BOOT ON THE GROUND IV
Edward Luttwak argues in today’s NYT that we need more troops:
In fact, the 28,000 American troops are now so thinly spread that they cannot reliably protect even themselves; the helicopter shot down on Sunday was taking off from an area that had not been secured, because doing so would have required hundreds of soldiers. For comparison, there are 39,000 police officers in New York City alone — and they at least know the languages of most of the inhabitants, few of whom are likely to be armed Baathist or Islamist fanatics.
Given the numbers in Iraq, it is impossible for American soldiers to contain even ordinary armed robberies, which abound because of the deeply rooted culture of tribal raiding (even the urban populations include many newly settled Bedouin, Kurdish and Turkmen nomads whose greatest pride was the razzia, the mounted raid). In the end, it would take several times the present level of combat troops to have any hope of enforcing order. The former Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, spoke of “several hundred thousand” troops before the invasion, only to be publicly ridiculed by the civilian chiefs. I doubt he takes much pleasure in being proved right.
Yet President Bush continues to push the sovereign remedy of cobbling together various Iraqi police forces and an army very quickly; Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld bragged yesterday that more than 100,000 Iraqi security officers had been trained. Assuming this hurried program allows for decent background checks — imagine criminal thugs and Saddam Hussein loyalists operating in police uniforms — it might help here and there, against the petty thieves. But it’s hard to imagine these lightly armed, lightly trained forces taking on well-armed robbers, let alone Baath militia holdouts, Sunni guerrillas, suicide bombers and Islamist terrorists slipping in from Syria and Jordan.
Luttwak’s argument is reasonable but he comes to the wrong conclusion. It is not only unrealistic but unwise to employ that many American soldiers as civil police authorities. This would only inflame resentment.
The mistake was in breaking up the existing Iraqi military and police forces, who were presumably large enough to get these jobs done before we arrived. Corruption in these forces would be unfortunate, but hardly novel in a Third World security force. But far easier to root out the bad apples on the job than screen them out ahead of time, given that we’d have to trust locals for the necessary background information anyway. US forces should be mainly concerned with training the locals to whom the job will devolve, with providing physical security to key sites as a major secondary responsibility.
As for the Chinook downing, the main problem wasn’t the lack of security but rather the bizarre decision to stage helicopters from an airport in daylight. Doing so gave all the advantage to the enemy, who merely had to wait to pick a high-value target.
