Op-Ed
Bush's Iraq 'Surge': A Good Strategery?
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January 25, 2007 - 11:12pmThe stakes in Iraq are very high. The governments of Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait and Jordan have all expressed public anxiety about the consequences of U.S. retreat from Iraq. If we leave and the Iraqi government falters or fails local governments will intervene.
This could easily lead to all-out war between Iran and the Arab states. The effects on the world economy and on Middle Eastern societies would be catastrophic. American interests would suffer gravely from this course of events. Therefore, we ought not abandon Iraq while there is still the prospect of success at a bearable cost.
That the war is unpopular does not make it hopeless or even wrong. The fact that Bush has made mistakes in the past is no excuse for compounding those mistakes by abandoning Iraqis to slaughter, and the Middle East to fanatics.
The surge, and the associated change of strategy, can work and is worth trying. The situation in Iraq is grave, but it is not actually catastrophic. The Iraqi government is not about to collapse; Iraqi politicians are working in good faith to improve their country. The Iraqi army is an increasingly capable and disciplined force. A lot of people in Iraq are risking their lives for their country, and we ought to take heart from their courage and hope for the future. The wanton terrorist murder of dozens a day is very sad, but it has little prospect of destroying Iraq, if we hold our nerve. The terrorists and murderers can be beaten. Sending more troops might make the difference between victory and calamity, and we therefore owe it our qualified support.
American withdrawal will not improve the situation. The vicious murderers who are daily killing students, tradesmen, women and children as part of a campaign of ethnic clensing will not stop if we abandon Iraq. On the contrary, it might tip the situation into all-out ethnic conflict — or even genocide. Many in the region fear this possibility. The democratically elected Iraqi parliament has endorsed the new strategy, and most regional governments are opposed to an American withdrawal.
Sending more troops to Iraq — the “surge” — is just one part of a broader shift in U.S. strategy. The President and the military are proposing to make several changes: First, to concentrate on suppressing violence in Baghdad and to help the local tribes rout Al Qaeda from Iraq’s western desert. Second, to restore order in Baghdad not simply by training local forces, but by committing U.S. troops to violent neighborhoods, to work closely with, and to supervise, the Iraqi forces. And third, to send more troops to enable these changes.
The chief challenge for Iraq at present is containing sectarian conflict in Baghdad and its environs. The Baghdad police (in contrast to the Iraqi Army) are unreliable. They harbor death squads, and are not trusted by the population. These problems can be corrected in time, but for the coming months, the U.S. and Iraqi armies may be the only armed forces strong enough, and trusted enough, to maintain order. We tried handing
responsibility for Baghdad to the Iraqis, and they weren’t able to handle it. It is time for us to use American force to restore order until Iraq can control its own capital. This may take months; it will not take forever.
The surge does not involve very many troops; the handful of brigades that Bush proposes to send constitute less than a quarter of our current troop strength in Iraq. As a result, the surge will not impose an excessive increase to the cost of the U.S. effort in Iraq. The surge might be too small, but it is not too large.
Despite the comparatively small number of troops involved, the surge might make a real difference. Not all troops are alike; sending an extra ten thousand combat troops might be more useful than twice that number of helicopter pilots or truck drivers. Where the troops are sent is also critical. An extra ten thousand troops in Baghdad might be worth much more than the same number dispersed throughout Iraq.
Napoleon observed that “in war, the moral is to the physical as three is to one”; committing troops to Iraq may have a psychological impact out of proportion to the numbers involved. Iraqi leaders have until now hesitated to move against Shi’ite militias because they fear that we will abandon them before the Iraqi army is strong enough, and that they will therefore be forced to rely on those militias. Sending a signal of American resolve would likely bolster the confidence of the Iraqis, and enable them to take risks they have avoided until now.
One common objection to the surge, and the Iraq war in general, is that the United States should not intervene in civil wars. This would imply that if some of the population of an enemy nation decided to side with us against their government, we would be in a civil war, and would therefore have to give up. American involvement in civil wars is routine; we have done so many times in the last 20 years; the war in Afghanistan and Clinton’s interventions in Bosnia and Kosovo were all cases of U.S. participation in foreign civil wars. In fact, the Korean War was, in a sernse, a civil war between the two halves of Korea. The “civil war” argument is simply disingenuous as applied to Iraq.
The surge is the most reasonable proposal for Iraq put forward to date. The plan calls for a change in strategy and tactics and a small increase in troop strength. This is not a major escalation, but it is a welcome change in the status quo. To oppose the current conduct of the war, but oppose this effort to change course, is unwise. Blaming Bush for everything, and inviting catastrophe, is worse.
Sacrifice is painful, but the consequences of failure in Iraq are too dire for us to give up without summoning the resolve to continue a bit longer. There will be time enough for defeatism if the surge fails to improve the situation. Now is the time for patience and resolve.
Ari Rabkin is a graduate student in Computer Science. He can be contacted at asr32@cornell.edu. Between the Lines appears Thursdays.