A Plague on the Nation

Watching George Bush’s televised speech last week, when he revealed what he called “the main elements” of his plan to rescue Iraq, was like watching a slightly nervous lieutenant colonel read PowerPoint slides. There was an unmistakable presence of bullet points; the plan is not altogether clear, but it seems to involve two deputy Iraqi commanders in Baghdad, nine administrative districts, eighteen Iraqi brigades, a large number of neighborhood police stations, and, oh yes, the dispatch of twenty-one thousand five hundred additional American troops. In a sincere tone of voice, the President also announced a door-to-door campaign “to gain the trust of Baghdad residents.”

Bush said that America’s military commanders had assured him that “this plan can work”—an oddly hedged phrasing. It was one of several fudges in his text, which recalled some of the rhetorical tactics his Administration employed to build support for the disastrous invasion of Iraq, almost four years ago. The President implied, for example, that his escalation had been conceived to support “the new Iraqi plan” to bring security to Baghdad, when it is well established that Iraq’s democratically elected Prime Minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, did not ask for any additional American troops and has agreed to accept them only under pressure. There were other tortured uses of language: Defense Secretary Robert Gates said that the plan was just a “temporary surge,” but temporary, he continued, in the sense of having no fixed end.

The President cowed Democrats in early 2003 by describing his choice then as a stark one between the invasion and overthrow of Saddam Hussein and a state of indefinite peril. He now claims that his opponents in Congress, who increasingly include members of his own party, face a choice between his “surge” and complete withdrawal from Iraq, with its attendant risk of chaos—more chaos, that is, than Bush’s war has already created. Of course, as the bipartisan Iraq Study Group made clear in its report last month, there are many policy choices besides an increase of troops which do not entail a total military withdrawal in the foreseeable future.

As Bush prepared to announce his plan, the White House overruled dissenters at the Pentagon in a manner reminiscent of its management of intelligence about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction before the invasion. On November 15th, General John P. Abizaid, the commander of all American military forces in the Middle East, testified publicly to Congress that he did not see a need for more American troops in Iraq. He apparently changed his mind later; in any event, he announced his retirement just before Christmas. Around the same time, the Washington Post reported that the Joint Chiefs of Staff unanimously opposed sending fifteen thousand or more troops to Iraq. There is no indication that the chiefs have all abandoned their doubts since then; they seem only to have agreed to follow orders. Gates told Congress late last week that the plan for more troops had originated with commanders in Iraq. But a short time later the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, General Peter Pace, testified that the commanders had requested considerably fewer troops than President Bush ultimately decided to send.

Presumably, the skepticism among uniformed officers is influenced by the numerous cases in recent military history, of diverse countries and diverse armies, which indicate that a counterinsurgency plan of the type Bush has embraced is very unlikely to succeed. The last British campaign in Northern Ireland was fought for three decades, and tens of thousands of Russian troops are still trying to subdue Chechnya more than ten years after a rebellion erupted there—and these are examples involving the sovereign territory of the occupying army, not some distant land conquered by an expeditionary force. The stabilization of Bosnia by NATO troops is sometimes cited as a recent and exemplary success, but in that case all the warring parties had agreed to forswear violence before the occupying troops arrived, and, even so, the size of the NATO force, in comparison to the size of the local population, was considerably larger than the American force in Iraq will be after Bush’s planned deployments. By none of the common measures of counterinsurgency doctrine—ratios of force size, the strength of local political agreements, or the credibility of the occupying army—does the President’s plan look convincing.

Bush has appointed Lieutenant General Raymond T. Odierno to implement the new approach as the leader of day-to-day combat operations in Iraq. Odierno commanded the 4th Infantry Division in Iraq during 2003 and 2004; he oversaw the capture of Saddam Hussein. He also has a record of either misreading the war or glossing over its difficulties. Odierno said in the summer of 2003 that the Sunnis were “not close to guerrilla warfare” and that the enemy had no will to fight. Early in 2004, he declared at a news conference that the insurgents he was facing were a “fractured, sporadic threat” who had been reduced to just a “handful of cells.” He said, “We see constant improvement. And so it is getting better.”

In this Elizabethan milieu of flawed and ambitious men, none arrive onstage with more complex motivations than Lieutenant General David H. Petraeus, whom Bush is sending to Iraq as Odierno’s supervisor. Petraeus graduated from West Point the year before the fall of Saigon and later earned a doctorate in international relations from Princeton; the subject of his thesis was the hobbling impact of the Vietnam War on the uses of American military power. His most recent assignment was to rewrite the Army’s counterinsurgency manual, which, amazingly, had not been updated in two decades. Petraeus is one last Quiet American, off to pacify a country that has proved to be a graveyard of theories.

In a competitive democracy, it is difficult to rescue a war built on distortions and illusions, because, to protect falsehoods proffered to voters in the past, a President and his advisers may find it tempting to manufacture more of them. It does not require a cynic to see that even an implausible escalation plan has the virtue of putting domestic political opponents back on their heels. This was the advice given by McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon Johnson in a memo dated February 7, 1965, concerning an escalation plan for Vietnam that Bundy thought might have as little as a twenty-five-per-cent chance of success:

Even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.

The Bush Administration is now reworking this sad axiom, and, once again, American soldiers will be asked to give their lives for its assumptions. Under the Constitution, only Congress can prevent this from occurring, but its members have exhibited little evidence in the past that they possess the skill or the will to do so.