Friday, December 15, 2006
The Futility of the Baghdad Surge
It appears today that the strategy of bringing in several thousand troops, and especially of adding 20,000 Americans to the forces in Baghdad for a three-month "surge" to retake the city, is now favored to win out in the strategy battles in Washington after the publication of the Iraq Study Group Report (that rejected this alternative). Several objections have been made to the more troops approach by its critics, including the difficulty the Pentagon would have in providing the forces. But it is gaining favor because the Baker report has been interpreted as as a defeatist approach and President Bush and his circle are desperate to avoid defeat in Iraq.
Unfortunately, the alternative Iraq strategy of providing more troops for a three-month "surge" that would lead to the control of Baghdad has more against it than the strain it would place on the American military. It is too often forgotten that our military forces have no experience with putting down an established insurgency in a major city. The experience of the Vietnam War will not help us here, for South Vietnam's only real city, Saigon, never posed an insurgency problem. There was never a need for a "green zone" in Saigon. With the exception of a few days during the Tet offensive and the day of the final assault by North Vietnamese tanks, Americans and Vietnamese moved about freely in the city and its immediate environs. The nearest parallel to what we appear to be planning to do in Iraq is our campaign in Falluja. We used 10,000 American and 2000 Iraqi troops and a great deal of airpower to overwhelm a city of 300,000. This suggests that to subdue Baghdad with a population of six million, we would need 200,000 American soldiers and 40,000 Iraqi troops.
It took us six weeks to win in Falluja, although at the expense of destroying the city. Most of the insurgents in the city eventually escaped before our victory to fight on elsewhere in the country. Today, Falluja does remain largely quiet. But half of its population has not returned. And the surrounding Anbar province is one of the least controlled areas in the country.
I am sure there would be less force-intensive ways to carry out the pacification of Baghdad, but I am not confident that the military has the plans, the trained personnel, or the time for such an effort.
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