Iraq "Surge" Will Last For Years

You might be wondering what I mean exactly by the title of this post. Its not a prediction that we will stay in Iraq for many years to come for the simple reason that presidents will change and a new president or perhaps even a bold Congressional move right now can interrupt the new "surge" plan being implemented by Gen. Petreaus.

What I mean is that as it stands with the current plan being implemented, many years (past President Bush's term) will be required. All which makes me wonder what Petreus thinks. He must know that he doesn't have all those years. Someone is going to stop this war -- either Congress or a newly elected President (please please let it be a Democrat).

And it’s not just me making these assertions up wholesale (I'm just not that clever and informed in counterterror and counterinsurgency to the level of the experts).

There are others:

As Democrats and Republicans back home try to outdo each other with quick-fix plans for the withdrawal of U.S. troops and funds, what few people seem to have noticed is that Gen. David Petraeus’s new “surge” plan is committing U.S. troops, day by day, to a much deeper and longer-term role in policing Iraq than since the earliest days of the U.S. occupation. How long must we stay under the Petraeus plan? Perhaps 10 years. At least five. In any case, long after George W. Bush has returned to Crawford, Texas, for good.

But don’t take my word for it. I’m merely a messenger for a coterie of counterinsurgency experts who have helped to design the Petraeus plan—his so-called “dream team”—and who have discussed it with NEWSWEEK, usually on condition of anonymity, owing to the sensitivity of the subject. To a degree little understood by the U.S. public, Petraeus is engaged in a giant “do-over.”

It is a near-reversal of the approach taken by Petraeus’s predecessor as commander of multinational forces in Iraq, Gen. George Casey, until the latter was relieved in early February, and most other top U.S. commanders going back to Rick Sanchez and Tommy Franks. Casey sought to accelerate both the training of Iraqi forces and American withdrawal. By 2008, the remaining 60,000 or so U.S. troops were supposed to be hunkering down in four giant “superbases,” where they would be relatively safe.

Under Petraeus’s plan, a U.S. military force of 160,000 or more is setting up hundreds of “mini-forts” all over Baghdad and the rest of the country, right in the middle of the action. The U.S. Army has also stopped pretending that Iraqis—who have failed to build a credible government, military or police force on their own—are in the lead when it comes to kicking down doors and keeping the peace.

And that means the future of Iraq depends on the long-term presence of U.S. forces in a way it did not just a few months ago. “We’re putting down roots,” says Philip Carter, a former U.S. Army captain who returned last summer from a year of policing and training in the hot zone around Baquba. “The Americans are no longer willing to accept failure in order to put Iraqis in the lead. You can’t let the mission fail just for the sake of diplomacy.”

In essence this plan is taking us down a road of increasing reliance -- without even the facade of trying to use Iraqi forces -- to "fix" Iraq. A proposition that will take years.

The interesting thing about this approach is:

Moving away from "superbases" towards the establishment of "mini-forts" is very proper and effective counterinsurgent tactics.

Counterinsurgencies must be run from among the population of the occupied nation; the soldiers must live operate and closely associate and understand the neighborhoods and the people. In that sense the "mini-fort" approach that Gen. Petraues is trying to implement fits right in with proper counterinsurgency tactics. And there really should be no surprise as this guy literally wrote the book on Counterinsurgencies for the Army.

From page 2 of article

“This is the right strategy: small mini-packets of U.S. troops all over, small ‘oil spots’ [of stability] spreading out. It’s classic counterinsurgency,” says one of the Army’s top experts in irregular warfare, who helped draft the counterinsurgency manual that Petraeus produced while commander at Fort Leavenworth last year—the principles of which the general is applying to Iraq. “But it’s high risk and it’s going to take a long time.”

These "inkblot" tactics are something I've talked about before in describing Gen. Petreaus' likely approach. If you want a good refresher on Counterinsurgency tactics and theory -- including the "inkblot" theory and the "mini-fort" tactic, take a quick read of another of my past posts here.

And I'll disagree with the wisdom of this surge for the same reason that I did in the first of my blog post I just referenced.

At this late state though, the civil war is here, the sides are polarized, the situation to far gone and deadly for us to try and start at square one with a good commander. The time frame in which Petraeus's tactics could have done some good have long since passed. The US was too busy in those days doing all it could to turn the Iraqi people away from them and into the arms of their Sunni or Shia brethren. Using heavy-handed tactics, humiliating Iraqi males in front of their families.

The insurgency is too well established, to well supported to effectively deal with in a manner other than political in nature (or with hundreds of thousands of combat troops we wont send). The various sectarian militias and groups are likewise. I salute Gen. Petraeus for valiantly accepting such a hard and I would argue impossible assignment. I just hope that he doesn't get ultimately blamed and his military record besmirched by what will likely be a lack of success. He was given an utterly difficult problem to deal with due to a mismanaged EVERYTHING before his term.

It’s really a change in tactics that has come too late to actually succeed. In any case it would take years of commitment that the US people are not willing to tolerate, doesn't have no where near the amount of combat troops required to make it have a chance to work (in fact we do not have enough combat troops period in the Army right now to make it succeed), and the likely outcome is failure in any case because it is just too late in the game to "fix" a situation that has spiraled beyond our ability to stabilize.

Brilliant commander that General Petreaus may be, he is not a miracle worker. We should not be engaging in actions that only serve to further deepen our involvement in Iraqi stability. We have to be working in the opposite direction: We need to start reducing our presence and our role with the eventual goal of leaving Iraq within 1 and a half year, give or take a few months.

This strategy is literally starting at square one, but this is not square one, this is four years of bombing, deaths, attacks, and fuck ups past square one. We do not have another 10 to 15 years -- required of most counterinsurgencies -- to fix this problem. We need to leave Iraq soon, and this surge only promises to involve us ever deeper.