Thoughts on Iraq

Sometime in the next few days, George Bush is going to lay out his “new direction” for Iraq. He got the recommendations from the Iraq Study Group a month ago and has been considering his options since then. I want to get my thoughts out on record before George does.

First, some background. Back in ’02, when talk of attacking Iraq first surfaced, I gave Bush the benefit of the doubt. I retired from the Navy as a cryptologist in ’99, and at that time I knew that Saddam was pretty much contained. He was a pain in the ass, but he wasn’t hurting anybody outside Iraq, and he certainly wasn’t a threat to us. Bush kept talking about the “threat” Hussein posed, and with such experienced advisors as Cheney and Rumsfeld, I figured that something new in Iraq must have come up since my retirement. As time went on, however, it became clear that there wasn’t anything new: it was the same old stuff, just repackaged with a few exclamation points thrown in to make it sound urgent. So I came down hard against the war in Iraq.

One other thing: I believed Hussein had chemical and biological weapons. Bush cited that as the “grave danger” that Hussein posed; I viewed it as a “so what”. As long as we stayed out of Iraq, our soldiers wouldn’t have to deal with them. There are lots of bad guys around the world that have bad weapons and it’s not our responsibility to go around invading them because of it. So I was angry that Bush was going to throw our troops into a chem/bio war for no reason.

Fortunately, there weren’t chem/bio/nuke weapons of any sort. Instead, there was something that was worse: strong Iraqi sectarian animosities that were contained under Hussein’s brutal rule, and absolutely no American plan for what would happen after Hussein’s overthrow. This combination has led to steadily increasing levels of violence and to the current state of low-level civil war. For three years, Bush has pretended that the situation in Iraq has been going well … maybe okay … so it’s really going well except for the damn media … umm, it’s making progress … except that progress is slower than expected … until nobody believes him anymore.

Now the situation is this:
- Iraq has a government that is essentially useless, powerless, corrupt, and incompetent.
- Various sectarian forces have stepped into the power vacuum and are escalating the “ethnic cleansing”.
- Our military is playing a game of “whack-a-mole” and is not making any real progress.
- Our military is the only real US player in the country. There’s almost no State Department representation, little/no economic or political or any other kind of help. It’s just boots on the ground.
- Our military is way overstretched, with some troops currently on their third tour in as many years. Our senior generals are saying that they’re nearly at the breaking point.
- The blue-ribbon Iraq Study Group has noted that the situation in Iraq can only be solved by Iraqis, not forced by the US.
- The Iraq Study Group recommended gradual disengagement of US military forces and increased negotiation with Syria and Iran, who are stirring the pot in Iraq.

It appears that George didn’t like the ISG’s report. So he started talking to others. And from press reports, it appears that the only people he’s listening to are the neoconservatives, who are arguing for a buildup of forces. To me, the neoconservatives have less than zero credibility: they’re a bunch of liars who got us into this mess in the first place. But neocons like to talk about “victory”, and George likes “victory”, even if he doesn’t know what it is nor how to achieve it.

Now for my viewpoint. I have been looking for a rational plan from SOMEbody in power for over three years now. I believe that we have an obligation to the world to bring stability to Iraq. It’s the old Pottery Barn rule: we broke it, we should fix it. But nobody has offered a plausible way to do that. George has one last chance this week to present one.

Everybody has been focused on troop strength. That should actually be a fallout of a rational plan. In other words, a good plan should come first, then you decide on how many people you need to implement it. I’ve seen one or two good plans, but they require far more people (50-100K) than the numbers coming out of the White House (20K).

I’m afraid that George is going to screw it up again. I think he’s looking for something he can call a “plan” that will need 20K more troops. He wants a troop increase for political reasons, so it looks like he’s doing something. He won’t draw down the troops because that’s an admission he failed. And he won’t commit the numbers that are really needed.

In my view, if he chooses not to commit sufficient resources, he chooses to let Iraq sink. If he chooses to let Iraq sink and keep the troop strength the same or bigger, then he not only fails Iraq, he fails the country by wrecking our already-overstretched Army and Marines. If he chooses to let Iraq sink and pull our troops out, at least we can start rebuilding our forces.

So the choice is to between implementing a realistic plan with sufficient resources, or pulling our troops out. Both are tough but we can live with them. Anything less than either of these choices is complete and utter failure, both now and for the long term.