If this guy likes the war so much why doesn't he do like Hemingway
and get his ass out of his loftspace
and pick up a gun and start irradiating some of Iraq for himself...
oh, he's a writer, a thinker...
oh, that's not his job...
he just blows hot air and lets the poor slobs,
who just wanted a college education and retirement of some sort,
to go die for some geopolitical madmen like himself...
oh, he's too sweet and cuddly to put on a pair of army boots
and die in the sand...
what a mensch he is...
hooray for armchair soldiers
with cute little grins!

any idea what he paid per month?

ee cummings would be proud.  No caps (except Hemmingway, oddly enough), random line breaks, and total nonsense.  Basically you're saying "If you oppose war, you can talk about it.  If you think war's being done correctly, you can't talk unless you've fought."  What a great technique to stack the ranks of critics and depelete the supporters.  Seriously, Michael's on a limb enough here.  Give him a break, brave anonymous poster.  Fight ideas with ideas.  Better that we not try to figure this out?

In all seriousness, I've never been a "pull out now" liberal, much to the chagrin of my Vietnam-prostesting father.  Ignoring sunk costs, there is a bloody hole in the Middle East, we have troops there, and we have moral responsibility to do something about it (the pottery barn law of international relations). We have moral responsibilities to do a lot of things in the world (Darfur?  Seriously guys - get on that) but we happen to be there, and this is the thread, so yes, I think we shouldn't just leave now and ask Assad & the Ayatollahs to take care of the mess.

You basically did  a forty times better job than Bush in explaining the power of the surge.  But there are two real problems.  One - Insurgents watch CNN Global.  They know this is temporary.  Why not just wait it out?  They lose something by allowing police to establish themselves, get trained, set up intelligence in various neighborhoods.  But it doesn't mean the insurgents get caught, lose their weapons, etc.  This won't eliminate the possibility that they'll just start a civil war in earnest once we leave.  Much like Hezbollah, post-Israeli withdrawl, they get a huge publicity bump when the US leaves, countering any loss they suffered by laying dormant.  Two - More importantly, Baghdad is not Tal Afar.  It is the seat of government, it is a substantially mixed city, and it has been through hell for the last 3 and a half years.  Insurgents may have been willing to let Tal Afar calm down, but Baghdad is the main event.  Just as we know that we must calm the city, the insurgents know that they must keep the city destabilized if they want to eventually establish their own brand of dictatorship (religious/ethnic/whatever) after the fact.

Do I have a better idea?  Not yet.  I'll keep you posted.

Good points: explicating counterinsurgency, explicating Kagan, takes Bush position seriously- Stressing importance of utilities!

Bad Points: Number 1 rule of counterinsurgency: never be sure of yourself. At least not so sure that you're going to tell us what will happen in two weeks, and then in six months. There are a few horribly optimistic paragraphs in there that read like the wet dream of any right thinking person. But shit over there does not go down like that. The author really does need to get a feel for the absolute chaos and distrust on the ground. I don't say this in the spirit of Mr. Anonymous, who's spouting bullshit, but in the spirit of making you, Mr. Author, yourself into the force you could be. Until then, I am just going to have to keep deffering to Packer on all these points. Notice however his recent New Yorker piece played up the possibility for substantive change... on similar grounds.

Also, Kagan is not quite nailing it when he says those 20,000 achieve parity with his figures. Baghdad is a child's playground of a crazy city to control, and we've had those 20,000 there before. Sure, we're changing strategies, but even Petraeus is open about his doubts that the U.S. military will really be receptive to the new approach. We frankly do need the about 150k boys over there to do it justice, Sadr City or not. Ontop of which we do need boots heavily outside of Baghdad too... It's a headache, there is progress being made (ducking tomatoes) and I'm five thousand miles from an expert, but, I got no confidence and don't think this is the decision to try and make a mark with...

More and more I am thinking, cut and run. This idea that we have to fix what we broke is turning into us breaking things into smaller and smaller pieces... (ducking eggplants from other side)

For now, color me Packer and i will continue, like so many of us, to get all my opinions second hand from the newsies!

As for the rough parity of figures between Kagan and Bush - the former says Bush's total amounts to 29,000, if one includes all the concomitants of Army brigades and Marine regiments. We don't deploy just combat forces, we deploy in formations known as BCTs (Brigade Combat Teams) and RCTs (Regiment Combat Teams). A brigade is comprised of about 3,500 fighting men, and that's the statistic the administration used to arrive at its deceptive surge total of 21,500. However, a BCT has 5,000 soldiers all told, including signals officers, psych-ops specialists, engineers, finance consultants, etc.

Kagan's point in that Weekly Standard piece was that Bush's actual deployment number is closer to 29,000, which is more or less what Kagan allocated as the minimum requisite combat troops needed to retake the most exigent sectors of Baghdad. I concede the AEI has played fast and loose with its figures. But also consider that Baghdad now has around 25,000 troops on the ground. A deployment of even 17,500 combat soldiers, which Bush has committed to send to the capital, with 4,000 going to Anbar Province, is still nearly a doubling of the current garrison. Crucial to this calculus is the insistence that we openly engage the Mahdi Army or Badr Organization.

Color me a realist, but chivvying the Shia for their sinister infiltration of central government while trying to stabilize the keystone province of Iraq is too tall an order. Kagan's plan is persuasive because it unfolds in phases and targets those areas -- the Sunni and mixed-ethnic neighborhoods -- where a diminution of violence will have the greatest political impact. The U.S. must declare itself a neutral peacekeeper, not beholden to any faction in what looks increasingly to become an all-out civil war. (What I failed to mention in my piece is that militarily confronting Sadr might have one potential benefit: Maliki's regime would collapse, and Jalal Talabani could then exercise his constitutional right, as president, to appoint a less partisan emergency government. This set of events carries with it a heavy risk, however.)

Cutting and running is the most disastrous option since Iraq has simply not got the capability to defend itself from internal disintegration. The disillusioned hawks like Charles Krauthammer and Andrew Sullivan who say we must threaten the Iraqis with a permanent withdrawal to the south and to Kurdistan are really saying, "Either you end the tribalism and get your act together or we'll let you find out what genocide looks like." Forgive me if I think this contravenes the basic principle for removing Saddamist fascism in the first place.

Iraqis don't trust local police forces because these have become sub-Serpico nightmares of double and triple-dealing, riven with the very death squad hooligans and gangsters we're trying to save the country from. The army is inchoate and too incompetent to wage any long-term hold-and-rebuild operations on its own.

Americans will, for the near future, have to form the vanguard of any successful military campaign. Our failures thus far are actually our advantages going forward. Operation Together Forward was a stunning catastrophe because it failed to adhere to one of the most clearly articulated rules of counterinsurgency warfare -- and those rules were not, remember, devised for just Iraq but for interventions in Central and South America.

The Tal Afar example is optimistic: here you had 50-50 split between the two most parlous tribes in Iraq, yet they eventually managed to arrive at a state of civility and pluralism. Surely the Sunnis and Shia of Tal Afar are not more laid-back than those of Baghdad. That Iraq's economy is thriving also works in the surge's favor.

Even the ISG stipulated that mass unemployment and widespread disaffection which resulted from a precipitous de-Baathification and the dissolution of the Iraqi army contribute to the insurgency. Bush proposes to add $12 billion to bolster local industry and employment efforts. Good. If even a handful of districts out of the 23 Kagan has isolated for clear-hold-build projects can be secured long enough to allow capital improvements to yield dividends for the Baghdadi man on the street, this will have been worth the additional call-up for forces.

Do I think the surge is guaranteed to work? No, and I offer a few reservations and caveats in my piece. There is no certainly that Bush will give Gen. Petraeus the proper latitude to put his (Petraeus') good thinking into practice. Nor do I have much faith that people on this side of the globe will tolerate the kind of bloody headlines we can expect in the coming months before there's even a hint of progress.

I'm not someone who thinks we've come so far and lost so much already that to give up now would be too demoralizing. Quitting a struggle to save lives is fine so long as we're prepared to accept the consequences of quitting. But I don't think we are prepared to accept the consequences if Iraq is forfeited to the primitive thugs who have sworn themselves to mass murder and Islamism, two phenomena you can be sure will return to haunt us on our own shores sooner rather than later.

Anyone who wants to really have perspective on what ultimately happened, right or wrong, in Iraq, will use the Petraeus appointment as a jumping off point. This is a kind of fresh start. And my boy P. was shot with an M-16 in the chest (pace Wiki) and has a name straight out of the 300. Can someone at Jewcy please dog this man's steps? Certain parts of your webdomain name have led me to believe that you control all the money. Can you not get on allocating that to tracking current and future progress of the Surge?

And I mean it: this article is getting some media attention. You are one of the few outlets of folks our age (I assume mid late twenties) taking this stuff seriously that ain't dailykos. Is it too much to ask that you commit to this story? I'm talking twice weekly updates... I believe this is an entirely realistic request.

I call it on: Jewcy vs. Everybody. Will the Surge work?

I am not smart enough to challenge Mr. Weiss on tactics, strategies, etc., but I am guessing that I can't be the only one with a nagging sense that what we have here is a failure to democracate (it's the "truthiness" of 2007 people, start dropping it).

There are numerous columns as to why the surge will fail, and a handful of what can be gained, of which this seems the most coherent and rational. Ultimately though, doesn't it boil down to the fact that our entire adventures in Iraq have been boiled down to securing Baghdad. The falsities and equivocations as to why we went to Iraq in the first place will be hashed by historians (and subcommittees) into perpetuity, but securing Baghdad is a galaxy far, far, away from the potentially noble ideal of setting up a stable democracy in the Middle East.

Rudy Guiliani's connection between his administration's succesful policing techniques in New York City and the surge sounds facile (I for one never considered the crack dealers on the corner an insurgency), but there seems to be truth in the idea that this is NYPD Blue in Humvees. Weiss breaks it down in almost Compstat terms, flooding the hot zones in South Karahdah instead of the South Bronx, and once and for all ridding the Green Zone of squegee men. I sincerely hope that Weiss is right that the "augmentation" could ultimately save lives, but I still can't get beyond the basic precept that even post-9/11, the average American (and the above-average-Americans with actual family members in Iraq) would have signed on to a mission that has been reduced to an extremely violent and dangerous precinct patrol.

I, of course, have no answers. Leaving Iraq to fend for itself seems morally corrupt, but no moreso than hanging tough in carnage central. Securing Baghdad is massively important -- and ideally worthwhile -- but even if it works, the surge isn't exactly going to find people kissing in the heart of now-safe-for-all-fans-of-Wicked-and-Bubba-Gump-shrimp-Times-Square on VE Day now is it.

--Patrick J. Sauer

So much of the political debate is focused on the binary assumption that the U.S. and allies must either stay the course in Iraq (with or without more troops) or disengage completely.  As has been pointed out ad nauseum, neither option is acceptable.  No increase in soldiers can stop determined guerillas and suicide bombers;  the Americans learned this, belatedly, in Vietnam (as far as guerillas were concerned, anyway).  Even reinstituting the draft, which the lame-duck Bush administration won't do, wouldn't help.  Conversely, disengagement would leave a weak Iraqi coalition government at the mercy of three warring factions plus Iran, with years of anarchy and ethno-religious massacres the likely result.

There is a third way which, although many others have suggested it, doesn't seem to be on the U.S. and Iraqi governments' table.  That option is to convene a conference of the U.S., the present Iraqi government, and the Shiite and Kurdish resistance leaders.  This conference must have one and only one purpose:  to divide the territory now called Iraq the way it should have been divided long ago,  into three states:  Sunni, Shiite and Kurdish.  As a necessary condition for receiving U.N. membership and international foreign aid, the three new states would have to sign a non-aggression pact, including but not limited to cessation of suicide bombings and other terrorist actions. This pact would be enforced with a combination of peacekeeping forces and a (much smaller!) number of U.S. and allied troops.  These forces, if properly trained and equipped, would not only prevent the new nations from imploding or invading each other, but also discourage Iran from taking control, whether directly or by proxy.

Mr. Weiss and the President presuppose there are a finite number of insurgents and terrorists in Iraq, and if we give enough time for US forces in Iraq to kill or capture all (or most) of them, then that would be the key to victory.

However that is a flawed asessment, as it is apparent the number of violent acts in Iraq have not decreased over these past 4 years. It would appear the US presence itself may in fact be the prime motivator for the violence, in which case Bush's troop "surge" will have the opposite desired effect.

The counterinsurgency doctrine assumes no such thing. As I hope I made clear in my piece, the impetus behind the surge is as much psychological as it is material. Clearing and holding Baghdad will provide time and resources to reconstitute the political and economic infrastructures of the capital, making the attractiveness and sustainability of any future insurgency that much less. Those who aren't encouraged to join in the attacks on coalition and Iraqi forces are at least cowed by the attackers to stay quiet and not inform on such riffraff. But civil incentives -- turning back on basic utilities, expanding a dire job market, etc. -- fills the vacuum in which Al Qaeda now bombinates. Zarqawi understood this all too well: In one of his many pronouncements before his not-timely-enough death, he foresaw that if civil war were averted in Iraq (with Al Qaeda presumably rushing in a such an ideal moment to cobble together its caliphate), his forces would have to revert to a new base of operations -- namely, Syria. Zarqawi did little accounting for the sheer figures of his terrorist army because he knew that these fluctuate with disillusion and chaos in whatever host country the army established itself. So it's not a matter of squashing individual terrorists as it is of killing off their blood supply.

The commenter is also wrong to say that the U.S. presence is directly correlated to levels of violence in postwar Iraq. Generally, where coalition numbers have increased in a region, the violence in that region has gone down. Also, there is every indication that a phased or categorical withdrawl of U.S. soldiers would give way to ethnic cleansing or genocide; surely a set of circumstances that would up the frequency of "violent acts."

As it stands, our presence may be the only stopgap between a sclerotic and faction-riven failed state and perhaps the bloodiest regional war the Middle East has ever known.

This article's main purpose is to get the US further bogged down in
the Middle East.
The US is tangled up in civil war that has no shortage of opposing fighters.
Killing insurgents/suicide bombers in no way effects the supply of
fighters.
Each offensive is just another version of one long unending
conflict.
No amount of force will change the battle field. The insurgents
will just wait for Iraq V2.0

If we "win" that they will wait for V3.0.

Why is Bush obsessed with being President of the Middle East

This is not the US's fight

So the idea is to pacify the Sunni areas and hand them to the Mahdi Army?

The idea is to protect the Sunni and mixed ethnic areas from Mahdi aggression; also to effect the kinds of changings within the Mahdi we're now seeing. Sadr in Iran, splinter elements rounded up and arrested, etc.

These people have a history exponentially longer than the existence of the US of fighting invaders. They wont quit, they live there. Doesnt matter how many you kill, how many McDonalds you set up for them to work in, they are religious and tribal zealots who will not stop fighting. Its in their culture to oppose that which is being forced upon them. They do not want democracy, and the only way to control them is to be as vicious as Saddam was and be prepared to use that tactic for the length of whatever "government" you desire to be in place. You cannot stop a determined insurgency by trying to kill all the insurgents. Once again THEY LIVE THERE.

Mike! You totally avoided the question of why your happy ass is not currently in the army. Put your money where your yapper is.

of course, it is theoretically POSSIBLE for the surge to work.  I wouldn't bet on it, for the reasons cited above and others discussed elsewhere...

it IS a tiny bit like NY in the early 90's, in that there were thousands of people dying with no end in sight, and then changes in policing strategy were made.  The policing DID help in a few small but significant ways, but IMO the sea change came from within the psychology and demographics on the street itself.  Hip-hop's message and the 'little brother syndrome'  made the next generation of 12-year-olds NOT want to be like their older dead gangbanging or crack ho'ing older siblings, choosing to 'kill' each other with rhymes instead of guns... and as 'Tipping Point' pointed out, the Roe demographic kicked in that there were simply measurably far less unwanted children (most likely to end up in crime) once abortion-on-demand became widely available.

 Point being, there may be a hundred significant internal trends within Iraqi society, any one or two or several of which may throttle the level of violence (or amp it, for that matter).  The 'surge' even at its most effective is not likely to do much more than ride the waves-- and nobody really knows whether the waves are getting bigger or smaller.  I'm sure they'll take the credit or the blame, but ultimately the fortunes of 20 million iraqis are in nobody's hands but the iraqis themselves (and god, if you will)