Thread: Iraq And The Polls

Los Angeles Times
June 23, 2005

Why The Rebels Will Lose

By Max Boot

The rebels lack a unifying organization, ideology and leader. There is no Iraqi Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro or Mao Tse-tung. The top militant is Abu Musab Zarqawi, a Jordanian who has alienated most of the Iraqi population, even many Sunnis, with his indiscriminate attacks on civilians.

Support for the insurgency is confined to a minority within a minority — a small portion of Sunni Arabs, who make up less than 20% of the population. The only prominent non-Sunni rebel, Muqtada Sadr, has quietly joined the political process. The 80% of the population that is Shiite and Kurdish is implacably opposed to the rebellion, which is why most of the terror has been confined to four of 18 provinces.

Unlike in successful guerrilla wars, the rebels in Iraq have not been able to control large chunks of "liberated" territory. The best they could do was to hold Fallouja for six months last year. Nor have they been able to stage successful large-scale attacks like the Viet Cong did. A major offensive against Abu Ghraib prison on April 2 ended without a single U.S. soldier killed or a single Iraqi prisoner freed, while an estimated 60 insurgents were slain.

The biggest weakness of the insurgency is that it is morphing from a war of national liberation into a revolutionary struggle against an elected government. That's a crucial difference. Since 1776, wars of national liberation have usually succeeded because nationalism is such a strong force. Revolutions against despots, from Czar Nicholas II to the shah of Iran, often succeed too, because there is no way to redress grievances within the political process. Successful uprisings against elected governments are much rarer because leaders with political legitimacy can more easily rally the population and accommodate aggrieved elements.

Look at Sri Lanka, the Philippines, El Salvador or Colombia, all fragile democracies that have endured major uprisings that recruited a larger percentage of the population and controlled more territory than the Iraqi rebels — without winning. Other democracies, such as Israel, Turkey and Britain, have also survived brutal insurgencies.

This does not mean that the Iraqi uprising will be quickly or easily defeated. Although most guerrilla movements fail in a democracy, a few thousand or even a few hundred dedicated killers can set off bombs indefinitely. And even if the Iraqi insurgents can't take over the entire country, they might be able to carve out a jihadist mini-state or spark all-out civil war.

The coalition military forces cannot hope to achieve a military victory in the near future. All they can do is provide breathing space for local institutions to take root so Iraqis can take over the fight for their own freedom.

So far, progress has been rapid on the political front and not-so-rapid in the deployment of security forces, which the coalition didn't emphasize until last year. We are finally seeing the emergence of some impressive Iraqi units, such as the Wolf Brigade commandos, who pursue insurgents all over the country, and the 302nd National Guard Battalion, which has pacified Haifa Street, a onetime insurgent stronghold in Baghdad.

The biggest advantage the insurgents still have, aside from their total disdain for human life, is that they can get reinforcements from abroad to make up for their heavy losses. The coalition needs to do a better job of policing the Syrian border and pressuring Damascus to crack down on the influx of jihadis.

But even if the border gets sealed, pacifying Iraq will be a long, hard slog that will ultimately be up to the Iraqis. The U.S. needs to show a little patience. If we don't cut and run prematurely, Iraqi democracy can survive its birth pangs.

Washington Times
June 23, 2005
Pg. 19

Back To Baghdad

By Austin Bay

BAGHDAD. -- This trip to Iraq is deja vu with a difference. I served here as a soldier, and returning as a writer in part explains the change in perspective. This trip my job is assessment and analysis, not action. Even with a fast-paced itinerary that takes us to Fallujah, Tal Afar and Kirkuk, there is more time to reflect.

Today, the summer heat is just as hard as it was a year ago, the sand haze in the air just as thick. But the Baghdad of June 2005 is not the Baghdad I left in September 2004.

"Metrics" is the military buzzword -- how do we measure progress or regress in Iraq? The piles of bricks around Iraqi homes is a positive. Downtown cranes sprout over city-block-sized construction projects. The negatives are all too familiar -- terror bombs and the slaughter of Iraqi citizens.

Last year -- on July 2, I recall -- I saw six Iraqi National Guardsmen manning a position beneath a freeway overpass. It was the first time I saw independently deployed Iraqi forces. Now, I see senior Iraqi officers in the Al Faw Palace hallways conducting operational liaison with U.S. and coalition forces. I hear reports of the Iraqi Army conducting independent street-clearing and neighborhood search operations. Brig. Gen. Karl Horst of U.S. 3rd Infantry Division told me about an Iraqi battalion's success on the perennially challenging Haifa Street.

In February, under the direction of an Iraqi colonel rapidly earning a reputation as Iraq's Rudy Giuliani, the battalion drove terrorists from this key Baghdad drag. Last year, Haifa Street was a combat zone where U.S. and Iraqi security forces came in Robo-Cop garb -- helmets, armor, Bradleys, armored Humvees. Gen. Horst told me he and his Iraqi counterpart now have tea in a sidewalk cafe along the once notorious boulevard. Of course, Abu Musab Al Zarqawi's suicide bombers haunt this fragile calm.

This return visit to Iraq, however, spurs thoughts of America -- to be specific, thoughts about America's will to pursue victory. I don't mean the will of U.S. forces in the field. Wander around with a bunch of Marines for a half-hour, spend 15 minutes with National Guardsmen from Idaho, and you will have no doubts about American military capabilities or the troops' will to win.

But our weakness is back home, in front of the TV, on the cable squawk shows, on the editorial page of the New York Times, in the political gotcha games of Washington, D.C.

It seems America wants to get on with its Electra-Glide life, that Sept. 10 sense of freedom and security, without finishing the job. The military is fighting, the Iraqi people are fighting, but where is the U.S. political class?

The Bush administration has yet to ask the American people -- correction, has yet to demand of the American people -- the sustained, shared sacrifice it takes to win this long, intricate war of bullets, ballots and bricks.

Bullets go bang, and even CBS understands bullets. Ballots make an impression -- in terms of this war's battlespace, the January Iraqi elections were World War II's D-Day and Battle of the Bulge combined. But the bricks -- the building of Iraq, Afghanistan and the other hard corners where this war is and will be fought -- that's a delicate and decades-long challenge.

Given the vicious enemy we face, five years, perhaps 15 years from now, occasional bullets and bombs will disrupt the political and economic building. This is the Bush administration's biggest strategic mistake: failure to tap the American willingness produced by the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.

One afternoon in December 2001, my mother told me she remembered as a teenager in 1942 tossing a tin can on a wagon that rolled past the train station in her hometown. Mom said she knew the can she tossed didn't add much to the war effort, but she felt that in some small, token perhaps, but very real way, she was contributing to the battle.

"The Bush administration is going to make a terrible mistake if it does not let the American people get involved in this war. Austin, we need a war bond drive. This matters, because this is what it will take."

She was right then, and she's right now.

Austin Bay is a nationally syndicated columnist.

National Review
July 4, 2005
Pg. 17

Are They In The Army Now?

Cries of shortfall, exhaustion, and overstretch

By Victor Davis Hanson

Figures on U.S. military recruitment just released for 2005 show that the Army missed its monthly announced goal, achieving only 75 percent of its anticipated enlistments for this May. The Army National Guard and the Army Reserve also missed their desired monthly targets. Stories in the press followed, claiming that the Pentagon is lowering Army standards to pull in new recruits and address the fallout from the depressing news from Iraq.

Recent dips in Army enlistments also fueled a new conventional wisdom: that the U.S. military is almost dangerously undermanned, exhausted, and overstretched. An unpopular war, domestic opposition, televised casualties, extended service, divorce and social dislocations, an improving economy, and supposed disparity in the sacrifices made by troops of different races and classes have all, it is said, conspired to cut recruitment to the volunteer army and reserves to alarming levels.

In turn, fears of undermanned armed forces have prompted existential questions about who should serve and the nature of U.S. foreign policy. Opponents of the war in Iraq also make the argument — perhaps legitimate in its own right — that our options are limited in dealing with Syria, Iran, and North Korea because we are overextended in Iraq and Afghanistan. Such critics also know that the cover of an exhausted military means they will never be called to spell out their exact position on the future use of force elsewhere.

Behind most critiques, oddly enough, is the promise of the draft. Some critics of the current war profess support for a return to conscription — both to address the purported manpower shortage and to ensure less military action abroad in the future. If a broader cross-section of the population serves in the military, it is argued, won’t we all be more careful how it is used? And isn’t the present system making inordinate demands on minorities, the poor, and the undereducated?

We might ask how accurate is the current picture of military disarray.

First, the Marines have suffered disproportionate fatalities in the war in Iraq. They are about 30 percent of all combat deaths, yet make up only 11 percent of current American forces. But in May the Marines slightly exceeded their recruitment goal. The Air Force and Navy likewise met 100 percent of their requirements. The Army traditionally has had the hardest time meeting its targets, given the reputation — warranted or not — that the other branches offer more specialized training and skills that will better enhance civilian careers without the same level of risk as ground combat.

Second, the year is only half over. The Army may well rebound and meet its full 2005 quota, as nearly all branches of the active services (the Army and Air National Guard were exceptions) did in 2004. Much depends on whether the economy continues to improve and thus competes for high-school graduates, and whether the Iraqi military can take over its envisioned preponderant military role, keeping the insurgency out of the daily headlines.

Third, on demographic grounds, our current troop mobilizations are hardly a drain on the U.S. population base. In a country of about 300 million residents, we have about 1.4 million troops deployed worldwide. Yet in 1974, during the first full year of the all-volunteer army, the United States deployed 1.9 million soldiers, drawing on a population of more than 210 million. In other words, when the population was just 70 percent of our current size, the armed forces sustained troop levels 1.3 times larger than our present military.

Critics harp on the expenses of the War on Terror and suggest that we are unable to sustain such a drain. Yet in the first full year of the volunteer army, military expenditures accounted for 58 percent of discretionary spending, or about 5.5 percent of the gross domestic product. In 2003, when we invaded Iraq with 200,000 troops and conducted reconstruction efforts in Afghanistan, we allotted only 49 percent of discretionary spending to defense, some 3.7 percent of GDP — itself a moderate rise from 1999–2000, when defense expenditure had descended to the historical low of about 3 percent of GDP. This suggests the armed forces were inadequate to meet the security profile of the United States well before September 11.

If it turns out that we need more troops in the military, based on historical precedents and current resources, we surely have the population and national wealth to field larger forces than we presently deploy, and to pay them more than we do now.

But if critics insist that the 140,000 troops in Iraq are nevertheless too costly for the presently constituted U.S. military, and the current armed forces too costly for the United States, then they should examine very carefully our troop allotments elsewhere. We still have around 110,000 soldiers in various places in Europe, and almost another 80,000 in Japan and South Korea. Even if the argument can be made that the rise of China has replaced the threat of the Soviet Union and mandated that we maintain current troop levels in Japan, still thousands of troops in Europe and South Korea could be cut or deployed closer to the Middle East.

The problem most often raised, however, is not so much the cost or size of our military, but rather the disproportionate sacrifice of the underprivileged. Yet statistics of combat fatalities from Iraq are kept current, and the most recent numbers suggest that the continual cries of unfairness are not substantiated by hard data. Indeed, the claim is eerily similar to the past hysteria that blacks and Latinos died in disproportionate numbers in Southeast Asia, when, in fact, statistics confirmed that they did not.

Data on combat deaths in Iraq as of March 2005 surprised critics of the war. Contrary to the perception that citizen soldiers are bearing an inordinate portion of the overall burden, National Guardsmen constitute about 24 percent of all military personnel but accounted for 16 percent of those lost in Iraq. Some 95 percent of the fatalities had high-school diplomas, though only 85 percent of all Americans have finished high school. Blacks and Latinos made up 10.9 and 11.5 percent of the dead, respectively — about their same percentages in the general population, but in the case of blacks less than the 18.6 percent currently serving in the military. Twenty-nine percent of those who died attended high schools in poverty-stricken areas, versus about a 30 percent poverty rate for all high-school graduates. Seventy percent of those lost were white men, although they currently make up only about a third of the U.S. population.

If our current debate about the military transcends proportionate costs and relative sacrifice, perhaps our unhappiness derives from the terrible loss of 1,700 combat dead in Iraq. Yet this discontent arises not from numbers alone. After all, at catastrophic moments in our history far more were killed either in a single day or in a few weeks than all those we have lost since September 11 in Afghanistan and Iraq.

Between five and six thousand Americans were killed on September 17, 1862, at Antietam. D-Day cost around 3,000 Allied dead, and another 6,000 were wounded. During the Battle of the Bulge, some 19,000 Americans died and another 60,000 were wounded, missing, or captured. In the first few minutes of Pearl Harbor, about 2,400 Americans perished. And so far the 1,700 killed in action in Iraq make up about 60 percent of those lost on the first day of this war in the attacks on the Pentagon and the World Trade Center.

The problem is not just absolute numbers, then, but the growing perception after two years of Iraqi reconstruction that our dead were not lost in a war of national survival, or that such deaths are incompatible with a contemporary society that no longer believes force is desirable or necessary to maintain its security. In that case, the problem is not a military one per se. Going 7,000 miles across the globe, toppling two fascistic governments and establishing democracies in their places, and doing so at a cost (albeit a painful one) of less than 2,000 soldiers, is, by historical standards, an unprecedented military achievement.

Arguments persist over the proper troop levels in Iraq. But given the nature of the insurgency, more conventional troops do not seem to offer solutions, especially when the more critical task is lowering the American profile and working in the shadows to support and train a new Iraqi military. Rather, the controversy is really a political challenge of explaining the nature of the American sacrifice in Iraq, putting it in a historical context, and convincing the American people that such brave soldiers have both made Americans far safer and given the Middle East a future.

A related issue involves the proper role of the American military in an increasingly complex post–Cold War world. There was enormous pressure to use American troops to stop the Balkan holocaust, which nearby Europeans either could not or would not end — despite the absence of Senate approval, U.N. resolutions, and a clear-cut connection to American national security.

Similar cries arise to deploy to Darfur to curtail the slaughter of innocents. All could agree that a U.S. carrier should speed immediately to Indonesia on news of the tsunami disaster. The message of Robert Kaplan’s recent Imperial Grunts is that there are tens of thousands of American soldiers stationed in unknown places in Africa, Latin America, and Asia engaged in the daily training of forces, civilian development projects, and what we might call old-fashioned foreign aid, all quite distant from any notion of conventional fighting. Such commitments are usually off the radar screen, do not involve many combat losses, and meet the postmodern criteria of nation-building rather than fighting wars. As long as Americans are not dying on television, the American people seem willing to pay for and support such extensive commitments.

Our current debate is not properly a military one, since the American armed forces are performing exceptionally well in Iraq and probably have enough aggregate strength to re-deploy to meet foreseeable crises elsewhere. Given our size, material wealth, and underutilized resources, we could easily expand or contract our military as we see fit. Rather, the rub is one of perception: The real question is whether Americans wish to continue their efforts to establish democratic states to replace deposed Middle East autocracies, and in general whether we wish to use forces abroad at all in wars that may require messy occupations and reconstructions that follow rapid and successful conventional victories.

Mr. Hanson is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and the author of the forthcoming A War Like No Other: How the Athenians and Spartans Fought the Peloponnesian War (Random House).