Destruction of the Bush Presidency
The “decider” has spoken. Overriding the clearly expressed wishes of the vast majority of the American public, the wishes of the majority of the American congress, the earnest pleading of his top military advisors( those who opposed too vigorously have been removed from office), as well as the intelligence input from analysts at the CIA and The Department of State, President Bush remains firm in his desire to send additional troops to Iraq.
In my humble opinion, this stubbornness and arrogance will be the final blow to what is by any measure a failed Presidency. Bush will go down in the history books as one of the worst, if not the worst, “decider” in the proud, if rather short by world civilization standards, history of the United States.
Why Bush thinks that an additional 21,500 troops will make any real difference in Iraq only demonstrates once again his ignorance of the dynamics of fighting an insurgency. Yes, I know that this time the strategy is supposed to be different. The US, with major assistance from the Iraqi troops are supposed to hold an area once cleared of trouble makers.
One of the problems with this plan is that a fair percentage of the Iraqi troops who are supposed to do the a significant part of the holding and clearing are the trouble makers.
Another problem is that all of the talk about “winning the hearts and minds” of the population is largely crap when you have already destroyed the countries institutions, infrastructure, way of life, and have provided almost no security for anyone in Iraq except your hand picked functionaries.
But the major problem with any plan for US troops to “win” the war in Iraq is the nature of a full blown insurgency which takes place in any country. An insurgency, from the insurgent’s point of view, is really a war against an unpopular government (weak, corrupt, inefficient) or an invading military force. With Iraq both conditions apply.
A general rule in fighting an insurgency is that ten conventional troops are required for every one of the insurgents. Why do you need such overwhelming numerical supremacy? The very nature of an insurgency gives us some very good reasons.
For one, the battle is taking place on the insurgents home turf. They know the battlefield in a way that the invading army never will. Then they blend into the native population. Why? Because they come from the native population. Which brings us to three. Every insurgent that is killed, captured, or mistreated in some way, has family members, friends, and associates who are outraged by the act and are duty bound to extract revenge.
In an area of the world, like Iraq, that has an “eye for an eye” tradition going back thousands of years, a constant and ever growing supply of fresh recruits who are eager for revenge are easy for the insurgents to obtain. Therefore, the likelihood in a well entrenched insurgency is that the longer the battle rages the stronger it will become.
Time is clearly on the insurgents side. They are fighting from or near their homes. They are highly motivated with the goal of removing foreign troops from their soil. As time goes by and the insurgency grows in strength the costs to the occupying armies increase. Both in the loss of life and the tremendous cost of maintaining fighting forces far from the homeland. It is a losing long term battle for the occupiers.
If you doubt the difficulty of fighting and winning against a well developed insurgency look at the history of the French in Vietnam, the Americans in Vietnam, the French in Algeria, and the Russians in Afghanistan, to name a few battlegrounds where the insurgents eventually won their fight against far greater “on paper” powers.
Then in Iraq you have the religious element to the war and the various factions within Iraq that are fighting each other. The deck is stacked overwhelmingly against the foreign forces. A political victory is required to really win any war but in Iraq where is a political victory coming from?
How can you “win” such a conflict when you are imprisoned in the middle of it? How can you win when you are up against an over powering religious influence that almost assures that eventually an Islamic Republic of Iraq will emerge?
The short answer. You can not. Not even a stubborn man like president Bush who continues to up the stakes. He is willing to sacrifice the lives and limbs of the best trained and dedicated troops in the world to defend his own misplaced ego and satisfaction of being a war time President and his role as “the decider”.
In doing so he has sown the seeds for the destruction of his own Presidency. The decider has decided to go for broke in Iraq. The danger is that his hubris knows no bounds.
Does anyone else hear the war drums beating to an Iranian tune?
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