Here’s an email from Iraq that gets to the heart of our current debate, it seems to me:
“First, let me start by saying how much I respect your opinions and that I enjoy reading your blog daily. I work at Multi-National Security Transition Command – Iraq, in the International Zone, where I’m a strategy development assistant for the Iraqi Security Forces.
I think that part of the problem in Iraq stems from the Administration’s fear that putting more soldiers in country would have made the case for going to war even more difficult. It was hard enough to sell the war on weak evidence of WMDs and Saddam’s involvement with the attacks of 9-11. By under-estimating the resources necessary to succeed, they avoided facing their critics and having a plan for a post-war reconstruction. Their goal was to simply get rid of Saddam and hope for the best. It would have been wiser to send a larger force to maintain stability in the country after Saddam’s fall since, if anything else, he did maintain order in the country (albeit, though fear and intimidation). The result is that the insurgents gained momentum and now it will take longer to train the nascent Iraqi Security Forces responsibility before any feasible reduction in troop levels. In the meantime, US soldiers will continue dying, not to mention innocent Iraqi civilians.
The lack of US troops in Iraq has been a disconcerting topic for many of us here. I still believe that we can defeat the insurgency with the current troop level … yet at what costs?”
I don’t think there’s much doubt any more that our occupation has been dangerously under-manned from the very beginning. Almost everyone with direct experience of the situation says so. Reading John Burns these past few days only confirms what struck me as pretty obvious from the first wave of looting. Money quote from Burns:
Among fighting units in the war’s badlands – in Falluja and Ramadi, in Haditha and Qaim, in Mosul and Tal Afar – complaints about force levels are the talk of officers and enlisted personnel alike.
The scope of the problem can be taken from the garrison in the Baghdad area. Maj. Gen. William G. Webster, commander of the Third Infantry Division, recently gave a rundown of the troops available to meet the surge of suicide bombings, buried roadside explosives and ambushes that have killed more than 600 people in the city since the new Shiite majority government took office in early May: 27,000 American troops, 15,000 Iraqi policemen and 7,000 Iraqi soldiers. Saddam Hussein, he said, had a regular garrison for the same area of 80,000 troops and 50,000 police.
Mr. Hussein ran a totalitarian state and had to worry about invasions, so direct comparisons can be misleading. Still, the fact that an American general had the statistics at his fingertips told its own story. The pattern of thin force levels seems to be replicated, in differing ways, almost everywhere Americans confront insurgents.
We’re fighting with one hand tied behind our back – and Rumsfeld tied the knot. We can only hope that our amazing troops and the Iraqis’ evident desire for a new future can somehow manage to wrestle victory from the incompetent, self-serving hands of their political masters.
The Dish 