New School Politics

Bush Brings Some Of Our Boys Home

Ryan | 13 09 2007

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After just over half a year of the troop surge, Bush is bringing soldiers home in limited quantities. Quite frankly, that confuses me. If the seven month surge is beginning to make the situation better in Iraq five year war, why start bringing troops home? It seems like exactly the opposite thing to do if we want to continue to make progress in Iraq.

What more troops gave us in Iraq was more force. Force has also been lacking since the beginning of the occupation in Iraq; we have always been fighting more passively (peacekeeping occupation) than aggressively (total war) and we never had enough troops to maintain the peace in the aftermath of isolated conflicts. We got it, it began to work, and then we toned it down. Considering my assumptions and my present knowledge, the move appears to make very little sense.

The President insisted:

Because of this success, General Petraeus believes we have now reached the point where we can maintain our security gains with fewer American forces.

That may or may not be true. But lets give the General the benefit of the doubt and say it is, say, 80% true–would it still be practical to begin withdrawals? I still say no. For one, there is a remaining possibility that Petraeus is wrong and we loose the ground we gained. And second, saying that maintaining our current levels is satisfactory also implies that we can achieve victory at the present rate. I don’t have any sense that we could achieve a surrender of jihadist forces in Iraq “in due time”. I think that even now, we still have to augment the rate of achievement in Iraq to make progress significant enough for ultimate victory.

If anything, the successes of the surge would tell me that we should maintain the surge itself or continue to inject more force in Iraq. As is I surmise that the present political developments are nothing more than representative of the major flaws of the entire Bush policy: he wants enough force in Iraq to keep the situation in our control, yet he will not raise the levels of force enough to yield the radically destructive change that constitutes victory in war.