With civil unrest continuing to rise in Iraq, there is a real possibility the entire venture could spiral out of control heading into the June 30th hand-off. Matt Yglesias wonders why we don't make greater use of Air Force and Navy personnel for policing the country.
Matt's point is simple: we need more boots on the ground. This is almost universally agreed to across the political and policy spectrums. Rob Kagan and William Kristol think so. Kevin Drum thinks so. General Shinseki thought so (and presumably still does) as do other senior military officials. John McCain, John Kerry and George Bush (each in their own way) think so.
Surely even Rumsfeld, the architect of our understaffed occupation, has come around on this one? As of this moment he's still in charge of the US military, so come on Don, make decisions that get more boots on the ground!
Increased contributions, both in terms of peacekeeping and logistical support, by the Air Force and Navy are a good possibility. Sure, there would be problems with interservice rivalry and coordination, but a strong SecDef should be able to overcome those. Rumsfeld came into office touting a reinvention of the US military for the post Cold War age. The lesson from Iraq (and Afghanistan) is that our high tech military can succeed in combat with far fewer troops, but maintaining an orderly occupation still requires large numbers of personnel with specialized training. Rumsfeld should seize this as an opportunity to complete the military transformation (and perhaps to restore some of his tattered reputation).
Another possibility I've noted before is the suggestion by Sen. Collins of Maine that we get NATO to take over some of our responsibilities in the Balkans so that we can shift those troops to Iraq; a proposal which has gone precisely nowhere since she made it a month or so ago.
Or come up with some other ideas. Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz et al. are supposedly bright guys. Brainstorm! They should lock themselves in a room, order out for pizza, and not leave until they have a plan to get another 50,000 troops into Iraq.
Many people, myself included, didn't agree with the reasoning on launching this war, but having wagered the good name of the US on making progress in the Middle East, none of us wants to see it fail.
NOTE: One of the comments on Matt's original post cites Edward Luttwak's "The Pentagon and the Art of War," which suggests that letting all the services get involved in Vietnam was a major cause of our defeat there. Not having read Luttwak's book I'm hesitant to comment, but have to suspect the analogy doesn't hold. In Vietnam we got all the services engaged in ongoing military operations, complicating our ability to exert force in a time of war. In Iraq the war is over, it's the peace we're trying to win.
Molto Grazie
Posted by: cogito | June 08, 2004 at 02:42 AM