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It is said that during the American Revolution, Loyalists and British soldiers amended their national anthem with the following words:
God save great George our King,
Long live our noble King,
God Save the King!
Send him victorious,
Happy and glorius,
Long to reign over us,
God Save the King
With our current president set to announce his request for sending additional troops to Iraq, those words may take on a more than ironic flavor. It should be fairly clear to most of the world that for America, the War in Iraq is in trouble. The execution of Saddam Hussein proved we had little control over the government we had put in place.
A troop increase is probably the last card the Bush Administration has to play since it has consistently and inexplicably opposed talking with Iraq�s neighbors about an end to the war. Like Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon before him, George W. Bush does not want to go down as a president who lost a war and certainly not as a president who both started and lost a war.
Yet after the execution of Saddam, the Sunnis universally oppose us, blaming the United States for the entire fiasco including scheduling it on an important religious holiday. So we have lost the Sunnis. As for the Shiites, their contempt for us was shown by the manner in which they ignored our recommendations about Saddam�s execution and they way they carried it out. It is also shown by their belief they can order people like General Casey to do their bidding.
If the political arguments don�t sway you, let�s run the numbers. The Iraq Study Group estimated that Mokatada al-Sadr�s Mahdi Army has approximately 60,000 fighters. The Study report “found that Iraqis loyal to him dominate the 145,000-strong Facilities Protection Service, which guards the ministries of Health, Agriculture and Transportation –all controlled by al-Sadr’s political allies.” So al-Sadr alone controls a force TEN TIMES larger than the extra troops we propose to send in to control them. Throw in the 140,000 existing troops in Iraq–many of whom are support, not combat troops–and we would still be short of al-Sadr’s numbers alone.
Then there is the Badr Organization, an Iranian-trained wing of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the largest Shiite party in Iraq. The Council on Foreign Relations estimates it may have at least 10,000 fighters. On the Kurdish side there are the peshmerga, which the Council now believes comprises some 100,000 troops, and serves as the primary security force for the Kurdistan Regional Government in northern Iraq.
On the Sunni side is a formidable fighting force formed last September by General Adnan Thavit, a 63-year-old Sunni and former intelligence officer in the Iraqi Air Force who was thrown in prison for plotting a coup against Saddam Hussein in 1996. According to the Council, “Armed by the Iraqi government, the brigade has heavy ammunition, rocket-propelled grenades, and AK-47 assault rifles. Most of its 5,000 members are hand-selected by Thavit and are former members of Saddam Hussein’s elite Republican Guard.”
Combining the Council on Foreign Relations report on the Iraqi militias with what we know about the execution of Saddam Hussein yields a very scary conclusion�the Iraqi government-the one we put in place– is composed of the very people who are killing our soldiers and Iraqi civilians. Al-Sadr dominates the Facilities Protection Service. General Thavit’s Sunni army is “armed by the Iraqi government.” The Kurdish peshmerga is the primary security force in northern Iraq. In other words, “Who in Iraq is on our side?” The answer seems to be no one.
The Council report on Iraq’s militias makes sobering reading for anyone who wants a picture of what we are up against in Iraq. It should be required reading for everyone as we debate this next step. If we add up the Council�s figures of armed opposition troops in Iraq, they approach 300-500,000. To think that 20,000 more American troops will be able restore order against such formidable opposition is madness. It could end up being a contemporary equivalent to Pickett’s charge.
By the way, for those who are interested there were between 180 and 250 troops at the Alamo against about 1,400 soldiers of Santa Anna’s army. This computes to a ratio of 7-1. The current Iraq situation would probably be about 3-1 or half that. Think about that for a minute–even with the Bush increase our troops in Iraq are opposed by an enemy that outnumbers us by about half what the troops in the Alamo faced. There is also a major difference–the troops in the Alamo were in a fairly strong defensive position. In Iraq our troops will not be in a fort but roaming the streets in the Humvees.
This leads to the other way experts use to approach the numbers needed to control a guerrilla war like Iraq. It is a well-known rule of guerrilla warfare that the ratio of the forces trying to oust the guerrillas needs to be far higher than that of the guerrillas themselves. In subduing a rebellion in Malaysia that ran from 1948-1960 and is generally cited as a textbook example of how to fight a guerrilla force, the British had a troop ratio of ten to one–that is, ten British soldiers for every guerrilla. In a June 18, 2003 intelligence briefing, Dr. George Friedman, the chairman and founder of Stratfor, the world�s leading private intelligence company, noted,
The quantity of force required to contain a guerrilla operation is inherently disproportionate because the guerrilla force is dispersed over a large geographic area, and its stealth and mobility requires a much larger force to contain. Second, guerrilla war generates political realities that affect the strategic level of war.
Past histories of guerrilla wars suggest other ideas of what that ratio might be. An important and little-known article written for the Army War College by James T. Quinlivan in 1995, details the number of troops needed to secure a country in various circumstances, citing historical examples. In a prescient passage that all but describes Iraq, Quinlivan pointed out:
Unless the capital city is quickly brought under both control and visible order, the credibility–locally and globally–of the intervention as a force for stability drains away together with whatever political legitimacy the intervention possessed. Therefore, establishing control over the large populations of such cities must be a major objective at the start of any operation, from which the conclusion is that any intervention force must have large numbers at the outset of operations.
Quinlivan then comes to this stunning conclusion:
Force ratios larger than ten members of the security forces for every thousand of population are not uncommon in current operations (Northern Ireland, or even Mogadishu). Sustaining a stabilizing force at such a force ratio for a city as large as one million (or for a country as small as one million) could require a deployment of about a quarter of all regular infantry battalions in the US Army.
Estimating the current population of Baghdad is difficult, but it certainly has at least a million. Some estimate Baghdad may have as high as five million people. According to the CIA World Fact Book, the total population of Iraq itself is around 26.7 million. In other words, the numbers don’t add up, which is why we have been unable to even control Baghdad.
More troubling are reports that the Bush people plan to place the new troops not in the fortified positions that most of our troops now reside in, going out only on periodic patrols and raids, but plans to put them in the cities among the very militias they are somehow supposed to tame. This smacks of a suicide mission of the type that only desperate or mad generals use as a last resort. All this so the administration can say it tried its best.
In answer I have a proposal, let members of this administration personally go to the doors of the homes of those in that group of 20,000 who do not return alive and explain why their loved ones died.
NOTE:
By the way, it”s nice to see some Democrats following the recommendations in the post, “Time to Deal.” Now the Democrats just need to tie the troop increase to the budget.
Crossposts: My Left Wing, LeftWord,
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