I haven’t tackled the fundamental question in Iraq for a while. No, Mickey hasn’t scared me into silence. Since the elections, it’s simply been hard to figure out exactly what’s going on. You can read the good news here. The demise of a complete Sunni boycott of the next political phase also has to be encouraging. Buit it would surely be dumb not to notice how resilient the insurgency still is, how it has capitalized on the political drift of the past few months, and how it is as lethal as ever. My old friend, Niall Ferguson, provides a longer view. Like me, he has long believed that the war was absurdly under-manned from the beginning. Like me, he wants it to work. But some things cannot change. This is the key point:
How, then, did the British crush the insurgency of 1920? Three lessons stand out. The first is that, unlike the American enterprise in Iraq today, they had enough men. In 1920, total British forces in Iraq numbered around 120,000, of whom around 34,000 were trained for actual fighting. During the insurgency, a further 15,000 men arrived as reinforcements. Coincidentally, that is very close to the number of American military personnel now in Iraq (around 138,000). The trouble is that the population of Iraq was just over three million in 1920, whereas today it is around 24 million. Thus, back then the ratio of Iraqis to foreign forces was, at most, 23 to 1. Today it is around 174 to 1. To arrive at a ratio of 23 to 1 today, about one million American troops would be needed.
We are fighting a global war with the manpower for a minor spat. Technology can only do so much. And when you further consider that, in order to win, we need to deal with Syria and Iran at the very least, you can see the scale of our problem. Solution? At this point, I can’t see any except a major dose of luck.
The Dish 