double them as Tom Friedman recently advocated—assumes we are losing and must add troops to win. Contrary to this assumption, we are most clearly winning. Second, the call for more troops assumes Iraq is largely a military problem. Counter-insurgency is a political problem that military means buy time to achieve.
Remember that in the invasion we overwhelmed the Iraqi military and seized Baghdad without a bloody siege while suffering few casualties. Just how would more troops have made this outcome better? Clearly, we had enough troops to defeat Saddam's military.
But since the invasion and immediate aftermath, the critics say, we have had too few troops for counter-insurgency. So, that means we are losing? Not quite. We have contained the insurgency to the Sunni heartland, defeated the fool al-Sadr, and split the Sunni resistance. All with military means in a campaign that historically speaking has been low cost in battle deaths.
Could more troops on the ground have stopped the looting in the immediate aftermath of the fall of Baghdad? Well not if they didn't shoot a few hundred Iraqi civilians to send a message. Otherwise we would have just had more troops standing around watching looting. Shooting was the key, not how many were doing the shooting—or doing the watching. Besides, the assumption is that the looting emboldened the defeated Baathists to begin an insurgency when in fact the insurgency was planned prior to the war. Under these circumstances, would shooting looters have simply given the enemy a propaganda coup to enflame resistance? Good grief, we catch hell from Amnesty International for our kid-gloves treatment of prisoners at Gitmo and earned hatred for treatment at Abu Ghraib that would have been seen as mild hazing in a 1950s college fraternity initiation ritual.
Alternatively, we are told that the looting wrecked the economy and hamstrung our post-war reconstruction. But in fact the problem with Iraq's infrastructure was the neglect it suffered under since Saddam took power and embarked on foreign military adventures. Given how careful we were to avoid destroying anything of civilian value, if Iraq had invested in the infrastructure over the prior 25 years, some looting of office furniture, computers, and a few museum artifacts would have been put right rather quickly. Iraq's economy was not a rebuilding problem—it is a building problem.
And what of the consequences of adding more troops to Iraq? We couldn't do it without breaking our ground forces so we'd need more troops in an expanded Army and Marine Corps. We'd have had to mobilize the entire Army Reserves and Army National Guard as well to have troops until the new troops are raised, equipped, and trained. Would our public have accepted the financial and human costs of this move? And more troops in Iraq would have meant more casualties. More troops sitting in road blocks? Targets. More convoys on the road to supply the additional troops? More targets. With home morale going wobbly as it is, would higher casualties have made our staying power problem better or worse? Or are advocates of larger troop commitments saying that these additional troops would have allowed us to militarily defeat the enemy and suppress the insurgency over the last two years? I think that is far fetched.
This assumption of needing a military victory is related to the second major error of the troop increase advocates. Winning the Iraq insurgency is not a military task. Mr. Dirita stated this clearly:
It's -- you know, we've from the beginning laid out -- the president has laid out some objectives with respect to Iraq and its transition. He's talked about the transfer of sovereignty, which happened. It happened almost one year ago -- and since then, a great deal of political development, which was another objective. In other words, transfer sovereignty to the Iraqi government and then let that Iraqi government start developing, which it's doing. It has had several major milestones of electoral actions. It'll have more going forward, and they're scheduled. And there's a constitution -- a law that allows for that.I've argued since the insurgency got going that the key was getting the Iraqis to fight while we pulled into the background in reserve. Would the Iraqis have liked it if we thoroughly Americanized the fight? No. Having a quarter million American troops in Iraq would have alienated Iraqis and discouraged effective Iraqi contributions to the fight. Iraqis would have been content to let us fight and would have hedged their bets by staying neutral. In time, more people would have decided that we were an occupying power and sided with the insurgents. If we had turned this into a pure occupation of all Iraq, even 250,000 would have been insufficient and we'd have had to double that again to get enough troop density. And to what end? To crush all Iraqis instead of liberating the Shias and Kurds while giving Sunnis a chance to join a free Iraq? Our goal was to free Iraq—not occupy it. Troop density arguments are more useful when talking about suppressing a hostile population, I think. We had 80% of Iraqis on our side or leaning toward us, and a too high profile would have alienated all but a small number of Iraqis.
Greater involvement by the international community -- that's happening. NATO has a training mission in Iraq. The coalition remains more or less about where it is, with 30-plus or -minus countries involved.
Continued effort in the reconstruction of Iraq -- and that's happening. We're -- we've probably expended or at least obligated to expend, I would say, something south of $10 billion and heading further.
And then the development of the Iraqi security forces.
So there's no military definition of success. The definition of success is those things: the Iraqi government taking responsibility for its own decisions, which it's increasingly doing; reconstruction continuing, which is going on. Sovereignty has already occurred. So those things will happen.
Yes, the resistance still attacks at rates that have remained constant over the last year. This does not mean we are in a stalemate in the war. Looking at it from the enemy's point of view, over the last year the insurgents have been unable to expand the insurrection beyond the Sunni base and have been unable to stop us from creating a new Iraqi government and military. It has been a military stalemate but that benefits us. A battlefield stalemate means that our military has provided the shield and bought the time to build up the political strength that is the real means to defeating the insurgency. This press briefing put it nicely and shows the DOD is certainly aware of this. I’m glad Dirita noted it:
And that is -- but keep in mind -- look at it from the terrorists' perspective. They are doing all these attacks, and yet transitional administrative law, the transition of sovereignty, 165,000 Iraqi security forces. So if you're looking at it from the terrorists' perspective and saying, What do we have to do? These people aren't stopping, they're moving forward and they're going to take control of this country and they're going to have their own security forces.
So I just turn the question back around. If you asked this question on May 1st, 2003, what's the progress, and we said, Well, at a certain point in time we want to have the Iraqis have their own sovereignty, we want to have the 165,000 security forces, it would have been fair at that point to say, Well, how the heck do you get there? But now we're there.
We've bolstered our standing with the Shias, kept the Kurds with us, started building Iraqi governmental and security forces, enticed the Sunnis to think about ending the insurgency, and have begun to rebuild the economy. The enemy has failed to inspire a national resistance against us and instead has provided a foreign jihadi enemy that Shias, Kurds, and Sunnis can all hate.
We've done all this without all the extra troops some say we need to win. Just because some commanders say they’d like more troops doesn’t mean we need more troops. Any commander would like more troops. Their job is to carry out the narrow military mission. They are not the theater commander nor the grand strategist. On the tactical level, any commander wants more troops. As General Conway said:
And I'm not saying that we're not taking them seriously. I'm simply saying that their perspective is that of a lieutenant or a captain; it deals with their immediate surroundings and doesn't always take into account the large picture and some of the things that their commanders are doing to try to facilitate their concerns.
Remember, we are winning with our current strategy. I think the burden of proof is on those who want more troops to explain what they'd do with them; where we'd get them; and how we'd maintain a larger combat force in the Army and Marine Corps. Then I'd want them to explain how our current victory path would be smoother with more troops and show that we wouldn't undermine what we've accomplished thus far.
Our weakness does not lie in Iraq. It is at home.
