Sake White

[nobody]that has argued the U.S. had too many troops in Baghdad after the removal of the Ba’athist regime.

Democrat strategist wannabes didn’t see a point in helping clear up the fog of war. Republican strategists, real or imagined, didn’t see a point in talking about “might have beens”. By the time the US had gotten to Baghdad, the US Army already had too many troops. It was too late to do anything about it one way or another. So people tried to fix it, but without a loyal opposition, not much good came out. It wasn’t until Petraeus started getting his ideas to Bush and Cheney that a loyal opposition to the then current administration plans came about.

Going on the wayback machine:

If the US had fewer troops going in, they would have been forced to take it slower, move slower, act less arrogant, acquire more help from the locals, and all in all act like Special Forces bandits instead of Army enforcers with big hammers.

That would have induced a faster rate of counter-insurgency learning than trying to learn COIN while being the occupiers.

The army commanders in charge of Baghdad were trying to plug a 50 meter hole with a hankerchief when they said they were going for a “light footprint”. You can’t go for a light footprint once you have already stamped your tanks on the face of Iraq, people. That’s just called playing games. The Iraqi people recognized you as the occupiers and thus the “new power” in town. So you had better act like the new power and put your foot down on looters and criminals via executions and public trials. But no, Americans didn’t want to do that. It wasn’t America’s place, people thought. We weren’t occupiers, we were just… visiting: yeah, that’s the thing, just visitors, tourists really.

That’s why US troops stood around in Baghdad and watched as riots occurred and looters looted and criminals went wild crazy on civilians. Cause the high command said “we weren’t occupiers”. Yeah, you were.

To some extent the low troop levels in Iraq were seen as an attempt to make it clear that we *weren’t* occupiers. I thought that was Rumsfield’s “thing”.

Rumsfield’s thing was Afghanistan and Special Forces. He didn’t get that. He had to compromise with the Joint Chiefs, who I take it wanted to relive the Gulf War over again. After all, for some of them it would have been their last chance to see combat in the army before retirement. And of course, they planned operations according to this. Rumsfield prefered less troops but his integrity demanded that he listen to the generals, else there would have been no explanation for why the US Army refused the help of Shia and Kurds, even when they were celebrating here in the US, while Special Forces used primarily Afghan indigs for the heavy footwork in Afghanistan. I take it that Rummy listened to the Army when he didn’t listen to the SF for Iraq because the Army had no idea how to mobilize into Afghanistan on such a short notice. The CIA field chiefs and the SF, however, did. They were smaller forces and thus more mobile. So Rummy heard a plan and the “I can do it with less troops” and gave that plan to the Prez and Prez did a snapshot decision to invade Afghanistan. Iraq took so long that Rummy got plenty of “ideas” from the regular Army. And things went the way they did just because Bush listened to Blair, leading to that little fiasco at the UN. There’s something essentially wrong about having your entire nation’s strategy and fate decided by some foreigner in a country that was already sliding down the pit into shariah hell.

So, Rummy got more than he wanted but the bigger hammer generals like Shinseki got far less than they wanted as well. A compromise was made, Synova. And we all know how great that works in war, right?

But that’s how that goes.

Indeed, that’s how domestic insurgencies go. Whatever works to gain power becomes justified.

Much as it is pleasing to say the U.S. is there for freedom, democracy, liberalism, human rights, and so on, that is no reason to militarily occupy a country.

Tell that to the black former slaves living in the South after the North pulled federal troops out of the South. Unfortunately, you can’t, cause they got lynched afterwards.

We want to end suffering, but we don’t want to sacrifice to do it.

America’s at the mall, we aren’t being asked to sacrifice much of anything. Or maybe being asked to sacrifice tax money that could be spent on welfare, energy subsidies, and education is the sacrifice people aren’t willing to do.

The military units in play now need to be redistributed to the violent regions of the South and Southeast;

Convince Germany and the other NATO “allies” to do that and I’m sure the people fighting down South would welcome the additional troops.

the Iraqi government itself has failed to make any political progress once the violence ebbed a bit.

The Democrats have made great political progress the last few decades and have eroded many Constitutional protections as a result. The state of a nation is not based upon “political progress”, it is based upon solid political foundations and how many cracks are present in the foundation.

A claim that the Iraqi government has failed to make any political progress is a claim is not necessarily a negative thing regardless of any wishful thinking justifying that it is.

“progress” is just an euphemism for “when do we increase our budgets”. No nation has ever “progressed” politically. They have just went around in circles, balancing the powers, and compromising. That’s what politics are designed to do. The citizens are the ones that have to improve their nation. The government can only make a solid foundation and get out of the way, sometimes taking a direct hand but mostly allowing actual competent people to do the job. It wasn’t the Shia central government that stabilized Al Anbar. It was the Sunnis of Al Anbar and us. Thus it cannot be said that the Shia government “progressed” anywhere politically with regards to the Sunnis. They just sat around and let people who knew their stuff do their stuff. Which is what government is supposed to be doing. Which is why the political foundation between Shia and Sunni are now better than ever.

This expectation that some “government” or “high command” will suddenly and magically come in and make things “progress” is pretty fantastic all in all. It just doesn’t happen that way.