A surge to nowhere
... provide means to deal with real grievances; commit sufficient troops; isolate the conflict area; display rectitude toward civilians and prisoners; emphasize intelligence; disrupt the insurgents’ food supplied; and divide the leaders from the followers
Those words, from a review of Anthony James Joes’ Resisting Rebellion: The History and Politics of Counterinsurgency go some way to explaining why the troop surge, now contemplated for Iraq, will not work, and provide further confirmation of the cluelessness of the Democrats.
So we apparently are planning to send 20-30 thousand more troops to Iraq to “get things under control”, “stabilize the situation”, “suppress the insurgency in Baghdad” or similar noble sounding words. Of course, we don’t know where that number came from, we have an idea that even the generals on the ground don’t want it, and, I’m not even sure we’ve heard a plan for what these troops are going to do, have we?
I fear that what they will do is what we have expected them to do in the past: “show the flag”, “send a message”, “convey resolve” and the like. All things which only work if those opposed to our toops agree to let them work. And we already know that the Iraq insurgency has long since gotten over any intimidation factor our soldiers conveyed.
So what we are left with is power: our solders can be ordered to blow things up, to kill people, to use force. And what continues to escape almost everyone is that force is not what you need to defeat an insurgency. See the quote at the top. We need those things, and no one is talking about them.
So the troop surge will replicate in miniature the failure of the war in general: military success followed by strategic failure. We will see more heroic video of our young men and women on patrol, covered in protective gear and armed with an amazing amount of firepower. And we will still not grasp that none of this is the point.
Apparently there is some seasonal lull in violence about this time of year. So the surge will coincide with that lull, the administration will claim success, the media will fall in line, the Democrats will suck their thumbs and cry.
And it will have solved nothing in Iraq.