Unqualified Offerings

US Army Maj. John Wilwerding puts his career in danger in Iraq’s western desert:

“Resources are everything in combat … there’s no way 400 people can cover that much ground,” said Maj. John Wilwerding, of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment, which is responsible for the northwest tract that includes Tal Afar.

“Because there weren’t enough troops on the ground to do what you needed to do, the (insurgency) was able to get a toehold.” said Wilwerding, 37, of Chaska, Minn.

So reports Tom Lasseter of Knight-Ridder, our finest foreign news organization. The entire story is about the Army’s valiant but vain attempts to secure 10,000 square miles with, first, 400 troops, and now about 7500 (combined US and Iraqi).

In his classic Vietnam War analysis, On Strategy, Colonel Harry Summers said the winning strategy for the US would have been to concentrate US forces exclusively on sealing South Vietnam’s borders, leaving the counter-insurgency entirely to ARVN troops. In Iraq too the US has tried to both secure the borders and do counter-insurgency simultaneously, and with a third the manpower available at the height of the Vietnam War.

As a reminder, the US fought the most recent phases of the Iraq War with that number of troops because that’s what the government could get away with: calling up more force would have soured the merely lukewarm public support that existed prior to March 17, 2003. You couldn’t have “more troops” and “get rid of Saddam Hussein” both, for political reasons.

Meanwhile, the postwar decision to cashier the entire Iraqi Army created a power vacuum inside the country that US troops needed to fill, but I can’t say that decision was obviously wrong. All indications are that the bulk of the insurgency is led and staffed by former members of the Baathist military, and that even the new-model security services are riddled with rebel sympathizers, informants and agents. Perhaps keeping the old Iraqi Army around would have given folks who became insurgents more of a stake in the New Iraq. Perhaps it would simply have given them an even stronger platform from which to continue their war against the US. And perhaps continuing the Iraqi Army in place would have alienated the Shiite and/or Kurdish communities to a fatal degree.

Upshot? There was no great way to do this in the first place, and no sure winning strategy now.