Iraq Troop Levels - Opinion

Obviously, this is a hot topic, and has been for years. Rhetoric goes all ways - apparently, you are either a coward or a murderer. Lovely.

In the last week or so there have been a number of high ranking DoD officials, probably most notably the CentCom chief, speak out in favor of raising troop levels in Iraq, while many politicians of both parties are in favor of troop reductions, as is public opinion according to the most recent polling.

I've said it a few times before, but I think that swelling our ranks in Iraq is the best option available. I know that many (most) here will disagree, and that is why I wanted to open the discussion.

Ignoring the piss-poor job of management already displayed, I believe our best path forward (in order to protect future American interests) is to bring the security situation in Iraq (and Afghanistan and Pakistan) to a level which conventional (local) peacekeeping forces can deal with.

It's gonna cost a lot of money. It's going to get our troops killed. But, bringing the Middle Eastern economy under control, minimizing the capabilities of terrorist groups operating out of that area, and having a powerful Iraqi government to sway uncooperative neighbors may make that a price worth paying. Short term pain for long term gain.

I think another 200K Coalition soldiers should do it. What's that? Where will they come from? Obviously, we need to get these cloning programs working

What do you think?

I think the only way more troops will help is if each one we send there kills at least 4 people that might be terrorists every month. Sooner or later only the good people will be left. It's the only way.

That's my opinion.

But, bringing the Middle Eastern economy under control, minimizing the capabilities of terrorist groups operating out of that area, and having a powerful Iraqi government to sway uncooperative neighbors may make that a price worth paying.

Wasn't that what pretty much what Iraq was before Operation Iraqi Freedom?

I prefer a withdrawal from Iraq into Afghanistan - if we need more troops, we as a country will have to start either making being a soldier a more attractive career choice or hiring mercenaries. Both will cost money that I'd rather see spent at home, but since we're already in this mess, we should make the best of it.

The resurgant Taliban, Pakistan and Iran are the real 'enemies of freedom' in the area... any form of order in Iraq will take years to emerge out of the chaos, and our troops are nearby in case it develops in a way that we don't like.

If we really want to 'win' in Iraq, I think that the War Nerd has the only lasting solution - partition the countries and let them fight each other for awhile, and make sure that the eventual winner understands that his continued health depends on making us happy.

We could also just put the Kurds in charge - they are the only ones disciplined enough to take total control right now, and I doubt that they would waste little time doing it given full American military backing.

I doubt that "numbers" will help us "win" Iraq. I use quotes because who really knows what a win in Iraq really looks like, and who knows how many troops are the right amount. I tend to trust the generals in charge, who say that they have enough soldiers. It depends on what our mission is right now - are the Americans the one who need to be policing the country right now? If so, we need a squad of soldiers on every corner. Otherwise, our job is to prevent civil war from breaking out, plus hunting down as many insurgents as we can. For the 2nd role, we have enough.

But, bringing the Middle Eastern economy under control, minimizing the capabilities of terrorist groups operating out of that area, and having a powerful Iraqi government to sway uncooperative neighbors may make that a price worth paying.

So the goal is not just to end the civil war in Iraq, but to:

"Control" the economy of an entire region;
Conduct comprehensive operations against regional terror groups;
and turn Iraq into a regional power.

Um, dude...Any one of these would be extremely difficult in any part of the world. All three, in the Middle East? I don't think it's anything like we could do in a generation, no matter how many troops we put in - unless the people in the area *want* it to happen...

LeapingGnome wrote:
But, bringing the Middle Eastern economy under control, minimizing the capabilities of terrorist groups operating out of that area, and having a powerful Iraqi government to sway uncooperative neighbors may make that a price worth paying.

Wasn't that what pretty much what Iraq was before Operation Iraqi Freedom?

Maybe, but I don't think a time machine is a feasible solution

"Winning" in Iraq is nonsense rhetoric. We like to win, so it seemed like a good party platform. Some reasonable objectives might be a better place to start. Assisting the government in providing and maintaining basic services might be a good place to start.

If we really want to 'win' in Iraq, I think that the War Nerd has the only lasting solution - partition the countries and let them fight each other for awhile, and make sure that the eventual winner understands that his continued health depends on making us happy.

I can only see this conflict lasting for many years, and there is no way Syria, Iran, and Israel would stay out of it. This would deteriorate the situation in the neighboring countries, and make things even worse. The present administration hasn't seemed able to deal with the fact that all nations have their own agenda, and we need to work within that framework to get what we want.

I can only see this conflict lasting for many years, and there is no way Syria, Iran, and Israel would stay out of it. This would deteriorate the situation in the neighboring countries, and make things even worse. The present administration hasn't seemed able to deal with the fact that all nations have their own agenda, and we need to work within that framework to get what we want.

Don't forget Turkey. You make "Kurdistan" a possibility, and Turkey will probably go bonkers.

John McCain is on the far extreme of the debate in stating that he is for a massive increase in the troop levels in Iraq. He's also delusional if he thinks that those troops will simply materialize out of thin air. Maybe he should get together with Charlie Rangel and work out a way to send all of America into that craphole.

Talk about two idiots who have no business running for national office.

I can't see even talking about upping the number of troops until a general or politicians can explain how more troops will make the shiites and sunnis reach a lasting political agreement.

Beyond that, we don't have the troops needed to station 500k soldiers in Iraq for any length of time. The only way to get enough would be to bring in the draft.

Well, a draft would not be needed if the Young Republicans simply volunteered en masse.

About four years ago, I came home from college for a vacation, and one of my floormates, who happens to live 20 minutes from me, drove. Before going home we hung out at his house for a while and played video games with his brother. His brother, let's call him Joe, was younger than us, a bit soft around the edges, always smiling, and got frustrated easily with HALO. About a week later, Joe shipped off to basic training.

Joe had some trouble in basic. He couldn't quite make some of the time requirements for long runs; he'd miss his goal by seconds. His instructors thought he was just being lazy until he started coughing up blood and passed out. Joe did eventually pass under the time limit, and was assigned to an Avenger crew. Avengers are HMMWVs mounted with anti-air missile racks; a role not terribly in demand these days.

About two weeks ago, I was hanging out with my college friend and Joe again. He's much taller than he used to be, and a lot more muscular. He doesn't smile much. He showed us slideshows and videos from where he's served; South Korea and Iraq. Pictures of friends goofing around. Pictures of camel spiders and a rare owl he saw in Iraq. Pictures of insurgents with their brains splattered all over the ground, including one he soberly identified as his first confirmed kill. He tells us stories that don't make it onto the news, too terrible for anyone to use for political gain. Little children, strapped with handgrenades, with fishing line linking the pins to their wrists. Joe has that kind of look and quiet voice of someone that needs to talk about things he can't articulate, and I'm one of the honored with enough of his trust that he tries to tell me. I just listen, but that seems to be all he really wants.

Joe's back in Iraq now. I think he gets one more leave before he goes back for the last time, and then he's out. He's in the Army, as was his older brother and his father, and his mother was in the Air Force. They all hate this war, hate this administration, hate this president with a kind of passion I feel guilty trying to understand. He'll make it home. He's smart and he's tough, and he doesn't want to be a hero.

I say enough people have died; enough of ours and enough of theirs. Bring our soldiers home. Let the Iraqis sort things out for themselves. After all, it's pretty racist to assume they're incapable of democracy without our leadership.

Robear wrote:

Well, a draft would not be needed if the Young Republicans simply volunteered en masse.

They already do.

souldaddy wrote:
Robear wrote:

Well, a draft would not be needed if the Young Republicans simply volunteered en masse.

They already do.

I think he meant volunteering themselves.

Don't forget Turkey. You make "Kurdistan" a possibility, and Turkey will probably go bonkers.

Any partitioning would have to come with a 'no-fly zone' level of security from us. I'd feel sorry for any Turkish soldier going into that war. The Kurds would eat them for breakfast on their own land, especially if we gave them military aid.

Minase wrote:

I'd feel sorry for any Turkish soldier going into that war. The Kurds would eat them for breakfast on their own land, especially if we gave them military aid.

Saddam's military managed to conquer them. It's not like they're indestructible. And taking the Kurd's side against the turkish military is not a place we want to be. It's just a bad situation all around.

Lobster wrote:

A very compelling emotionally charged story about his friend Joe

It's sad to think that things like this will not decrease if we were to pull out now. In fact, horrible attrocities went on before we ever left for Iraq. It is interesting though how some (not reffering directly to Lobster) seemingly never cared about the children and families that were butchered before the Iraq war.

You mean like the people who try to paint Iraq as a place we desperately needed to free from a horrible dictator, moreso than any of the war-torn nations in Africa where the quantity of innocents tortured and butchered are exponentially higher than that of Saddam-run Iraq?

Yeah, that is interesting.

In fact, horrible attrocities went on before we ever left for Iraq.

Not at anything like the rate they are now. Saddam was hard on Iraq; this is worse.

But as I recall, the prescription even among the people who wanted to go "back to Baghdad" was to simply knock over Saddam. Everything would be fine then. No one said "Yeah, let's do it even if it causes worse suffering, breaks the country to pieces, enables Al Quaeda to train and propagandize, and empowers Iran in the region." By any measure - humanitarian, economic, diplomatic - this has been a mistaken enterprise that has not achieved it's goals.

I wonder, too, if you were demonstrating against our involvement in Iraq back in the 80's, or if you were happy to accept Reagan's judgement that a dictator who was fighting Iran was the kind of guy we wanted. Even the folks who today mouth the "save the innocent" argument were willing then to overlook what Saddam did to his own people. American foreign policy only shifted after the war ended and Saddam started taking liberties and bad-mouthing us.

Only solution I see is to partition the country into three semi-autonomous states.

Internationalize the oil fields as much as possible, with a revenue sharing plan for all three states.

The Kurdish region must sign and abide to a proclamation that they will never seek to increase their borders, and that any attempt to do so will cost them their share of the oil revenue.

Split Baghdad right down the middle and give half to the Sunnis and have to the Shiites.

All of the above will be in effect for 10 years at which time the three regions can decide to reunite as one country or go there separate ways forever.

It might work.

The fundamental problem is that we're using the wrong tool for the job.

Armies are useless against terrorists. Armies have two functions: they break things and kill people. Ours is the best that's ever existed, but it still just breaks things and kills people. You can't have a war on terrorism any more than you can declare war on the Hail Mary pass. Terrorism is a tactic. Declaring war on a tactic is a serious syntactic confusion that's getting thousands of our soldiers, and hundreds of thousands of Iraqis, killed.

Trying to use soldiers to fight terrorism is like trying to kill ants with army boots. You can do as much stomping as you want, and there will always be more ants. Soldiers aren't good at investigation and determining the correct target. When all you have is a hammer, your problems all look like nails. Soldiers have guns and artillery, so that's what they use. But they kill the wrong people and make more terrorists. They see ants and stomp them. They see more ants and stomp those. But no matter how much stomping they do, there's always more ants.

The right way to fight terrorists is with police, investigations, trials, and scrupulous adherence to the rights of the accused. We could have won this with careful police work, by turning the Iraqis against the terrorists. We had to convince the rest of the population to cooperate. If they knew that psycho cousin Abdul would be treated well and given a fair trial, at least some of them would have been willing to turn the bad guys in. Stretching the ant metaphor a bit too far, instead of stomping on ants, we had to use the ants to get to the queens and neutralize THOSE. We had to convince the Iraqis that our way was better, and the way to do that was by actually being better.

But then Abu Ghraib happened, and we lost the war. It was over right there. When the Iraqis realized that we're just as bad or worse than Saddam, and that our vaunted 'superiority' is just propaganda and not the truth, it was over. No Iraqi of good heart would ever drop a dime on crazy cousin Abdul, knowing what we'd do to him. The remaining result has been completely predictable. I've been saying it ever since Abu Ghraib broke: the war is lost and we will eventually get kicked out of the Middle East so hard we'll bounce.

It doesn't matter how many soldiers we throw in. All we're doing now is stacking up body bags until we come home. Adding more soldiers will just result in more dead kids on both sides.

I, for one, am not all that concerned with the plight of the poor Iraqi. More to the point, I think that the vast majority of Americans, if they bother to put away the temporary advantage such outrage grants their own silly sectarian positions, would find it matters very little to them as well. There is very little in this world more distasteful than the feigned outrage of the demonstrably callous. Where, for instance, is the Christian Conservative "political will" when it comes to stopping the outrages of Karimov (who by any reasonable measure is many times worse than Saddam ever was)?

What DOES matter to me is how such policies we have pursued in the past or are pursuing now affects American interests. Frankly, whether or not an Iraqi college student can publish an obscene cartoon in his college paper doesn't matter at all to me. It doesn't even bother me if his parents are tortured as a result of it. What does matter to me is whether or not our policies result in American security, American interests, American influence, and American enrichment being adversely or positively affected.

In the view of that lens, this misadventure in Iraq has been a complete and unmitigated disaster and no increase in American troop levels will result in it being anything other than that.

It's time to pull out the troops.

I think we need about a million soldiers.

Seriously.

We're policing a civil war we unleashed between two sects of a largely violent religion that hate each other. The only way we can actually bring stability to Iraq (assuming that is a goal worth persuing at this point, although there is a if you broke it you should fix it morality angle here) is to basically bring in an enormous amount of troops and really occupy the country completely. And like someone else said, kill all the "bad guys".

In other words, it's a bad idea heaped on top of another bad idea. We messed up Iraq and have caused more death and carnage than Saddam ever dreamed of. It's a mess.

The entire discussion on troop levels is a red herring.

One can point out that, given enough time, money, and resolve for brutality, we can subjugate any people on earth. Though that may be true, the point is easily discounted by the fact that we neither have the resources or the political capital to make such a thing happen. As I pointed out to Robear in a private conversation, one solution to the insurgency could be to ship off all the Iraqis in traincars to gas chambers, but it's just not going to happen.

Given that we have to live in the real world and there are real world limitations on our power, what is the best we can hope for given the possible outcomes and the available tools? Stating that all the rational outcomes are unacceptable and putting off the decision to do anything constructive is no longer an option available to us. We've futzed around with that for the last three years and it's just gotten a lot of Americans killed.

Paleocon wrote:

As I pointed out to Robear in a private conversation, one solution to the insurgency could be to ship off all the Iraqis in traincars to gas chambers, but it's just not going to happen.

Your views intrigue me, and I wish to suscribe to your newsletter.

I think we ought to pull out entirely and use the money we're no longer spending to bribe each and every person in Iraq to stop fighting. Hey, if a guy's willing to stand in the middle of the street and fire an RPG at an Abrams for a couple bucks, he's probably more willing to NOT do that for a couple more.

LobsterMobster wrote:

I think we ought to pull out entirely and use the money we're no longer spending to bribe each and every person in Iraq to stop fighting. Hey, if a guy's willing to stand in the middle of the street and fire an RPG at an Abrams for a couple bucks, he's probably more willing to NOT do that for a couple more.

The time for that has long come and gone. If anything, we should have offered Saddam the bribe before the war started. That would have been "nation building" on the cheap.

LobsterMobster wrote:

I think we ought to pull out entirely and use the money we're no longer spending to bribe each and every person in Iraq to stop fighting. Hey, if a guy's willing to stand in the middle of the street and fire an RPG at an Abrams for a couple bucks, he's probably more willing to NOT do that for a couple more.

Yeah but where are we going to get the 72 virgins for each one? Certainly not from any college campus I've seen.

LobsterMobster wrote:

I think we ought to pull out entirely and use the money we're no longer spending to bribe each and every person in Iraq to stop fighting. Hey, if a guy's willing to stand in the middle of the street and fire an RPG at an Abrams for a couple bucks, he's probably more willing to NOT do that for a couple more.

That may be the best plan anyone has come up with yet. 200 million a month / 26 million people and going down daily = 7 a month for everyone.

baggachipz wrote:
LobsterMobster wrote:

I think we ought to pull out entirely and use the money we're no longer spending to bribe each and every person in Iraq to stop fighting. Hey, if a guy's willing to stand in the middle of the street and fire an RPG at an Abrams for a couple bucks, he's probably more willing to NOT do that for a couple more.

Yeah but where are we going to get the 72 virgins for each one? Certainly not from any college campus I've seen.

I read somewhere that it was actually 72 grapes. Seriously.

Yeah, if you don't see where the translation went wrong, I'm not going to hold your hand through it. ¬_¬

Paleocon, are you sure you don't see any negative impact on American interests should Iraq fall further in chaos? Do you really believe, with such Globalization as we have today, that we would be unaffected?

What happened before doesn't matter - what is the best path forward, considering what we know now?