The Unknown Candidate: Kristof Pissed Off: No Surge in Iraq

Monday, January 08, 2007

Kristof Pissed Off: No Surge in Iraq

An Escalation of American Blood
By Nicholas D. Kristof
The New York Times

A surge in the number of troops in Iraq might have helped in 2003 or early 2004.

But in 2007, President Bush’s plan seems to represent a warmed-over variant of approaches that have already been tried and mostly failed, that are opposed by some top American military commanders and ordinary Iraqis alike, and whose most likely outcome will be many more Americans in body bags or wheelchairs.

The reality is that we’ve already tried surges. There was one of 20,000 troops in early 2004, a similar one in the fall of 2005, and one a bit smaller in the summer of 2006.

As recently as July, Mr. Bush cheerily described a plan “to deploy additional American troops and Iraqi security personnel in Baghdad in the coming weeks.” He explained that this would “bring greater security to the Iraqi capital ... [and] root out those who instigate violence.”

By October, Maj. Gen. William Caldwell, the chief U.S. military spokesman in Iraq, was acknowledging that the recent troop increases “had not met our overall expectations of sustaining a reduction in the levels of violence.”

Proponents of escalation cite the example of Tal Afar, a town in northwestern Iraq. U.S. forces there have met some genuine success since September 2005 with the “clear, build and hold” strategy that Mr. Bush apparently now favors for Baghdad.

But Tal Afar is only about one-thirtieth the size of Baghdad, and it isn’t even Arab: its people are mostly members of the Turkmen minority. Trying to replicate that (limited) success in Baghdad is a fool’s errand.

In Tal Afar, there was one U.S. soldier for every 40 residents. Using the same ratio in Baghdad would require 150,000 troops, sustained for more than a year. That’s impossible.

Mr. Bush’s surge may be just big enough to expose more troops to danger and to let the Iraqi government off the hook, without being big enough to achieve security.

Don Rumsfeld was wrong on just about everything in Iraq — except the downside of additional troops there: “More forces, U.S. and coalition forces, create the impression of an occupation,” he said. Indeed, any expansion of our military presence is likely to bolster anti-American radicals, like Moktada al-Sadr.

Sure, Iraq promises to help in the crackdown. But my bet is that — once again — Iraqi leaders will make big pledges and then let us do the heavy lifting.

In any case, sending in even more young Americans won’t help counterinsurgency efforts when, according to an American-sponsored poll conducted in September, 78 percent of Iraqis believe that the American troop presence is “provoking more conflict than it is preventing.” That’s why Iraqis overwhelmingly favor a timetable for a U.S. withdrawal, and it’s one reason I do as well.

Mr. Bush is right about the risks of withdrawal: our pullout could be followed by a vast bloodbath and by a regional war in which Iran backs Iraqi Shiite militias and Saudi Arabia and Jordan back Iraqi Sunnis (with Turkey marching into Kurdistan). But all that may unfold anyway, and the prospect of withdrawal may be the best hope to galvanize Iraqi factions to take steps to avert such a catastrophe.

If Mr. Bush succeeds in escalating our military involvement, it’s almost inevitable that many more Americans will be killed and injured. The focus has been on fatalities, but by some counts there have been 16 American service injuries for every death. That’s partly a tribute to improvements in military medicine, for in Vietnam there were 2.6 injuries per American fatality.

All told, between 22,000 and 50,000 Americans have been injured so far in Iraq (depending on who does the counting); the higher number is one-third as many as in the entire Vietnam War. Linda Bilmes, a Harvard scholar who has written a new report on the war injuries, notes that the backlog for veterans’ disability claims has risen more than fivefold since 2000, and she cites horror stories like that of a staff sergeant who suffered severe brain injuries and then had his pay stopped and utilities cut because of a bureaucratic error.

“If the new Congress really wants to support our troops,” Ms. Bilmes writes, “it should start by spending a few more pennies on the ones who have already fought and come home.”

That’s a responsibility Mr. Bush should assume as well. And when he speaks to the nation to urge more troops in Iraq, he needs to explain why the back alleys of Baghdad are the best places to invest additional buckets of American blood.

Photo Credit: Nicholas Kristof. (Fred R. Conrad/The New York Times)