Defending Iraq

If we are to prepare for a longer military stay in Iraq, which we should do, the Iraqis need to ask us to stay soon. How soon, I don't know, but to meet the end-of-the-year deadline to leave, we'll be heading for the exits months before that deadline. Our brigades are moved across the globe and in time in an elaborate game of training, equipping, moving, and deploying. We can change that, but it isn't easy and disrupts the choreography in time and space.

I still think we need at least 25,000 in Iraq for at least a decade. Say, 3 combat training and assistance brigades, special forces, and support personnel.

We have put in place at least one piece for a longer stay in Iraq with the orders for the deployment of the National Guard's 55th heavy brigade to Kuwait for convoy escort duties, which would prepare them to operate across Iraq's highways, too, to supply American forces remaining in Iraq.

We need to stay in Iraq, both to defend Iraq's borders while we train the Iraqi military for conventional warfare and to keep Iraqi politics from descending into violence to settle disputes. The Iraqis know they need us to stay in Iraq. And Secretary Gates is on the record as thinking we should stay.

But the Iraqi government has to first ask us to stay.

UPDATE: Our military really wants to stay:

Eight months shy of its deadline for pulling the last American soldier from Iraq and closing the door on an 8-year war, the Pentagon is having second thoughts.

Reluctant to say it publicly, officials fear a final pullout in December could create a security vacuum, offering an opportunity for power grabs by antagonists in an unresolved and simmering Arab-Kurd dispute, a weakened but still active al-Qaida or even an adventurous neighbor such as Iran.

The U.S. wants to keep perhaps several thousand troops in Iraq, not to engage in combat but to guard against an unraveling of a still-fragile peace.

I sincerely doubt that these are "second thoughts." It has always been clear we need to stay, and I'm sure DOD has always known that. As for several thousand or even 10 or 15 thousand troops, as one senator mentioned, I hold to needing 25,000 (all services) for now.

UPDATE: The scumbag Moqtada al Sadr's boys are protesting any idea of American forces staying after this year. Until that pig is dead or in jail, victory will be at risk.