I have been listening to General Petraeus’s testimony before Congress today. He shows a slide for drawing down the troops steadily and over the next 2 1/2 years ending US ground operations there. He strongly warns against a faster draw down because Iraq may become much more unstable than it is now. And he claims that the surge is a success. So let’s consider that for a moment.

The biggest success this year in Iraq has been in the Anbar province. The funny thing though is that the surge was targeted at Bagdad. The success of turning Sunnis in Anbar against Al Qaeda may have happened even without the surge.

So ignoring Anbar, how did the surge do? Here is the slide set that General Petraeus showed. If you look at the slides, overall it looks like the surge has brought the violence down to about the level of May 2006. So then is the surge a big success? Taking violence down to what was already considered way out of control can hardly be called a great success.

But if you look at the last slide, it does give a plan for drawing down troops. This will take about four more years, but importantly, our troops are no longer in ground combat in about 2 1/2 years. At the end of four years about 5000 military personel stay behind (on the internal bases I have long advocated at NoSpeedBumps, although the 5000 number he shows is way too low).

So really, the entire debate about next steps in Iraq gets down to two simple choices:

1) Start gradually withdrawing troops right away and end ground patrols within no more than a year
2) Follow General Petraeus’s 2 1/2 year roadmap for ending ground patrols

(In both cases significant numbers of American military personnel can be left behind on bases.)

The General says that doing option #1 can lead to disaster. Okay, but there is certainly no guarantee that doing #2 will work either (as the general admitted). In fact, haven’t we been hearing for years now that if we just stay the course a little longer that things will get better? At this point it is all just guesswork. A couple of months from now things in Iraq might get much better - or much worse. Your guess is as good as mine - or as good as General Petraeus’s.

At one level, the surge was a brilliant political move by the Bush administration. Because they can now show some progress in Iraq, however fleeting it may be, they have bought themselves more time to “stay the course” and hold off the forces calling for a fast withdrawal.

Every day more young American men get killed or severely wounded in the Iraq. Is it worth it? It is hard to know at this point. Will Iraq someday be a stable democracy at the heart of the Middle East? Well, that is a pretty hazy vision at this point. Even if we keep troops there doing ground operations for another 5 years, that is doubtful. Another authoritarian regime is more likely. I mean, how much experience do Iraqis have with democracy? And instability leads to authoritarianism, not democracy. A more realistic goal at this point is to avoid a failed state.

So I am not buying General Petraeus’s plan. As we cut back ground operations, violence is going to increase - whether we do it over the next year or over the next 2 1/2 years. So why drag it out while more Americans get killed, we spend billions more, and our military is further run down? As I wrote last November:

If we think that we can wait to cleanly hand over each province to the Iraqi central government, we are kidding ourselves. They are going to do a really erratic job for years to come. Some places will not be secured well at all. Some will be like the wild west gone mad with various insane factions killing each other and civilians. But we can’t fix this perhaps even if we stay for another decade and let another 10,000 of our soldiers be killed.

… We just have to pull the plug and throw the hot potato over the wall to the Iraqis themselves. Our troops can consolidate and withdraw on to a few large bases in Iraq to provide a significant supporting role - unlike in Vietnam where we just walked away from any supporting role. Nearly all of the ground patrols and ground fighting will be in Iraqi hands (our troops will only go after high-value Al Qaeda targets).

So take General Petraeus’s plan shown on his last slide and compress it down from 2 1/2 years to one year. Regardless of what General Petraeus or any other analysts say, leaving in one year vs. 2 1/2 years may not make any difference at all. In fact, things could even get worse if we stay longer.

For that matter, we have been in Iraq for 4 1/2 years and last week a group of retired police chiefs and US generals said that we should scrap the entire Iraqi police force and rebuild it from scratch! Oops, time to start over.

It is past time to start over. It is time to start leaving. And we should start gradually leaving right now.

But of course that is not going to happen. Instead, now the Bush administration has the cover it needs to stay the course. And Republicans in Congress have the votes to keep the Democrats in check.

So all we can do is hope for the best in Iraq while General Petraeus begins implementing his slow withdrawal of troops. Meanwhile, we can wait to hear what the presidential candidates plan to do when they take office.

This entry was posted on Monday, September 10th, 2007 at 11:10 pm and is filed under Iraq & Middle East, Politics. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. For Trackbacks to this post, use URL: http://nospeedbumps.com/wp-trackback.php?p=1381