Julie

Pentagon Sees 3 Options for Iraq: 'Go Big,' 'Go Long' and 'Go Home'
Monday, November 20, 2006


WASHINGTON — Senior Defense Department officials are mapping out a new strategy for Iraq defined by insiders as "go big," "go long" and "go home," according to a newspaper report.

Monday's edition of The Washington Post says a secret review commissioned by Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman Gen. Peter Pace outlines three alternatives for Iraq: sending in more troops for a short-term blitz, shrinking the force on the ground but staying longer or ditching Iraq and pulling out.

An official who spoke on condition of anonymity told the newspaper that the group conducting the review is likely to recommend a combination of the first two options, but favors going long.

The study comes as violence in Iraq appears nowhere near abating. At home, voters made their opinion of the war known during a midterm election that ousted many Republicans who favor President Bush's position of pressing onward.

Democrats are split about what to do with the U.S. commitment in Iraq, but two in powerful positions next Congress are looking at timetables.

Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., the incoming chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, said last week that he favors a plan to get out within four to six months.

In the absence of a phased withdrawal of U.S. troops, Levin told a cable news network that Iraqis are "going to continue to have the false assumption that we are there in some kind of an open-ended way. And it is that assumption on their part that takes them off the hook."

Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., the incoming head of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, told NBC on Monday that he is waiting for recommendations from the Iraq Study Group, a congressionally-commissioned panel mandated with finding solutions.

Biden said he wants the panel to make clear that U.S. troops won't stay indefinitely, adding that the United States should begin to let Iraq's leaders know of that plan so they can address the issue of "how to get Iraqis to stand together."

Biden said he also hopes the group led by former Secretary of State James A. Baker III and former Democratic Rep. Lee Hamilton will propose a clear political road map for Iraq and recommend engaging Iraq's neighbors in a political and diplomatic solution.

"Over the next four months let them know we're going to start to phase out, force them to have to address the central issue. That is not how to stand up Iraqis, but how to get Iraqis to stand together," Biden said.

"The idea that we're going to have 140,000 troops in Iraq this time next year is just not reasonable," he said.

On Sunday, Republican Sen. John McCain, a Vietnam pilot and possible 2008 presidential candidate, said more troops should be sent in and that the soldiers there now are "fighting and dying for a failed policy."

"I believe the consequences of failure are catastrophic," said McCain. "It will spread to the region. You will see Iran more emboldened. Eventually, you could see Iran pose a greater threat to the state of Israel."

With about 141,000 U.S. troops in Iraq more than 3 1/2 years into the war, the American military has strained to provide enough forces while allowing for adequate rest and retraining between deployments.

Democratic Rep. Charles Rangel of New York repeated his call for reinstituting the military draft, which the administration has repeatedly said it doesn't need.

"there's no question in my mind that this president and this administration would never have invaded Iraq, especially on the flimsy evidence that was presented to the Congress, if indeed we had a draft," said Rangel, the incoming chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee.

Talking on CBS' "Face the Nation," Rangel said he will introduce a bill next year requiring Americans to sign up for a new military draft after turning 18. He has said the all-volunteer military disproportionately puts the burden of war on minorities and lower-income families.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,230702,00.html

Trooth

Go long and Go home are the same strategy. Go big achieves nothing. Who would the US "go big" against?

The Iraq issue is only divisive in the media. The issues are not close enough to home, nor the coalition death toll big enough to actually warrent the domestic population to panic. Yes, deaths are tragic. but the western populations are not sufficiently touched by Iraqi deaths to want more of their own dying to help. Going big would bring the spectre of conscription or a contraction of US and other forces deployment overseas. They are stretched as it is.

Shoving more troops in would cause the region to destablise more. It doesn't matter as to rights or wrongs, but the presence of western troops is a motivator for the insurgents. More western troops = more insurgents.

Go home can only be morally achieved by go long. Can't pull out and let it descend completely. If a withdrawal is defined in a short term timetable then you will get Somalia all over again - a situation where everyone is focussing on a somewhat meaningless date .

The solution is to continue to support Iraq as it evolves into a stable country. It is inevitable that this will involve talks with its neighbours. Iran and Syria have both overt and underground reasons for an interest in Iraq. The most transparent being that if Iraq descends into civil war it is unlikely to be confined within its borders.

The plan for withdrawal should be objective based, not time driven. When the milestones are achieved there will be a natural progression from an occupation force to a policing action to a supporting role to advisory. At each milestone coalition troops will become increasingly redundant and can be redeployed.

Also, by going long it provides troops on the ground which will be useful in the ongoing situation with Iran regardless of Iraq.

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gunnut

I want to see an Iraq campaign that's "bigger, longer, and uncut."

__________________
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zraver

Go big na dthen bigger.

1- Order and Security

Beatign an insurgency is doable, but brutal. Outlaw guns and weapons, shot on site type outlawing, Kill Sadr and when his people riot in the streets gun them down with apaches, use reprisals (they are legal if proportionate). Make the cost of coming after US troops so high they simply wont do it.

at the same time when you catch a corrupt cop acting as a death sqaud member kill him and hang his corpse in the sqaure of the town he was terrorising.

Make preaching radical islam or hate a crime punishable by death and then enforce it.

2- Stability

Turn the F'ing lights on already and ge tthe clean water running

3- Hope

stop uisng forgien contrators and put Iraqi men to work rebuilding thier own country. Paythenm a decent wage for thier sweat

Get the teachrs and university professors to come home and give them a state of the art university

Security

Tell Iran tha tthe gig is up and if the insurgency doesnt stop yesterday we are going to take them apart and knock them into the stone age and salt the earth and forever end Persia's ambitions at empire.

ArmchairGeneral

So when we've killed 10,000 Sadr-ites, what then? What do we do with the 100,000 that will pop up to take their place? What do we do with an entire city that hates us because we've killed their family and/or friends? Kill 'em all? Okay, then what do we do with an entire country that hates us because we just destroyed a city? There is a way to do COIN effectively and productively, and brutality is not that way.

Reprisals when American soldiers are attacked simply are not worth it. If you come to the table with the view that your soldiers' lives are worth far more than the civilians they are attempting to protect, you will get NOWHERE in trying to win hearts and minds. If we don't care about the citizens of the country we're trying to stabilize, WTF are we doing there in the first place?

__________________
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-Theodore Dalrymple

-{SpoonmaN}-

Indeed, I voted go big, because, well, the primary reason the occupation has become such a travesty is because there havent been enough people on the ground, be they Iraqi, American, Australian, Korean or whatever, to control the country and provide enough security to allow services to re-establish themselves to the point that Iraqi civilians don't have to live in squalor and perpetual danger.
Probably the biggest error from an ecomonic standpoint was disbanding the Iraqi Regular Army, since the subsequent outpouring of disgruntled people who didn't mind helping the insurgency, or at least selling their weapons to them, has dragged this whole thing out way past it's bedtime, and simply put it would have been a lot cheaper and easier to reform the existing Army (although the guard had to go) rather than to build a new one from scratch, especially when its recruits are priority number one for the mainstream of the insurgency.

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zraver

So when we've killed 10,000 Sadr-ites, what then? What do we do with the 100,000 that will pop up to take their place?

There wont be, if thier is killing to do, do it all up front with as much force as possible and shock the citizenry into compliance. it has worked every time it was tried in history. from Rome through the mongols, Ameriandians, the pre world war colonies upto post WW2 Germany, Japan and post civil war China. How do you think Saddam kept te country inline? By making the price of breaking the peace to hard to bear.

The differrance is you dont just kill to keep order, you use the order produced by the violence to create peace.

What do we do with an entire city that hates us because we've killed their family and/or friends?

rebuild it, just ask Berlin, Dresden, hamburg, Nagasaki, Hiroshima and Tokyo residents

There is a way to do COIN effectively and productively, and brutality followed by security and propserity is not that way.

fixed, History disagrees with you

Reprisals when American soldiers are attacked simply are not worth it. If you come to the table with the view that your soldiers' lives are worth far more than the civilians they are attempting to protect, you will get NOWHERE in trying to win hearts and minds.


is not about the comparitive value of life, but about the absolute impossition of a ceasefire and disarmament by making continued war to unbearable to contemplate, and then creating the seeds of peace. The war and the peace have to be won seperately and in the proper order. You win the hearts and minds after they laydown their guns.

How do you think empires formed, and how do you think the sucessful one slasted or turned into nations? By brutally crushhing thier foes and THEN working on winning over the survivors.

WTF are we doing there in the first place?

building a better tommorrow, and that involves hard choices today.

Americas problem is pansy's who don't have the stomach to win so they drag things out and make things worse. if we accpet the Lancet's figures as accurate 600,000 or so. Thats 500,000 more than would have died if we had gone in big from the get go, and killed the first 100,000 who dared disrupt the peace. BTW thats about the number who have died in secterain violence because we tried to fight a war without shedding blood.

-{SpoonmaN}-

Zraver you're obviously forgetting one major lesson of history;
somtimes when you subject a people to force, they will indeed bend before it, but sometimes the exact opposite will happen. Your solution would run far too great a risk of feeding the insurgency not destroying it.
But I do agree with you that going hard from the start would have saved a lot of lives in that mysterious thing that everyone seems to have forgotten called the long term.

Draconion

Go Long.

Only because the oil which US will get in return will be worth the few lives lost.

Plus, the US will lose credibility if it backs out now from I-raq.

__________________
"To every man upon this earth, Death cometh soon or late;
And how can a man die better; Than facing fearful odds,
For the ashes of his father; And the temples of his gods."

Trooth

Zraver the cities you highlight were destroyed during the war. Not after the occupation. Its been "mission accomplished" for three years it would be political suicide to start the kind of operation you are talking about. It won't happen.

It might, might have solved the problem when the time was right, but now it will just cause the region to completely and utterly descend, it would open coalition forces up to attack all over the world, and those forces are not in a position to open any more fronts.

Officer of Engineers

Talking about bold ...

Published on Sunday, November 19, 2006 by the Madison Capital Times (Wisconsin)
'Cut and Run' Must be First Step in Iraq
by William E. Odom


The United States upset the regional balance in the Mideast when it invaded Iraq. Restoring it requires bold initiatives, but "cutting and running" must precede them all. Only a withdrawal of all U.S. troops - within six months and with no preconditions - can break the paralysis that enfeebles our diplomacy. And the greatest obstacles to cutting and running are the psychological inhibitions of our leaders and the public.

Our leaders do not act because their reputations are at stake. The public does not force them to act because it is blinded by the president's conjured set of illusions: that we are reducing terrorism by fighting in Iraq, creating democracy there, preventing the spread of nuclear weapons, making Israel more secure, not allowing our fallen soldiers to have died in vain, and others.

But reality no longer can be avoided. It is beyond U.S. power to prevent sectarian violence in Iraq, the growing influence of Iran throughout the region, the probable spread of Sunni-Shiite strife to neighboring Arab states, the eventual rise to power of the anti-American cleric Muqtada al-Sadr or some other anti-American leader in Baghdad, and the spread of instability beyond Iraq.

These realities get worse every day that our forces remain in Iraq. They can't be wished away by clever diplomacy or by leaving our forces in Iraq for several more years.

The administration could recognize that a rapid withdrawal is the only way to overcome our strategic paralysis, although that appears unlikely. Congress could force a stock-taking. Failing this, the public, sooner or later, will see through all of the White House's double talk and compel a radical policy change. The price for delay, however, will be more lives lost in vain.

Some lawmakers are ready to change course but are puzzled as to how to leave Iraq. The answer is four major initiatives to provide regional stability and calm in Iraq. They will leave the U.S. less influential in the region. But it will be the best deal we can get.

• First, the U.S. must concede that it has botched things, cannot stabilize the region alone and must let others have a say in what's next. As U.S. forces begin to withdraw, Washington must invite its European allies, as well as Japan, China and India, to make their own proposals for dealing with the aftermath. Russia can be ignored because it will play a spoiler role in any case.

Rapid troop withdrawal and abandoning unilateralism will have a sobering effect on all interested parties. Al-Qaida will celebrate but find that its only current allies, Iraqi Baathists and Sunnis, no longer need or want it. Iran will crow but soon begin to worry that its Kurdish minority may want to join Iraqi Kurdistan and that Iraqi Baathists might make a surprising comeback.

Although European leaders will probably try to take the lead in designing a new strategy for Iraq, they will not be able to implement it. This is because they will not allow any single European state to lead, the handicap they faced in trying to cope with Yugoslavia's breakup in the 1990s. Nor will Japan, China or India be acceptable as a new coalition leader. The U.S. could end up as the leader of a new strategic coalition - but only if most other states invite it to do so.

• The second initiative is to create a diplomatic forum for Iraq's neighbors. Iran, of course, must be included. Washington should offer to convene the forum but be prepared to step aside if other members insist.

• Third, the U.S. must informally cooperate with Iran in areas of shared interests. Nothing else could so improve our position in the Middle East. The price for success will include dropping U.S. resistance to Iran's nuclear weapons program. This will be as distasteful for U.S. leaders as cutting and running, but it is no less essential. That's because we do share vital common interests with Iran. We both want to defeat al-Qaida and the Taliban (Iran hates both). We both want stability in Iraq (Iran will have influence over the Shiite Iraqi south regardless of what we do, but neither Washington nor Tehran wants chaos). And we can help each other when it comes to oil: Iran needs our technology to produce more oil, and we simply need more oil.

Accepting Iran's nuclear weapons is a small price to pay for the likely benefits. Moreover, its nuclear program will proceed whether we like it or not. Accepting it might well soften Iran's support for Hezbollah and it will definitely undercut Russia's pernicious influence with Tehran.

• Fourth, real progress must be made on the Palestinian issue as a foundation for Mideast peace. The invasion of Iraq and the U.S. tilt toward Israel have dangerously reduced Washington's power to broker peace or to guarantee Israel's security. We now need Europe's help. And good relations with Iran would help dramatically. No strategy can succeed without these components. We must cut and run tactically in order to succeed strategically. The U.S. needs to restore its reputation so that its capacity to lead constructively will cost us less.

Odom is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute and a professor at Yale University.

© 2006 The Capital Times

LGen Odom's proposal certainly takes balls.

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Chimo

ArmchairGeneral

Actually, no. Because what you're describing is not COIN. It's total war. Like WWII and all the others you mentioned. And I believe that total war is not justified without extreme provocation. WWII was a just war; but it was not a clean war. We were fighting against mass murderers bent on world domination, and we fought fire with fire. We burned entire cities to the ground, for the specific purpose of cowing our enemies into submission. To terrorize them, if you will. I do not believe we would be justified in fighting total war against the Iraqis. There is a difference between invading a country because they have declared war on you, and invading a country with the declared purpose of liberation, not subjugation. If we call ourselves liberators, and then brutally subjugate the country, we are nothing but the new bully on the block. Call me an idealist, but I really don't think America should begin empire building.

leib10

Since it's obvious that going home will solve nothing and going long is a doubtable proposition, I voted go big. But in order to win this battle, half-measures and half-assed effort will just not do.

__________________
"The right man in the wrong place can make all the difference in the world. So wake up, Mr. Freeman. Wake up and smell the ashes." G-Man

ArmchairGeneral

Wow. You ain't kidding. "And now, for something completely different..." What do you think about this proposal? I'm curious about shek and S-2's opinions on this as well.

Seems like it might be worth a try, if the situation truly goes down the toilet. Of course, Odom and many, many others believe that has already happened. It would definitely save American lives in the short run, and perhaps in the long run. Who knows?

zraver

Armchair,

Show me a single instance where a limited war has stopped an insurgency. The closest you wil get is the British in Maylasia, and that involved a very brtal forced relocation program to isolate the communist from thier base. Limited war does not work agaisnt an insurgency, total war does.

The objec tin war is not to kill, but to break the enemies will to resist. The only reason the insurgents are still figthing is they no people like you will eventually cry loud enough to make our leaders pull out and then the flood gates of uncontrolled violence will really open.

The only way to win is to crack down so hard and so fast that open conflcit is no longer an option. The only way Iraq can form an identity as a antion is if the sectarian violence stops.

And I believe that total war is not justified without extreme provocation.

And that right there is the cancer in modern thinking. war is war the only excpetion is nukes. If you allow limited wars with limited or no provocation you end up with situations like Korea, Vietnam, and Iraq. If you decide to shed blood as a matter of national policy to achieve what ever objective you go all out. it saves lives, money, and years of conflict.

There is a difference between invading a country because they have declared war on you, and invading a country with the declared purpose of liberation, not subjugation.

No there isn't if it's war it's war no matter what you call it. We owe those we are "liberating" our best efforts to keep the conflict as short as possible and ge tthem on the road to a better future as fast as possible. Pissing away lives and treasure If we call ourselves liberators, and then brutally subjugate the country, we are nothing but the new bully on the block. Call me an idealist, but I really don't think America should begin empire building.in dribs and dabs is far moe costly.

If we call ourselves liberators, and then brutally subjugate the country, we are nothing but the new bully on the block. Call me an idealist, but I really don't think America should begin empire building.

If we call our selve sliberators and then do nothing but let those we claim to want to help be terrorized by nutjobs, until we just pull out and leave them hanging then we are worse than bullies, we are murderers. Our goal never was to stay and build an empire, but now we have to stop the Iraqi civil war and give them the tools and the oppurtunity to build a nation.

The only way this will be achieved is taking the violence to a level where the insurgents cry uncle lay down and turn in thier arms and join the politcal process. Right now there is zero reason for any warring party in iraq to quit becuase they know without a shadow of doubt the cowards and touchy feely liberals back in the US have persauded the goverment and the people that we lost.

The insurgents like the Vietcong never beat the US, we beat our selve sby listening to people who have lost touch with history and reality, and who don't have a clue about what it takes to win a war.