ENOUGH TROOPS?

Here’s an argument that we have plenty of troops to do what we need to in Iraq. Count me unconvinced. One responsibility any invading army has, it seems to me, is to retain order. Once we take over authority, we have a moral obligation to ensure that mayhem isn’t the result. We didn’t simply fail to do this from the fall of Baghdad onward, we fully intended to fail. There wqas no plan to restore civil order after victory – and 12,000 Iraqis have died as a result. I don’t think anyone can seriously claim that the insurgency didn’t gain enormously from this power vacuum. Meanwhile, another alert reader queries my analogy to the successful British pacification of an Iraqi insurgency in 1920, as highlighted by Niall Ferguson. In Niall’s words,

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.

Here’s my correspondent’s argument against Ferguson:

They didn’t have native security forces then, nearly all of those men were from the Indian Army. The US has a couple of hundred thousand native allies. I think you need to add those to your number.
In addition, the British problems extended from Basra to Kurdistan – every wild character, Shiite, Sunni and Kurd, was up in arms. The US has only a subset of that population to worry about. US deployments are only in a limited area of the country.
The British were also forced to maintain large inflexible garrisons because it was terrifically difficult to move around in Iraq at the time. Their force utilization was very inefficient.
Last, the US never had the force structure to maintain many more in Iraq long term, under a peacetime economy and mobilization scheme, than it now does. The US economy would be in pretty bad shape with a “full” deployment as you desire. It isn’t prudent for longer term US strategic purposes to take an economic hit. A draft is a bad idea. What you have is what you are going to get. The solution, as it always was, is Iraqis. It will take time.

My correspondent has a point. And this thing is still winnable. But running the war in this way risks something significant: that the costs and extra time involved in fighting such a campaign on the cheap will eventually wear on Americans’ patience. We’re already seeing that with falling support for the war. Moreover, the administration told us that this was a critical venture for our very survival. If it is that critical, why take the kind of under-manning risks we’ve taken? If it isn’t critical, then why did you tell us it was? My only fear all along is that we might fail. I cannot understand why this administration would have made decisions that made this process so much harder than it might have been. If they’d called for a draft after 9/11 or for a massive influx of new soldiers, don’t you think the American people would have agreed? Instead, they aimed low and placed a great deal of reliance on hope and luck. Hope and luck can indeed win wars. But actual soldiers are more reliable.