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More Troops?
    #6323462 -

MORE TROOPS?

William Lind | November 30, 2006
link to article

The latest serpent at which a drowning Washington Establishment is grasping is the idea of sending more American troops to Iraq. Would more troops turn the war there in our favor? No.

Why not? First, because nothing can. The war in Iraq is irredeemably lost. Neither we nor, at present, anyone else can create a new Iraqi state to replace the one our invasion destroyed. Maybe that will happen after the Iraqi civil was is resolved, maybe not. It is in any case out of our hands.

Nor could more American troops control the forces driving Iraq’s intensifying civil war. The passions of ethnic and religious hatred unleashed by the disintegration of the Iraqi state will not cool because a few more American patrols pass through the streets. Iraqi’s are quite capable of fighting us and each other at the same time.

A second reason more troops would make no difference is that the troops we have there now don’t know what to do, or at least their leaders don’t know what they should do. For the most part, American troops in Iraq sit on their Forward Operating Bases; in effect, we are besieging ourselves. Troops under siege are seldom effective at controlling the surrounding countryside, regardless of their number.

When American troops do leave their FOBs, it is almost always to run convoys, which is to say to provide targets; to engage in meaningless patrols, again providing targets; or to do raids, which are downright counterproductive, because they turn the people even more strongly against us, where that is possible. Doing more of any of these things would help us not at all.

More troops might make a difference if they were sent as part of a change in strategy, away from raids and “killing bad guys” and toward something like the Vietnam war’s CAP program, where American troops defended villages instead of attacking them. But there is no sign of any such change of strategy on the horizon, so there would be nothing useful for more troops to do.

Even a CAP program would be likely to fail at this stage of the Iraq war, which points to the third reason more troops would not help us: more troops cannot turn back the clock. For the CAP or “ink blot” strategy to work, there has to be some level of acceptance of the foreign troops by the local people. When we first invaded Iraq, that was present in much of the country.

But we squandered that good will with blunder upon blunder. How many troops would it take to undo all those errors? The answer is either zero or an infinite number, because no quantity of troops can erase history. The argument that more troops in the beginning, combined with an ink blot strategy, might have made the Iraq venture a success does not mean that more troops could do the same thing now.

The clinching argument against more troops also relates to time: sending more troops would mean nothing to our opponents on the ground, because those opponents know we could not sustain a significantly larger occupation force for any length of time. So what if a few tens of thousands more Americans come for a few months? The U.S. military is strained to the breaking point to sustain the force there now. Where is the rotation base for a much larger deployment to come from?

The fact that Washington is seriously considering sending more American troops to Iraq illustrates a common phenomenon in war. As the certainty of defeat looms ever more clearly, the scrabbling about for a miracle cure, a deus ex machina, becomes ever more desperate - and more silly. Cavalry charges, Zeppelins, V-2 missiles, kamikazes, the list is endless. In the end, someone finally has to face facts and admit defeat. The sooner someone in Washington is willing to do that, the sooner the troops we already have in Iraq will come home – alive.


--------------------

And as things fell apart,
Nobody paid much attention...
- David Byrne, '(Nothing But) Flowers' from the Talking Heads' album, 'Naked'

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Re: More Troops? [Re: Trepiodos]
    #6323973 -

I don't think sending more troops to Iraq in the quantities suggested is a good idea either. Perhaps if we upped the force to 500,000 in the short-term, that might help (it could be done too, the US has mobilized forces of that size for 6-month periods before, notably in 1991). But an extra 30,000 isn't going to make much of a difference.

That said, I don't think we should ever listen to anything that William Lind has to say about what "might" happen.

Why?

Well, the man spits out predictions at a rate of 3 a month, and while 1 of the 3 tends to come true (the 3 are usually contradictory, so this isn't hard) let's examine some of his claims that haven't come true.

First, remember when he thought that the poor Iraqi defense of Baghdad was a trick in order to cut US supply lines? The massive surrendering on the part of the Iraqi forces, the ease of defeat back in 1991, the total technological disparity, these were all ignored by Lind. No, he had a point to make, and he wasn't going to let "facts" get in the way.

Then we have this lovely gem, where Lind predicted that the apparent surrender of the Iraqi army was infact a ploy by Saddam to regroup Royal Guard units to fight a guerilla war.

Apparently had come kind of tactical genius that only Lind could see...

Even his original piece on the possible evolution of 4th generation warfare is extremely interesting, not in what it got right, but in what it got wrong.

As usually, he makes 3 disparate predictions, one of which happens to be terrorism (and wasn't much of a prediction in 1989, since the US had already experienced it in Beirut during the mid 1980s).

But look at some of his other claims:

America has a dirth of culture and is therefore vulnerable. (Which must be right, and those dissidents in other nations that complain of being over-run by the apparently non-existent American culture, well, they're just silly)

Drug-takers are the reason for the dirth of American culture. (Because drugs are not intimately linked with the CDs that other countries love to buy so much..)

It seems like Lind is mostly "right" in his predictions only when they're already obviously true...

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Re: More Troops? [Re: Trepiodos]
    #6324163 -

We don't need more troops. We need more people who serve support functions, including policing and training Iraqi forces. We can't expect these soldiers to be doing jobs for which they aren't trained for.

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Re: More Troops? [Re: Economist]
    #6324924 -

Taking quotes and examples from William Lind and taking them out of context to smear him in response to the original article is a bit ridiculous.

William Lind say's alot of stuff and makes a lot of predictions, but his theories are more reputable and credible then any other talking heads ive seen, and more pragmatic and practical than most politicians.

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Re: More Troops? [Re: The_Red_Crayon]
    #6325698 -

Why put more troops in, when there is no conventional war to speak of? Sick of the fuck ups in this predicament.


--------------------
“I must not fear.
Fear is the mind-killer.
Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration.
I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me.
And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path.
Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

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