Declaring disaster and going home

Last night I heard John McLaughlin declare operations in Iraq a thorough-going disaster and proclaim the urgency of immediate withdrawal from Iraq. Dr. McLaughlin opposed the invasion and has opposed the war in Iraq from the very outset. I just heard a similar exchange on ABC’s This Week round-table.

I don’t know for certain that Dr. McLaughlin isn’t right but it’s hard for me to figure out how he’s reaching his conclusions. Military morale among our troops seems high, particularly among those actually in the field in Iraq—don’t take my word for it read the milbloggers; reenlistment rates are strong; there have been a series of very successful operations against the insurgency along the Syrian border in recent months. Bill Roggio of The Fourth Rail’s coverage of these operations has been fantastic. The Iraqi military and police continue to have strong rates of enlistment; they’re carrying on an increasing proportion of operations; they’re carrying on operations on their own.

The morale of the insurgency seems low as evinced by the letter attributed to Zarqawi that was making the rounds last spring and the increasingly desperate attacks against mostly civilian targets. Supply lines from Syria are at last being interdicted.

Yes, a lot of time has passed. The statistic I’ve frequently heard is that it takes roughly nine years to put down an insurgency successfully. My intuition is that that’s a statement about demographics more than anything else. Discussion of “exit strategies” is enormously premature.

Yes, we’re taking casualities. Are casualties a good measure of failure? The Battle of Iwo Jima took place just 6 months before the end of World War II. In 36 days of fighting 6,825 Americans were killed and 25,851 were wounded. This should at least make you wonder about the utility of casualty counts in reckoning success. And suggests that we can’t expect a steady reduction in the number of casualties until the fighting is over.

By this I don’t mean to suggest that the Iraq conflict is in any way like World War II—only that the idea of a steady, gradual reduction in casualties has little basis. That’s not the way things work.

The Bush Administration continues to do an unutterably bad job of communicating what our objectives are, how we’re meeting those objectives, and how successful we are. Their diffidence can lose what our military has gained.

I wish that the Administration was promulgating analysis that’s half as good as what’s coming from some bloggers. I’ve already mentioned Bill Roggio who will soon be departing for Iraq to be embedded with a Marine unit serving in Anwar province. Check out the great analysis from Alexander the Average. Here’s a fantastic post on casualties. Also check out this roadmap to victory in Iraq.

Now if we can just get the Bush Administration on board.

UPDATE: This post from Jim Dunnigan of Strategy Page (hat tip: Austin Bay) is also worth a look. Here’s a sample:

First, there is definitely a terrorism problem. Not an insurgency, not a guerilla war, not a resistance. A portion of the Sunni Arab population refuses to recognize the Sunni Arab loss of power in early 2003. They are supporting a campaign of terror to either get back power or, more pragmatically, to get immunity for most Sunni Arabs for crimes committed during Saddams decades in power. The majority of support the terrorists get is from the amnesty crowd. Hundreds of thousands of Sunni Arab families have one or more members who did Saddam’s dirty work. That has left millions of Kurds and Shia Arabs looking for revenge. Remember, this is where the legal concept of “eye-for-an-eye” was invented thousands of years ago. The children of Hammurabi want their measure of vengeance, and if they get it, the current violence in Iraq will look pallid by comparison. All the prevents a wholesale descent into mutual slaughter is the presence of coalition troops. In other parts of the world (and there are many to examine at the moment) this sort of thing is called peacekeeping. Withdraw the peacekeepers, and what peace there is goes with them.

That certainly supports Collounsbury’s observations about Iraqi civil war here.

However, I think there’s a genuine insurgency going on, too. Take a look at this tiny post from Abu Khaleel of A Glimpse of Iraq, The Lone Insurgent:

He is a retired army officer in his mid fifties. He is totally convinced that America is an enemy. He has dedicated his life to expel the invaders. But he does not trust anybody, so he works alone.

He puts his AK47 machine gun and his RPG (rocket propelled grenade launcher) in the trunk of his car and roams the streets of Baghdad and the surrounding areas. He never acts rashly and waits for a good ‘hit’. When the opportunity presents itself, he makes that hit, and goes back home.

Replicate that a hundred or a thousand times and you’ll start to see the scope of the problem. There’s been a lot written in the last few years about super-empowered individuals. But there are lower levels of empowerment that can be very, very troublesome.

This is a new instance of a problem that’s been apparent since the development of atomic weaponry 60 years ago. Our moral development as a species is lagging farther and farther behind our technological development.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Obviously, I’m not the only one thinking about quagmires, etc. Joe Katzman of Winds of Change notes that Bosnia isn’t going that well, either.

5 comments… add one
  • Constance Link

    Dave, you said: “Discussion of “exit strategies” is enormously premature.”

    I respectfully disagree. Discussions of an exit strategy are woefully overdue. We never should have gone into Iraq without one. Bush & Co. thought this was going to be a cakewalk. They were arrogant and willfullly unprepared. They sought no one’s advice that differed from their objective of going to Baghdad and ousting Saddam. Our troops and their families have sacrificed greatly and performed to the best of their abilities with what they’ve been given. I bet most of them still believe Saddam had something to do with 9/11. Even though Saddam didn’t have anything to do with it, they are still heroic — every one of them. They have my respect. I don’t, however, have that same respect for Bush-Cheney and the rest of the neo-cons in this administration who got us into this war under false pretenses. Whether that was was deliberate or not, we each have to decide. I know what I believe.

  • As I’ve written quite a few times, I was opposed to the invasion of Iraq. And I think there’s been a lot of bungling since the invasion—much of it due to going to war without domestic support of the breadth or depth required to fight a campaign of the type and duration required to achieve whatever goals are actually being achieved.

    I distinguish between an “exit strategy” and a “victory strategy”. I think it’s premature for the former and long overdue for the latter. The stakes are far too high for exit without victory.

  • Ron Link

    I continue to marvel at the high level of troop morale and support for Bush among US troops. US troops in Iraq do not generally see the engagement as a quagmire, or another “vietnam”. The US press corps, on the other hand, cowering in the barrooms of Baghdad hotels, confidently proclaims the US defeated in Iraq, stuck in yet another hopeless quagmire.

    Dave points to Bill Roggio. Michael Yon is another rare source of accurate information from Iraq.

    US troops will certainly leave Iraq eventually. It is by no means certain that US troops will go from Iraq to a less hazardous posting. The world is a dangerous place, thanks to Islamic supremacy in the form of alqaida and Iran, and Chinese ascendancy and ambition toward hegemony.

  • The whole idea of an “exit strategy” has bothered me for a long time. I understand the need to find a way to avoid repeating Viet Nam, which is what led to both the current active/reserve/Guard mix and the concepts of overwhelming force and “exit strategies”, but all three of those responses to Viet Nam were fundamentally wrong, if your goal is to achieve the political goals of the Congress elected to (in part) decide on when war is justified and the President elected (in large part) to manage our wars and our foreign policy.

    The current mix of active, reserve and Guard was designed to create a force structure that would prevent the country from going to war, as it had in Viet Nam, without mobilizing the Guard and reserves, who also tend to have critical private sector jobs. The idea was to ensure that any future war could not be put onto the shoulders of a small number of draftees while the majority of the society remained unaffected. It has certainly ensured that we cannot fight large wars without activating the Guard and reserves; nor can we continue it without great effort, given the limitations on how long the Guard (and reserves?) can remain activated. However, the situation has changed markedly since the policy was originally formulated: we now have an all-volunteer military. As a result, the current structure merely ensures that going to war is incredibly disruptive of civilian police and fire fighter organizations, while also taking longer and being less efficient. Not good. This should certainly be fixed in the “transformation” projects underway within the military.

    The idea of overwhelming force, most notably shown by General Shalikashvili’s objections to the war plan (later to become a major anti-Bush talking point, and in large part the basis of the “Bush is incompetent” meme) on the grounds of it not having enough troops. As General Franks demonstrated, General Shalikashvili was simply wrong: it didn’t take a force larger than we used in 1991 to conquer Iraq. And it has not taken that large a force to get us where we are today: well on the way to defeating both the insurgency (which as an organized effort is essentially defunct) and the terrorism (still going, but hard pressed). In fact, a larger US footprint would have been helpful in occupying Iraq the way that, say, the Russians occupied Chechnya, but it would likely have been detrimental to our efforts to get Iraq to stand on its own feet. (In fact, the incoherent “anti-war” talking points simultaneously say both that we have so many troops that we are alienating the Iraqis and must withdraw them quickly, and that we have not enough troops to beat the enemy).

    As to the concept of an “exit strategy”, that’s just a nicer way of saying “planning to lose”. You exit the battlefield when your enemy is defeated; any other way of leaving is a defeat for you. In the end, you cannot win if you don’t stay, and coming up with how we are going to leave well in advance is simply not practical, unless we are willing to forego victory every time. Take, for example, the “exit strategy” for Bosnia: our troops would be out in a year. How’s that going, eh?

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