Unqualified Offerings

Jack Keane and Frederick Kagan show some foresight in the Washington Post this morning – they want their excuses for any failure of the so-called “surge” strategy on the record early. Specifically:

Reports on the Bush administration’s efforts to craft a new strategy in Iraq often use the term “surge” but rarely define it. Estimates of the number of troops to be added in Baghdad range from fewer than 10,000 to more than 30,000. Some “surges” would last a few months, others a few years.

We need to cut through the confusion. Bringing security to Baghdad — the essential precondition for political compromise, national reconciliation and economic development — is possible only with a surge of at least 30,000 combat troops lasting 18 months or so. Any other option is likely to fail.

They smuggle their actual policy assumptions under the numbers talk like a swaddled suicide bomber slipping past a checkpoint. Their reference to pacifying “Sunni and mixed Sunni-Shiite neighborhoods” in Baghdad rests on some version of the “80% solution” – lining up with the Shiite power structure against Iraq’s Sunnis. While Keane and Kagan don’t want to assign the Dribble Detachments to training Iraqi security forces, they do talk about partnering with them in clear-and-hold operations, and “provid[ing] time to bring Iraqi forces up to the level needed to fight whatever enemy remains.” Apparently we’ll “bring” them “up” without any more intense training effort than already underway. Keane and Kagan do not talk about the central problem, the lack of a political consensus for “Iraqi security forces” to secure.

There’s an offhand reference to what others have called the “whack-a-mole” problem, but their proposed response – “address” terrorist bases in Anbar with 7,000 (extra?) US Marines – seems vague and unpromising.

Now the real question. Keane and Kagan conclude, sternly,

The United States faces a dire situation in Iraq because of a history of half-measures. We have always sent “just enough” force to succeed if everything went according to plan. So far nothing has, and there’s no reason to believe that it will. Sound military planning doesn’t work this way. The only “surge” option that makes sense is both long and large.

If “the surge we have” is not “the surge we’d like to have,” will Keane and Keegan call for withdrawal? Will they finally decide that enough is enough?