Superb article
Rumsfeld’s Revisionism by Peter Wehner is superb, and the comments are extremely good, also. I particularly agree with comment #8, although it does not explicitly give enough credit to the Iraqis' miserable experience with Al Qaeda rule in Anbar for the success of the Surge.
Alternative history is a game of conjecture, and it can never be more than that. Here's my conjecture:
Claims that, pre-Surge, we did not have enough troops in Iraq are mistaken; we had the right number. That was the result of the "small footprint" policy, even though the rationale for that policy was badly flawed and would have failed on its own. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
The right pre-Surge number turned out to be a number sufficient to avoid complete chaos, but NOT sufficient to bring Al Qaeda under control. If we had brought enough troops to completely control the country, it would have had two bad effects:
First, it would have made us an enormous occupying army, with all the resistance and resentment that always entails. It would have created a false peace by suppression, which would have collapsed as soon as we tried to withdraw; we would have faced a disastrous fight on the way out, leaving a chaotic failure behind us.
Second, by making Al Qaeda temporarily withdraw and lie low, "enough troops" would have meant that Iraqis in Anbar and other places would not have had the awful experience of life under an AQ regime, and it would have allowed AQ to retain its mythical status as resistance fighters and liberators, instead of the murderous fanatics they are and, given the opportunity, showed themselves to be.
Having "too few" troops forced us to create the new Iraqi army as rapidly as possible, and it meant that, in the meantime, the Iraqis by direct experience became eager to see the extermination of Al Qaeda. The success of the Surge depended on both of those things, an increasingly competent Iraqi army and a population fed up with AQ. Both of those, in turn, depended on having approximately the number of pre-Surge troops we actually had there, not the much higher number advocated by John McCain and others. More troops was the correct and necessary recommendation after the conditions necessary for the success of the Surge had been established, but it was not correct before then. What was correct then was about the number we had there.
We were, I think, lucky in another way. It turned out that there really was a hunger for democracy among the majority of Iraqis, something that we hoped and assumed but could not know for a fact. But when given the opportunity to vote, they came out in large numbers even at personal risk; the response of Iraqi women was especially impressive and inspiring. Democratic leanings were initially less evident among Sunnis, who had reason not to trust the process, but we see now that similar sentiments are present among them, also. None of this had to be the case, and many observers doubted that there would be any desire for democracy in an Arab society like Iraq. If we had been wrong about the appeal of democracy, probably no quantity of troops or military strategy would have made much difference.
Byron
Alternative history is a game of conjecture, and it can never be more than that. Here's my conjecture:
Claims that, pre-Surge, we did not have enough troops in Iraq are mistaken; we had the right number. That was the result of the "small footprint" policy, even though the rationale for that policy was badly flawed and would have failed on its own. Sometimes it's better to be lucky than good.
The right pre-Surge number turned out to be a number sufficient to avoid complete chaos, but NOT sufficient to bring Al Qaeda under control. If we had brought enough troops to completely control the country, it would have had two bad effects:
First, it would have made us an enormous occupying army, with all the resistance and resentment that always entails. It would have created a false peace by suppression, which would have collapsed as soon as we tried to withdraw; we would have faced a disastrous fight on the way out, leaving a chaotic failure behind us.
Second, by making Al Qaeda temporarily withdraw and lie low, "enough troops" would have meant that Iraqis in Anbar and other places would not have had the awful experience of life under an AQ regime, and it would have allowed AQ to retain its mythical status as resistance fighters and liberators, instead of the murderous fanatics they are and, given the opportunity, showed themselves to be.
Having "too few" troops forced us to create the new Iraqi army as rapidly as possible, and it meant that, in the meantime, the Iraqis by direct experience became eager to see the extermination of Al Qaeda. The success of the Surge depended on both of those things, an increasingly competent Iraqi army and a population fed up with AQ. Both of those, in turn, depended on having approximately the number of pre-Surge troops we actually had there, not the much higher number advocated by John McCain and others. More troops was the correct and necessary recommendation after the conditions necessary for the success of the Surge had been established, but it was not correct before then. What was correct then was about the number we had there.
We were, I think, lucky in another way. It turned out that there really was a hunger for democracy among the majority of Iraqis, something that we hoped and assumed but could not know for a fact. But when given the opportunity to vote, they came out in large numbers even at personal risk; the response of Iraqi women was especially impressive and inspiring. Democratic leanings were initially less evident among Sunnis, who had reason not to trust the process, but we see now that similar sentiments are present among them, also. None of this had to be the case, and many observers doubted that there would be any desire for democracy in an Arab society like Iraq. If we had been wrong about the appeal of democracy, probably no quantity of troops or military strategy would have made much difference.
Byron
posted by Byron | Wednesday, November 26, 2008
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