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3 The myth of more in
Iraq By Michael Schwartz
The recent election in the US launched a
new era in Iraq policy, including a new
assertiveness by the Democrats and visible
soul-searching among at least some Republicans.
The news is filled with a sense of impending
change: the Democrats are finally claiming the
front pages with promises of dramatic new
departures and scads of investigations once they
take control of Congress.
James A Baker's
Iraq Study Group (ISG) has released its eagerly
awaited recommendations for a new policy in Iraq;
a new defense
secretary, Robert Gates,
himself a critic of deposed secretary Donald
Rumsfeld's Middle Eastern policies, has been
confirmed; and the president has officially
abandoned his "stay the course" posture in favor
of a new mantra of "flexibility".
But
beneath this ferment lies an unfortunate
continuity with pre-election reality: the myth of
more. Almost without exception, whatever proposals
are being floated about changing Iraq policy avoid
mentioning, or explicitly reject, the idea that
the United States should abandon its three-year
old attempt to occupy Iraq and actually withdraw
its troops. Instead, each new suggestion or set of
recommendations calls for the US to do not less,
but a whole lot more of something that is already
a part of existing policy.
Among the most
commonly heard cries for more are the calls for
more Iraqi troops to replace overstrained American
combat forces, or more American advisers to insure
the capability and growth of Iraqi combat units,
or more American troops assigned to Baghdad to win
back the streets of the Iraqi capital, or more
marines in al-Anbar province to quell the rising
tide of violence in that heartland of the Sunni
insurgency, or more Congressional oversight to
ensure that the administration is following a
constructive course in the Middle East.
Even the negative proposals being raised
rest on demands for more. Demands that the US set
a timetable for withdrawal or redeployment to
non-conflict areas are explained as a way to force
the Iraqi government to take more responsibility
for the country's security; and calls for that
government to dismantle the religious militias all
involve demands that more Iraqi police be assigned
to the neighborhoods where these militias operate.
The terrible problem is that all these
proposals and many others that pop up daily in the
media rest on the assumption that the American
presence, however much it has failed, is
nonetheless ameliorating intractable internal
problems among the Iraqis.
This is the
fundamental fallacy of the myth of more. In fact,
the American invasion and occupation of Iraq have
visited a series of plagues on both the Iraqi and
the American people - and on the world as a whole;
and these plagues will have no hope of
amelioration until the US military genuinely
withdraws from that country or is expelled.
To
demonstrate that this sad observation is true,
let's explore just two of the proposals that
derive from the myth of more in order to expose
the underlying corruption of the policy upon which
it rests.
Fallacy 1: Once
more Iraqi troops are trained, both the insurgency
and the American presence will decline
Until just before the November
election, Bush's mantra was: "As the Iraqis stand
up, we will stand down." In translation this
meant, more Iraqi soldiers would result in a
reduction in the fighting between the American
military and the insurgency, leading to a
reduction in US troop levels in Iraq.
The
underlying logic of this argument, though rarely
stated, is straightforward and intuitive. It rests
on the assumption that the fundamental building
block of the war is ferocious violence visited by
insurgents upon local citizens in order to take
control of Iraqi cities. Naturally, it follows
that US (and Iraqi) troops, responding to this
violence, must enter urban areas and chase the
insurgents out of town or into hiding.
Unfortunately, in this portrait, when the
troops leave, the insurgents and the violence
invariably return. So ... if only we could add
larger numbers of well-trained Iraqis, who could
be stationed in such pacified city neighborhoods
permanently, the violence would assumedly not be
able to reestablish a foothold. More Iraqi troops,
in other words, would mean less violence.
This certainly seems quite logical. The
only problem is that this logic does not work in
practice, not on the streets of Iraq's cities.
Between the fall of 2004 and the fall 2006,
American military sources reported that the number
of combat-ready Iraqi Army troops actually
increased in number from about 40,000 to 130,000.
The latter number is a hair's breadth away
from the 137,000 target figure long ago
established by the US military as the necessary
threshold for Iraqi security; and yet this
threefold increase has not resulted in the
promised reductions in the level of insurgent
activity.
Instead, during the same period,
military attacks by insurgents at least kept pace
with the numbers of troops being "stood up",
recording a threefold increase, from about 50 per
day to about 150 per day, while the number of car
bombs and roadside explosives (or IEDs) doubled.
Nor, as is obvious, have the number of American
troops in the country declined. They have remained
at about 140,000 during the entire period.
Let's review this paradox. In a time when
the Brookings Institute reported that Iraqi
military strength increased by slightly less than
90,000 troops and American troops remained steady
at 140,000, the insurgency dramatically increased
in intensity. In this case more actually seemed to
work in favor of the insurgents. Why didn't a
larger presence result in a greater suppression of
insurgent violence for longer periods of time?
Solving this paradox requires
understanding the fundamental horror of Bush
administration policy in Iraq: American troops are
not quelling violence; they are creating it.
Instead of entering a violent city and restoring
order, they enter a relatively peaceful city and
create violence. The accurate portrait of this
situation - as described, for instance, by Nir
Rosen in his book In the Belly of the Green
Bird, is that the most hostile anti-American
cities like Tal Afar and Ramadi have generally
been reasonably peaceful when US troops are not
there.
They are ruled by local leaders in
league with local guerilla fighters. The
insurgents - most often organized into armed
militias - provide policing functions, as well as
enforcing the (usually fundamentalist) religious
laws that are currently dominant in both Sunni and
Shi'ite areas of Iraq.
These cities do not
accept the sovereignty of the Iraqi government
