What’s 20,000 More Troops Going to Accomplish?
November 22, 2006
There’s a certain amount of insanity surrounding the talk about sending 20,000 more U.S. troops to Iraq.
We already have 144,000 troops there.
Waging war in Iraq is not like storming Stalingrad.
This is not conventional warfare; it’s not even a conventional insurgency or your traditional civil war.
It’s a mutant organism.
There are about 20,000 mercenaries—I’m sorry, I mean contractors—there.
And about 7,000 British troops.
That’s 171,000 total.
How’s adding another 12% going to be decisive?
Iraq is falling apart, and 20,000 additional troops can’t put it back together again.
In October, a record number of Iraqis—3,709—were killed. With a vicious cycle of sectarian violence on top of the insurgency, the idea that 20,000 more troops can do much of anything is deluded.
And what’s all this talk about making a “final push”?
As Rahul Mahajan, author of Full Spectrum Dominance, recently noted, waging war in Iraq is not like storming Stalingrad.
This is not conventional warfare; it’s not even a conventional insurgency or your traditional civil war.
It’s a mutant organism: part religious civil war, part blood feud, part intra-ethnic jockeying, part homegrown insurgency, plus a foreign jihad all rolled into one.
So who are the U.S. troops going to be protecting? The Iraqi government?
But it’s not a government, in any real sense of the world, as Mahajan noted in a talk November 16. The government itself is made up of many factions, with their own militias, which have infiltrated the army and the police. By aiding the army and police by day, the United States ends up aiding some of those militias by night.
There is no large number of Iraqi policemen or troops that puts loyalty to the nation above parochial allegiances.
Now the United States says it wants more U.S. trainers. But as Thomas E. Ricks notes in The Washington Post on November 21, “The U.S. military’s effort to train Iraqi forces has been rife with problems, from officers being sent in with poor preparation to a lack of basic necessities such as interpreters and office materials.”
Finding good interpreters may be harder than you think. “They couldn’t speak English,” one lieutenant colonel told Ricks. Those who can are in shorter and shorter supply.
Because they’re being killed off.
“Iraqi interpreters working with the British army in Basra are being hunted down and killed, according to the Iraqi police,” Phil Sands reported for the San Francisco Chronicle on November 20. “At least 21 have been kidnapped and shot in the head over the last month.” This, after getting letters warning them not to cooperate with the occupation.
And that’s in the south of Iraq, where things are supposed to be going well.
The United States is in a no-win situation in Iraq. The American people realize that. We must now pressure our political leaders to wake up, face facts, and withdraw.
Adding 20,000 more U.S. troops will not solve anything.
But it will have one effect.
More U.S. troops will die.