I've reversed myself since I wrote earlier today. Bush can't leave Iraq until at least Saddam Hussein is captured or killed. Silly of me to forget about that! (But such has been the silence from the admin about him it's perhaps not be wondered that we tend to forget that he's still there!) Nevertheless, I still feel that leaving Iraq might well be under serious consideration already, especially if the third quarter's growth turns out to be a statistical freak and the economy plunges after Xmas. (And two or three of our economic journalists over here are suggesting that this might well happen.)
Or perhaps it is still possible if the American public really do take on board that Saddam, nasty though he was to the Shias and Kurds, was not exactly dangerous to the rest of the Middle East, according to Blix and can be left there.
I thought Edward Luttwak's Op-ed in today's NYT very persuasive -- that American simply cannot supply enough troops for adequate patrols, now nor in the future (and especially the supervision of polling in the event of an election -- something that Luttwak didn't mention).
Keith Hudson
November 4, 2003
OP-ED CONTRIBUTORSo Few Soldiers, So Much to Do
By EDWARD N. LUTTWAKCHEVY CHASE, Md.
The Bush administration's reaction to the deaths of 16 American soldiers in the downing of a helicopter on Sunday morning was the same as it was to the suicide bombings at police stations and the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week earlier and the same as it has been to every other setback the coalition has faced: insistence that there is no need for more American troops beyond the 133,000 now in Iraq.
It is part of any president's job to inspire confidence under pressure, but given the true number of troops in Iraq actual armed soldiers doing a soldier's job President Bush might just as well have said that there is no need for any American troops in Iraq. Because zero is the exact number of soldiers actually present at many sites that should be secured 24 hours a day.
Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than 56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties. As for the rest, there are many command posts where soldiers operate computers not guns, there are many specialized units charged with reconstruction and civil duties, and even in the actual combat formations there is a large noncombat element. The 101st Airborne Division has 270 helicopters, which alone require more than 1,000 technicians. The Fourth Infantry Division has the usual panoply of artillery, aviation and antiaircraft units that are needed in war but have little role in peacekeeping and security duties.
And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 to oversee frontiers terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition facilities. Even if so few could do so much, it still leaves the question of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Falluja, with its quarter-million restive residents.
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.
Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>, <www.handlo.com>, <www.property-portraits.co.uk>
