The CB excerpt betrays its real agenda with the RNC-approved reference to Kerry having voting against various weapons systems. And its benchmark for success is amazingly low. In particular, its focus on US casualties as the sole metric. Even Dick Cheney says that Iraqi military casualties should be included in the Coalition total, and with that it's not "astoundingly good news" anymore. And that's before we add in Iraqi civilian casualties. Let's put it this way -- would the Israeli defence forces accept a similar set of statistics (their own casualties, Palestinian civilians, number and severity of terrorist incidents) as representing success in the West Bank and Gaza?

measured in either men or material, is nowhere near the cost of what transpired in Vietnam. We're talking about differences by several orders of magnitude

What about the costs in terms of Iraqi civilians - somewhere near 100,000 according to some estimates? Rather a good idea to factor that in if you're going to war to "liberate" them...

The pro-Bush idea of what constitutes success blows my mind.

I just read a post elsewhere, from someone who has an old family friend working in Baghdad. Things blow up everyday, they just found a headless corpse on the block where he lives, and you have no idea if the people walking beside you down the street are suddenly going to open fire on everyone. The poster's friend is leaving Baghdad - is thankful that he *can* leave Baghdad.

Another pro-Bush idiot said she doesn't see any difference between Baghdad and East L.A. She was promptly challenged to name the street gangs armed with RPGs and plastique explosives, and to tell how many police precinct stations have been blown up and how many dozens police officers murdered all at once.

Bush apologists are big on stickers: They slapped a Sovereignty Restored sticker on Iraq back in June. Nothing's gotten better since then - in fact, the insurgency attacks and kidnappings have gotten worse - but that doesn't matter. Only the bright shiny "Sovereignty Restored!" sticker matters.

Now complete morons like Reynolds are getting ready to celebrate another sparkly sticker: Elections!

It won't matter if the most populated part of the country can't vote, if a few hundred voters are murdered, if street battles break out around polling places and you take your life in your hands going anywhere near them.

No matter what the turnout, no matter what the results are, no matter what the body count is, Bush and his supporters will call the election a success and slap on yet another "Mission Accomplished" sticker.

They're mistaking the label for the actuality. Just like they always have.

Stu: The estimated number of Vietnamese casualties during that war runs around 4-5 million, I believe. In contrast, you've cited a 100,000 figure that relies on a BS study. Even Iraq Body Count, which tends to inflate its figures, has a rough count of 15,000 Iraqi casualties.

That's a lot -- but again, it's nothing compared to Vietnam.

I basically agree about Vietnam being a bad comparison, but just to play devil's advocate here....

Shouldn't the real comparison be to the first 18 months of Vietnam? Even if you pick a start date as late as 1963, it would indicate that Iraq is worse than Vietnam, not better.

Now, I don't expect us to be in Iraq for another decade, and it's pretty obvious the war won't escalate the way Vietnam did, but still.

And what is the significance of the comparison to the Vietnam casualty count?

Why not compare it to WWI, or the Peloponnesian War, for that matter?

Dan:

Your point about the human costs in Vietnam is fair. But it's worth noting that there was a more credible rationale for being in Vietnam than there is here - Vietnam seemed a quasi- proxy war with (potentially) two powers that could actually harm us. I'm not sure what the rationale du jour is for Iraq now, but I know we've had to give up (a) Remove the WMD (ludicrous compendium of unlike things that it was), (b) Stop Al Qaeda Support, and (c) Democracy in Iraq, Hurrah, Hurrah! At the moment, I think the rationale is "Allawi - like Hussein, but with 20% fewer rapes and murders."

Vietnam may have been more expensive in lives, but this one was more pointless.

I think things will get worse(in a sense that we will get more violence) because terrorists and saddamists will try everything to kill the January elections. They´ll certainly risk loosing hundreds/thousands of men for that to be achieved.
--------------------------------------------------
A poor piece by the increasily poor Newsweek
Just look at this part ...
"Now even Baghdad's Green Zone, the four-square-mile U.S. compound cordoned off by blast walls and barbed wire, is under nearly daily assault by gunmen, mortars and even suicide bombers...."
------------------------------------------------

"If we can't stop the intimidation factor, we can't win," said Lt. Gen. John F. Sattler

Thats 100% true, the reason i said before i was optimist is that attacks were made mainly against Iraquis that wanted to be policemen, that proved insurgents were unable to convince comon Iraquis to their cause.
Since we havent hear more about police stations attacks recently , that means Iraquis are refusing to enlist or that counter-measures are working? we dont know because the media dont do their job.

"Reconstruction aid is finally flowing into formerly rebel-held cities like Samarra and other areas."
That´s good news. seems there are resources for that. And could imply there is reconstrution aid in other parts of the country...

"Commanders voiced fears that many of Iraq's expanding security forces, soon to be led by largely untested generals, have been penetrated by spies for the insurgents"

The accounts of recent battles seem to prove that Iraqui units are more reliable than in begining when they just run away.
Corruption always(?) will be high in Iraq, - was the journalist expecting that decades of bribe culture just vanished ? . And this problem will happen, but they´ll be enough to affect the mission or will be a dozen of cases that will not affect the big picture?

"And I don't see a Rumsfeld-led DoD altering its in-country force levels or its in-country strategy"

What do you know? i lack information to judge. We just know that a British regiment/battalion(?) went to Sunni triangle,so changes are being made but what that means? About US units, we know there is an increasing concentration of troops around Fallujah.

http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story2&u=/ap/20041101/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_more_troops

Just fresh from Yahoo...

BAGHDAD, Iraq - A brigade of fresh U.S. troops arriving in Baghdad will push the total U.S. troop presence in the Iraqi capital to an estimated 40,000 by Monday, as planners prepare for an expected assault on insurgent hotspots to the west and for Iraqi elections in January.
Army units slated to depart were being held back until after the elections, causing the overall number of U.S. troops in Iraq (news - web sites) to swell to around 142,000, the highest level since the summer of 2003.
At Camp Victory North, the sprawling headquarters of the Army's 1st Cavalry Division, the mess hall and housing trailers were brimming to capacity with the arrival of the 3,700-member Louisiana-based 256th Enhanced Separate Brigade, a National Guard unit that has been rolling into the Iraqi capital over the past few days.
The arrival of the 256th was supposed to have been timed with the departure of the 1st Cavalry's 2nd Brigade, which was scheduled to prepare to return to Fort Hood, Texas, in November. But the Pentagon (news - web sites) delayed the 2nd Brigade's departure by two months, military officials said.
Iraq's impending elections and expected offensives in Iraq's western Anbar province were expected to soak up much of the extra U.S. combat power.
About 850 British troops, mostly from the Black Watch regiment, have taken positions south of Baghdad, allowing U.S. Marines once stationed there to reposition in Anbar province, home of guerrilla strongholds of Fallujah, Ramadi, Hit and Husaybah. (...)

"Toys Kerry voted against"?

Let's not forget, Cheney wanted to cut twice as many "toys" as the Senate did.

A few disjointed observations.

What a shame. By all measures Kerry will cut and run like he has all his life. You can't show one item of his leadership in the past twenty years and now he will make better decisions and show leadership? As been pointed out by Dr. Laura, "don't marry a man expecting to change him".

The 20-20 hindsight exhibited here is amazing. One could almost believe you have all the information on the situation and a crystal ball for the future to boot.

The left's hate of GW has pushed them over the precipice into loony land with Carl Rove setting up OBL as a Republican puppet.

As long as you rely on the MSM for your information you will have a left wing slant. Add your bias, if it's left, and the sum pegs the wacko side of the meter. No wonder people are tuning you out.

Lastly, if anything I've said makes you angry then you have to take a deep breath rethink your reaction. Anger does not lead to rational thought.

I agree that based on a comparison with Vietnam (circa 1965-6) that the Iraq war has yet to produce as many casualties. We could however be reaching an inflection point when casualties could really spike. It may be helpful to look at the trajectory of casualties per year in Vietnam and Iraq.

http://www.archives.gov/research_room/research_topics/vietnam_war_casualty_lists/statistics.html
Year of Death or Declaration of Death Number of Records
1956-1960 9
1961 16
1962 52
1963 118
1964 206
1965 1,863
1966 6,143
1967 11,153
1968 16,592
1969 11,616
1970 6,081
1971 2,357
1972 641
1973 168
1974 178
1975 161
1976 77
1977 96
1978 447
1979 148
1980 26
1981-1990 34
1991-1998 11
Total 58,193

OIF U.S. Military Casualties
by Phase
Combat Operations - 19 Mar 03 thru 30 Apr 03
- 138 total deaths
Post Combat Ops - 1 May thru Present
- 966 total deaths
http://www.defenselink.mil/news/casualty.pdf

In Iraq, we may be moving toward Vietnam circa 1965 in terms of number of American soldiers dead per year. From the Brookings Institution website, we can see that the monthly death rates for American soldiers spiked in April and May before falling dramatically in June and July before a slight spike again in September. If you look at the October to October casualties in Iraq, the 12 month total is 763. Maybe the 2004 calendar year Jan. to Jan. will be a little higher.
http://www.brookings.edu/dybdocroot/fp/saban/iraq/index.pdf

We should probably compare troop levels as well by year to get a sense of whether these death rates are at all comparable.

Year American
1959 760
1960 900
1961 3205
1962 11300
1963 16300
1964 23300
1965 184300
1966 385300
1967 485600
1968 536100
1969 475200
1970 334600
1971 156800
1972 24200
1973 50
http://members.aol.com/warlibrary/vwatl.htm

We've currently got about 138,000 U.S troops (including Reserves/National Guard) with an additional 23,700 allied troops for a total of 161,700 (see page 13 in Brookings report).

So, we're nearly at 1965 levels in terms of troops and we're heading north in terms of casualties, though still probably a significantly lower death rate as a proportion of overall troop levels.

However, we may absorb higher numbers of casualties if we take out Falluja as it appears we're likely to do.

These quantitative indicators may not be the best judge. Are we any closer to stabilizing the country so we can get out? I wouldn't put much faith in the numbers about Iraq troops or police that are trained (i.e. thoroughly infiltrated, unreliable, inadequate training).

Is this 1965 all over again? Have we got a choice to either change how we carry out the war before it's too late or has this war jumped the shark already?

Given the reports out of Iraq, the Glenn Reynolds and company argument is simply contradicted by the facts on the ground.

Unfortunately, getting out could be disastrous. Unlike Vietnam, Iraq matters in terms of oil and regional stability. If we get out, it might not only be a bloodbath between the Sunnis and Shia, but how are the Saudis, Turks, and Iranian going to deal with the power vacuum?

It's a hell of a mess whether you're a Democrat or Republican.

Kevin,

You're right. Iraq is accelerating faster than Vietnam did. Please also remember that Vietnam spent years building up through an anti-French insurgency. As for how bad it can get, let's not forget that Iran is still out there. Even if we stop at sanctions against them, they can twist the dagger in our wound by destabilizing Iraq. And if we attempt to do something as risky as authorize strikes against them, all bets are off. Yet even now global pressure for actions against them are building.

So far we've ducked this bullet by letting Europe take the lead, but sooner or later we will have to choose between taking action or appearing impotent. I don't think Kerry could politically afford the later and hope to get relected in '08. If we do take action - well disasterous. Not a whole lot of good options here.

This is part of those "unobservable costs" that Dan is noting and that pro-war boosters aren't thinking about.

Professor Drezner,

"measured in either men or material, is nowhere near the cost of what transpired in Vietnam. We're talking about differences by several orders of magnitude"

We've lost 1000+ women and men in Iraq. We lost 58,000 women and men in Vietnam. That is within one order of magnitude.

Iraq's $200B budget is well within one order of magnitude of the first google hit for Vietnam: $500B.

Several orders of magnitude? Not even one order of magnitude.

It's sad that you represent the academic, moderate right.

Comparing the body counts to previous wars misses the point. We're in Iraq ostensibly to improve our position in the global war against terror. The statistics we need to watch are levels of support among Islamist groups around the region, for these numbers indicates our success in transforming the region and winning the battle of "hearts and minds".

The war was a calculated effort to improve our security in the long term by imposing democracy in tyranny-scarred Iraq. It's too early to tell- but I agree with Dan that things aren't necessarily getting better.

In September, 2003, USA Today reported that costs of Vietnam are identical to the costs of Iraq and Afghanistan BEFORE ADDING IN RECONSTRUCTION COSTS:

http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/iraq/2003-09-07-cover-costs_x.htm

The Pentagon is spending nearly $5 billion per month in Iraq and Afghanistan, a pace that would bring yearly costs to almost $60 billion. Those expenses do not include money being spent on rebuilding Iraq's electric grid, water supply and other infrastructure, costs which had no parallel in Vietnam.

In Vietnam, the last sustained war the nation fought, the United States spent $111 billion during the eight years of the war, from 1964 to 1972. Adjusted for inflation, that's more than $494 billion, an average of $61.8 billion per year, or $5.15 billion per month.

Not just a "democracy," Matt. A pro-US democracy.

What're the odds? Of either one, much less both?

Matt makes a good point. We have to go back to Rumsfeld question from October 2003: "Are we capturing, killing or deterring and dissuading more terrorists every day than the madrassas and the radical clerics are recruiting, training and deploying against us?"
http://www.usatoday.com/news/washington/executive/rumsfeld-memo.htm

Does anybody in the government know?

If the Zogby and Pew Global Attitudes polls are any indication, we have utterly failed with the hearts and minds aspect with the Arab street.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A7080-2004Jul22.html
http://people-press.org/reports/display.php3?PageID=796
(this poll provides some hope that attitudes in the Muslim world can calm down though)

Have we done anything to convince Muslim moderates and your average Muslim on the street that we are on their side. If your average Saudi or Pakistani or Iranian looked at Iraq even through Fox News would they go, "Man, I sure hope that America brings freedom like that to us!"

I doubt it. We have simply f-ed this up in Cheney's words "big time." Could it have been done better? I have to think so.

I think this poll from the extreme leftist Commondreams will settle the matter:

http://www.commondreams.org/news2004/1025-04.htm
Views on USA

Egypt: Positive: 2.8% Negative: 95.9%

Turkey: Positive: 17.5% Negative: 66%

Pakistan: Positive: 14.4% Negative: 65.1%

Iraq: Positive: 35.5% Negative: 60.5%

Saudi Arabia: Positive: 9.4% Negative: 56.5%

Bosnia: Positive: 49.2% Negative: 45.9%

Afghanistan: Positive: 65.9% Negative: 9.6%

Kosovo: Positive: 95.9% Negative: 1.8%

If you want any hint of Arab love destroy their governements...

Shows also the media distortion...

I made a mistake i implied that the poll was somewhat related with commondreams site, and doesnt seem so. Seems to be just news they posted there.

Good post from Lucklucky. I think the Bosnia,Kosovo, and Afghanistan campaigns were all better managed than Iraq (though certainly not unmitigated successes). Too late in Bosnia (200,000 dead), lucky in Kosovo (Milosevic folded before we had to send in ground troops), and insufficient reconstruction in Afghanistan (and Osama got away...).

Strange thing though, we get no love from the Muslim world for having done these things for Muslims because we have slashed our public diplomacy budgets and appointed a hack ad exec after 9/11 to run the program.
http://www.cnn.com/2003/US/03/03/state.resignation/

I believe that post is now vacant after her successor resigned.

I am sure the love for US in Iraq was worst before invasion.

Josh i dont think the 200000 deaths are a reliable number. They were less.

LuckLucky,

As for the 200,000 (is this what you're referring to "1965 184300"?),I think the source of confusion is that the last column in my first post referred to American troop levels rather than deaths. Should be clear from preceding paragraph but I left off the word "soldiers."

"But the truth is, neither party is fully reckoning with the reality of Iraq--which is that the insurgents, by most accounts, are winning."

Yes, I'm not at all convinced that Kerry can fix Iraq. I can already imagine the next election, with commercials telling us how Bush had the Iraq problem solved and then Kerry came in and blew it. It's almost enough to make me wish for a Bush victory.

But not quite. The key national security issue is fighting al Qaeda and affilates, and I think that Kerry will do that better than Bush has.

"Iraq Body Count, which tends to inflate its figures, has a rough count of 15,000 Iraqi casualties."

The article in Slate you link to points out that the IBC's figures are extremely conservative, and they figure offhand the actual number is likely double. But more to the point, how does triple-fact-checking only those casualties reported multiple times in mostly the Western press - juan cole has noted that there are numerous reports IBC does not account for, western reporters have the barest in terms of access, and the Iraq Health Ministery is refusing to report its statistics - leave you accusing them of inflating figures?

The key idea is fighting the ideological war, not lunatic ideas like converting the entire Middle East to democracy or terraforming Mars (the latter is a joke, the former is official U.S. policy).

See Kerry would fight terrorism better for what we aren't doing to win hearts and minds and what Kerry would probably do better.

If Kerry wins, expect teams to go through the records of the past administration and look forward to all the wonderful things they're going to find.

On the other, less likely hand, consider what 2005 would be like for the Bush administration. Stories like Iraq Awash in Arms Sites, Some Unguarded are going to be a common occurrence as people start wondering where 250,000 tons or so of Iraq's arsenal is and who has it now.

For what it’s worth a quick reading of the troop levels to deaths ratio shows very roughly that in Vietnam 1000 soldiers a year were dying per 100,000 troops in theatre. In Iraq this number is closer to 500 per 100,000 troops per year. I’m not sure what the value of these comparisons is however.

The most telling parallel between the Vietnam and the Iraq wars is their similar conflict typologies—namely, a large armed presence by a great power fighting an indigenous insurgency in an under-developed country.

As I have pointed out here before, we have five post-WW2 examples of this typology:

France in Indochine 1945-1954
US in South Vietnam 1954-1975
France in Algeria 1954-1962 (today is the 50th anniversary of the start of this conflict)
Israel in South Lebanon 1982-2000
Soviet Union in Afghanistan 1979-1989

Each time the conflict ended in total defeat for the great power.

If the lessons from these conflicts could be summed up in one aphorism it would be: firepower feeds insurgencies. Here is an excerpt from Stanley Karnow’s Vietnam, A History:

Soon after taking over the region around Danang in the spring of 1965, the US marines embarked on “cordon-and-search” missions, later to be given the quaint title of “county fair” operations. In theory, they were supposed to surround a group of hamlets, then distribute food and dispense medical care to the inhabitants while probing for Vietcong cadres. In practice, as Ehrhart described them, the operations were less benign: “We would go through a village before dawn, rousting everybody out of bed and kicking down doors and dragging them out if they didn’t move fast enough. They all had underground bunkers inside their huts to protect themselves against bombing and shelling. But to us the bunkers were Vietcong hiding places, and we’d blow them up with dynamite—and blow up the huts too. If we spotted extra rice lying around, we’d confiscate it to keep them from giving it to the Vietcong.”

As the peasants emerged, Ehrhart continued, they were “herded like cattle into a barbed wire compound, and left to sit there in the hot sun for the rest of the day, with no shade.” Meanwhile, several South Vietnamese policemen with an American interrogator and his interpreter would pass through the crowd, selecting people to be taken to a nearby tent for questioning about the Vietcong presence in the vicinity: “If they had the wrong identity card, or if the police held a grudge against them, they’d be beaten pretty badly. Maybe tortured. Or they might be hauled off to jail, and God knows what happened to them. At the end of the day,the villagers would be turned loose. Their homes had been wrecked, their chickens killed, their rice consiscated—and if they weren’t pro-Vietcong before we got there, they sure as hell were by the time we left,”

The original insurgants are anti-American to their bones and it is utterly irrelevant how US troops act towards them, these insurants are going to fight regardless of how many kid gloves we don in handling them. These are the fish in Mao famous dictum that “fish that must swim in a friendly sea.” It is the soldier’s need for security that creates the friendly sea; in such an environment, exactly the one we see in Iraq, the great power always loses. No amount of training can overcome this reality, the soldier will always value his life higher than the abstract political consequences of his attempting to improve his security by aggressively searching for and destroying his enemy.

It’s no accident that things are going better for the US in Afghanistan, not only militarily, but also far more importantly, politically. Bin Laden’s latest tape can be read as an attempt to halt a worrying (from his point of view) political situation in Afghanistan where the US is seen more and more as a force for freedom while the al Qaida / Taliban alliance is seen as a foreign force of oppression. The reason for this is that we have a very small footprint on the ground in Afghanistan, and while it is true that 90% of the country is in the hands of warlords, the political momentum is in our favor there. The Taliban lack the friendly sea that is neccessary for their having any hope of victory.

Josh i was refering the Bosnian deaths.

To be 100000 around 200 persons would have died daily . I think that´s enough to dismiss that number has a political job from a scientific journal. I am sure The Lancet will have problems in it's board of directors in near futur.

Vietnam and Iraq started diferently so it's very dificult to make comparisons.
What is relevant is that Zarqwawi and friends felt the need to fight US in Iraq and not in mountains of Afghanistan, dispite having a beter terrain for insurgency. Iraq mission is a bigger threat to them.

Let's cut through the bull crap okay? No one here seriously cares about the number of Iraqi dead any more than the millions of Vietnamese killed are anything more than a footnote in the history books for Americans. The argument over them only exists as a proxy for people to justify their opinions one way or another about how well or badly they think the war is going.

The only certainty we know is that however many are dead, the way things are going they look to be joined by more to come.

I'm a little morally sick of the numbers of Iraqi dead being used as a tug-of-war chew toy by both the right and the left over who's right on Iraq.

Both sides are wrong, dead wrong, and the dead are mostly Iraqi.

For the pro-war crowd I should note that the most recent casualty of the PR war over Iraq has been none other than William F. Buckley who wrote a fascinating column declaring that the proper analogy for Iraq was in fact the French loss of Algeria - and that not only are we not winning but that we cannot win.

Now I do not worship at the alter of WFB but I will suggest that all the pro-war freaks who still think that Iraq is still getting better every day ought to question their convictions of exactly how sunny things are if they've lost a stalwart like WFB. If they aren't capable of that level of reflection, then they should have their license revoked to talk about something as serious as war in the first place.

"For the pro-war crowd I should note that the most recent casualty of the PR war over Iraq has been none other than William F. Buckley who wrote a fascinating column declaring that the proper analogy for Iraq was in fact the French loss of Algeria - and that not only are we not winning but that we cannot win."

Well, if we cannot win, we're screwed. Pulling out, or not having gone in in the first place, would leave us in a terrible position to eliminate existing terrorist networks and their supporters or prevent terror-supporting states (mainly Iran at this point) from getting nuclear weapons - which are both absolute requirements to promote our long-term security. Only with a significant force in a place like Iraq do we have a chance in Hell of doing any of this.

In Vietnam we could bug out and go home and let the South Vietnamese catch hell without that hell following us home. That ain't going to happen this time - the jihadis aren't going to stay in their sandbox, we're going to have to fight them somewhere, there's a hell of a lot of them, it's going to take an awfully long time, and they fight really dirty and don't give a rat's ass who gets caught in the crossfire. But we knew all that ever since 9/11, and nothing's changed since then.

buermann: .

I'd like to note that everything being discussed here and in the linked reports is in reference to the Sunni Triangle including Baghdad. Not 'Iraq'. That isnt to minimize the importance or impact of what is transpiring there, but there are factors at work that havent been added to the equation.

Demographics. The insurgency is doomed one way or the other. Either the US and allies are victories and stomp it out, or we are defeated. If that is the case, there are hundreds of thousands of Shiia and Kurds itching to plunder Fallujah et al, and burn those towns to their foundations. What Allawi and co are doing now is trying to convince the Sunni honchos of this fact. Either play ball with Allawi and the Americans, or face being left out of the new Iraq, and at the mercy of their former victims.
Historically there are two ways to put down insurgency. The first is to win over the populace. Through criminally bungled reconstruction, we have botched that thus far. The second is utter brutality. US forces arent going to engage in this, but ethnic Iraqi forces gladly will. If the choice is a reemerging Baathist movement backed by religious zealots, or simply wiping out the Sunnis, which do you think the Shiia and Kurds will choose?
The only way we get back to the first option is stomping on the terrorist enclaves, rebuilding the Sunni cities IN A TIMELY FASHION (for gods sake), and tying all that in to elections. Thats the plan and it could work. The military part is a no brainer. The rebuilding part I have no reason to believe will be competantly executed. By the time the civilian bureacrats running reconstruction get things sorted out in Fallujah it will be well past the elections at the rate they work at.

The idea that the Shiites and/or Kurds could stomp out the Sunni resistance relies on the false premise that this conflict is limited to Iraq. The is already a growing body of evidence that we are starting to see a replay of the Iran-Iraq War, which despite its name was actually a regional conflict which pitted Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Jordan and the Gulf States, backed by the US against Iran, backed by Syria, the Iraqi Kurds and sometimes Israel. The Saudis are hardly going to allow a Shiite Islamist state (the most likely result of fair elections in Iraq) on their borders. The only horse we have in this race is the secular exiles and the Shiites and the Sunnis will never accept their rule.

This thread has left much of Dan's original thread far behind, mostly because posters have dwelt at such length on historical analogies. These are bound to be confusing at best, misleading at worst; the number of variables in any two historical situations is so great that direct comparisons are practically guaranteed to lead to questionable conclusions.

This, incidentally, was one of the things that got America into such trouble in Vietnam in the first place -- the analogy in vogue at that time was between the fight against Communism there and the fighting in Korea a decade before. Everything from combat tactics (emphasizing firepower) to strategy and diplomacy (emphasizing the avoidance of military measures that might provoke a wider war with the two large Communist powers, China and Russia) was carried over in some measure from the Korean War to the Vietnam conflict. The generally unfortunate consequences of this may serve as a warning for those seeking to predict the future of Iraq today from the experience of Algeria forty years ago.

Marine Gen. Sattler makes an important point relating to what they might call at the War College the multiple dimensions of asymmetric warfare. The disparity in fighting power in urban environments between small groups of armed men on the one hand and large groups of unarmed civilians on the other is much greater than the disparity between a modern army and small groups of armed men -- especially when the modern army has few people who speak the local language and are unsophisticated about local politics and customs. Moreover, in Iraq the tactics used by the insurgency to intimidate the population are not paticularly unusual -- except for suicide bombings, most of what the insurgency is doing now Saddam Hussein's government did for decades. In a very real sense the insurgency, and enforced submission of the civilian population to it, represents normality in Iraq; with the alternative of liberal democracy being at best ill-defined, much of the population in Sunni towns like Ramadi and Fallujah are bound to see the likely alternatives as worse.

The deadlock seems likely to be broken in one of two ways. Military action later this year -- and perhaps beginning later this month -- could set back the insurgents long enough for an elected government to take hold. Iraqi insurgents could turn on foreign fighters, and Sunni Arabs could over time negotiate their place in a new Iraq with the great majority of the population that is either not Sunni or not Arab. The other possibility is that military action by the coalition sets back the insurgency, but only temporarily; the new government will only have real legitimacy in the Shiite and Kurd regions of Iraq. The American government will decide this is enough, and withdraw from Iraq (leaving perhaps a garrison in Kurdistan). The new government, possibly with Iranian support and very likely with American acquiesence, will then deal with the ongoing Sunni Arab insurgency using tactics that will mirror those the insurgency itself has used. The resulting civil war could create divisions within the Arab world, and between Arab countries and Iran, that the West could exploit to advantage.

There are other possibilities, but these seem most likely at this time.

Another pro-Bush idiot said she doesn't see any difference between Baghdad and East L.A. She was promptly challenged to name the street gangs armed with RPGs and plastique explosives, and to tell how many police precinct stations have been blown up and how many dozens police officers murdered all at once.

Oh wow. Airstrikes on East LA! They'd probably vote democrat anyway.

I can see the slogans. "Bomb America first!"

Anyone hoping that the Shia' of Iraq will bail us out of this are in for a rude awakening. The disaffection of the majority of Shia' for al-Sadr is only matched by their disaffection for U.S. bombing campaigns. They are not going to form effective shock troops to contain the Sunni areas. The Kurds are better organized and armed, and have formed the basis of the most effective Iraqi fighting units, but don't expect them to go but so far. Their interests after all, are an independent Kurdistan, not control of Baghdad. The British were much smarter about this in 1920. They co-opted the Sunni tribes in order to control everyone else. We, on the other hand, have alienated the entire arab population, and have probably lost the Turkmen as well. The momentum is still with the insurgency, and flattening Fallujah is a ham handed tactic that will produce no U.S. advantage. The insurgency is like water, thrust you hand in it and it gives way, remove your hand and it's like your hand was never there.

Oldman said, No one here seriously cares about the number of Iraqi dead any more than the millions of Vietnamese killed are anything more than a footnote in the history books for Americans.[...]

I'm a little morally sick of the numbers of Iraqi dead being used as a tug-of-war chew toy by both the right and the left over who's right on Iraq.

Clearly, you care. And I care. That's two of us. Two people caring plus a pound of C4 will make a dandy suicide belt.

I dreamed I'm wearing an orange jumpsuit, kneeling on the floor. Some guy with an arabic accent is saying "You are responsible for the actions of your government." And I sit up straight and say "Wait a minute! I voted against him every time! I campaigned against him! I wrote letters to my senators! It isn't my fault! AEEEIIIIII!"

It's hell accepting responsibility.

Holy crap! Newsweek printed a third hand account from multiple anonymous sources indicating that things are going poorly in Iraq! And the New York Times wrote an article claiming that things are going poorly in Iraq!

I'm sure this is just as accurate as the predictions that Afghanistan would turn into a quagmire one week into the war...

Here's a thought: take a map of Iraq, and plot the points where US troops have been killed in the month of January. Then do the same thing for February, March, etc. Then tell me whether the insurgency is widening.

No one is talking about the fact that Sadr has fallen off the face of the earth either.

The bottom line is the Shiia are absolutely not going to sit still for a resurgence of Baathism. If the insurgency isnt squashed effectively before the elections, the elections will be held without much of a Sunni presence, the Shiia will dominate, and whoever the new leader is will gather an army and put down the rebellion. Only a complete boob of a leader wouldnt do so. Such an event would be orders of magnitude more bloody than anything we have done (the Lancet people will quickly see their death count rise well beyond the population of all of Iraq using their ridiculous methodology). Thats the absolute reality. The Sunni arent the ones on trial here, the US and Allawi are on trial by the Shiia to see if we can bring the Sunnis into the fold 'our way'. There was has been much discussed by the tribal shieks, and seen many times in Iraqs history. The Sunni have no hope of surviving such an event intact short of Syrian intervention (Saudi Arabia has no army fit for adventuring). Such a result absolutely would not be the Shiia 'bailing us out', it would be a terrible outcome where the US loses much respect and Iraq devolves into a Lebanon like mess for the forseeable future.
I wonder if the egg-heads who guaranteed Bin Laden and Hussein would never work together because of their differing idiologies would make the same guarantee about Bin Laden's Wahabiism and a Shiia Iraq? No, that conclusion doesnt let them blast GW Bush effectively.

Zathras,

I find your potential outcomes in Iraq quite realistic and your argument that the US in Vietnam reused its Korea strategy is also on the mark, but doesn’t this then totally contradict your idea that we shouldn’t use historic models to predict the outcomes of wars? Couldn’t one have seen from a pretty early stage that the same limited war strategy that led to a draw against China--who had no interest in a long, stalemated conflict in Korea--would lead to defeat against a highly motivated indigenous insurgency that had every interest in a long drawn-out war? I think what you are saying is that the architects of wars shouldn’t reuse their assumptions and strategies from previous wars. This is indeed good advise, history is littered with losing generals who foolishly chose to re-fight their earlier battles.

The fact is though; historic precedent is a very important filter through which to see a conflict because most of the participants are basing their actions either on or in reaction to historic models. In Iraq, Hizbollah actually sent intelligence officers to Iraq to teach the insurgents about the wonders of IED’s. Every Arab military thinker is intimately aware of the details of the Algerian conflict and it certainly shapes the choices they make. The influx of foreign fighters in Iraq has some similarities to what we saw help defeat the Soviet Union. In that case most of the foreigners were actually based in Pakistan while in Iraq, the foreign fighters are mixing with the local population which is indeed a potential weak point for the insurgents

Each conflict is unique and the complicated witch’s brew of ethnicities and religious tendencies makes predicting the way things will pan out in Iraq very tricky. But when I look at the US military’s response to the growing insurgency, I see no new techniques or strategies that give me hope that we will overcome the weight of history there. If we are to believe the press accounts, and I don’t, it seems as if our political leaders were surprised to find themselves facing an insurgency at all, let alone that they have come up with some innovative way to put it down. The signs are pretty ominous. Back in April, we had a huge group of insurgents encircled in Fallujah, but also at the end of the battle, not only did the US fail to overwhelm them, the guerrillas actually ended up holding the field of battle and it was us that withdrew! This is unheard of in great power vs. insurgent history. Sure the Vietcong used to regularly escape encirclement (due to the weakness of the South Vietnamese Army) and the Vietminh encircled (and annihilated) the French at Dienbienphu, but in Afghanistan the mujahadeen never even held any significant real estate until well after the Soviets withdrew. The FLN were reduced to keeping 30,000 troops in Tunisia because the French were kicking their asses so badly.
Until I see something innovative from the US military in dealing with the insurgents, and maybe we will see this in the Fallujah II engagement that we are being promised, I am keeping to my gloomy prognosis in Iraq.

Haydar has a good point there. The shia have been mostly quiet, maybe because they fought tyhe british and the breitish set up the sunnis to rule over them. We promised them a democracy and in an honest democracy they'd have the votes. But that wouldn't make them malleable, quite the reverse.

The sunnis could maybe stamp on everybody else the way they did before, and they'd be precarious enough they'd need our help. But they're the insurgency at the moment.

The kurds are reported to have the best army apart from us, but could we set them up to run the whole thing? Maybe rename iraq "The Kurdish Empire"? It doesn't sound very practical somehow.

We'd probably do best to keep our word. If we can actually deliver on one set of promises that would be an improvement for our reputation in the middle east, which at the moment is mostly that we have repeatedly claimed to be an "honest broker" between israel and various arabs, while we also admit that we are totally partisan to israel.

Mr. Buehner,

I agree with most points of your analysis, which is for the Kurds and Shia to seize political power and then ethnically cleanse the Sunnis and that this will be a net negative for the USA. However I don't think just razing Fallujah can solve the problem. On the one hand you can't allow insurgent strongholds. On the other you just can't destroy - you must dominate.

We have one and only one hope of stabilizing Iraq. That is to forget everything that has happened before and reconquer Iraq, this time securing areas, stabilizing them, and taking territory with a mind to keeping / holding ground with a more or less well defined front. Militarily this form of domination is the only way we can defeat the insurgents. Otherwise we hit them in one place and they pop up in another. We have to squeeze them right off the map.

It is the only solution. If we continue to play this game of guerilla warfare and occupation patsy ... well we will lose. That's not just what I say. It's what WFB and Kissinger (in Newsweek) has come out saying.

Someone out there in the Pentagon! Tell Rumsfeld to get his head out of his ass and get his act together or we're gonna lose!

as for the Iraqi forces ... here is what Kissinger has to say from Newsweek:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6370244/site/newsweek/
Having witnessed the challenges of creating local security forces in Indochina, I would warn against approaching the security effort in too mechanical a manner. In Vietnam, it took far longer to make units ready for combat than simply fulfilling the requirements of a training manual. The effectiveness of Iraqi forces will depend not only on their military training but on the degree to which the emerging Iraqi institutions gain domestic legitimacy. Units without political allegiance are generally least reliable when most needed.

However the most likely outcome ... ethnic fracturing of Iraq ... is highly unlikely to create political legitimacy for Iraqi forces.

There is too much at stake in Mesoptamia for us to fail - not just with Terrorism but with China as well in times to come. Our entire status as a superpower effectively rests on succeeding with our current posture, and more than that the democratic destiny of entire countries not just in the middle east but in Taiwan and South Korea will fail unless we succeed here.

But we cannot succeed playing by the current rules of engagement and strategic doctrine. Therefore the doctrine must be changed. We must reconquer Iraq and secure it square inch by square inch. That appalling task of launching an entirely new invasion is both daunting and seemingly impossible but I submit that it could be accomplished within 18 months with full success- if someone were daring enough to commit to it.

It is risky but the current course only offers the surety of failure.

Btw, there's an arab saying that goes like this:
"Me againt my brother. Me and my brother against my cousion. Me, my brother, and my cousin against everyone else."

They will slaughter and fraticide each other. Then when they've got that settled they'll come for us. It won't be right away but they will come.

Failure is not an option. Only right now that's what our present course trajectory indicates the most likely outcome will be.

if Kerry becomes president, will all the people who keep saying that Iraq is an amazing success continue to do so?

My guess is that the "average" Iraqis have been hedging their bets, especially in areas where the local preponderance of force has been on the Baathist/terrorist/thug side. They remember what happened 12 years ago, and are not about to pick a side before they know that the coalition is not going to succumb to international and domestic political pressures and leave them in the lurch again.

A Kerry win is very unlikely to be interpreted by them as an encouraging hand-off to a President who'll fight the war "better". Rather, I suspect, it would signal to them that the American public is beginning to warm to the idea that it might be time to start winding things down, and would make them considerably more reluctant to stick their necks out on the side of the coalition.

A Bush win, however, would be a sign that the American public is willing to stick it out and see it through. Shortly after that, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing more reports of fed up Iraqis taking it to the "insurgents". Well, OK, perhaps not on the front page of the New York Times or on 60 Minutes.

Oldman, I agree with you as far as the Sunni triangle goes, but again we have to remember that 2/3rds of Iraq is stable (granted the less populous areas generally). We have to remember that the last Fallujah invasion was stopped because of Sadr creating a dangerous disturbance in our rear. Militarilly we could have dealt with both easilly, but politically the cost was deemed to high. Aggravating 2 of the 3 major ethnic groups similtaneously was judged too dangerous. Whether we made the right choice is an open question (I rather think not).
The advantage we have now is that seemingly the Shiia are getting their own house in order. Its dangerous to consider them an official ally, but at the moment our interests intersect. The first time we went to Fallujah Sadr and many Shiia swore solidarity with the Fallujans. This time they seem to be fed up with foriegn terrorists blowing up Iraqis in the name of the Baath party. Iraqi native troops may not be reliable, but we dont need them to be. They are window dressing. The bottom line is that we havent been stumbling blindly, we have made difficult choices. Maybe the wrong choices. We will soon find out if any of the divide and conquer tactics of the last 6 months will bear fruit. It appears we are going after every major town in the Sunni triangle at the same time. That is critical. Whether we can hold onto them effectively is the real question. Much rests on our ability to set up local Iraqi security and government while rebuilding the infastructure, essentially building trust. The Bush track record is not good on that end. If the native Fallujans are really as sick of the foriegners as reports say, this could actually work. But you are right, rolling in and out of these towns will kill plenty of baddies, but longterm its not going to help much.

I cant believe we havent sealed the borders.

Mr. Buehner,

Unless we effectively relocate our entire expeditionary force we don't have the current force and logistic structure to hold on to all the critical towns in the Sunni sector. That's just a simple matter of taking the number of troops on the upper end of the estimate committed divided by the total number of residents. The math doesn't work.

That's the real reason why we needed those Iraqi troops - to hold the territory. We can go in and knock down anybody anywhere in Iraq so long as they don't hide out in a famous mosque.

But if we raze the towns and they fall back into the hands of the insurgents we will be hated - once for destroying their city and twice for letting them fall back into the hands of the insurgents so all the suffering was for nothing.

I know that the Pentagon is scraping the bottom of the barrell within their deployment policy parameters to get as many boots on the ground as they can - but they don't have enough. They're not ready for this. And the Iraqi troops aren't a coherent enough fighting force to fill in.

I estimate the ploy has at best approximately accomplish 15% of the desired goal standards. Too low a success rate to do anything more than roll in, kill a bunch of bad people that pop up, and then turn those towns back over to those same bad guys.

Osama bin Laden lives. He has threatened terrorist attacks on any Red State. Will you make peace with this killer? Your vote makes this decision.

Half of this nation supports our President. Yet, half wish "For Peace in our time." A noble ambition but it did not work for Neville Chamberlain it will not work today. Peace is earned with sacrifice. You cannot negotiate with Osama bin Laden. He must die or be captured.

Give in to Osama bin Laden and some day he may tell you when to rise each day, when to pray, and what you will think. Have the terrorists’ insurgents that kill our soldiers in Iraq threatened our nation on our soil? No, they do not have the men, the material, the strategy, or the funding.

Osama bin Laden evaded our military not because of out sourcing but because he is a superior opponent with the funding and resources to evade the most sophisticated technological fighting force in history. Hitler and Saddam Hussein abused drugs and alcohol. Both were megalomaniacs with psychotic delusions. It took five years to defeat Hitler and over a year to find Saddam. Osama bin Laden does not have these vices and he is not insane. He is just a killer.

This is a World War. It is not Vietnam. We must finish the liberation and restoration of Iraq. Our Military Forces want President Bush to see this through to the end. This is their choice. Will you deny them? Those that have given their life deserve this hard fought peace. And yet what is your reply? Are you on the front line? Your vote must reflect our nations support of winning this War. We cannot and must not change our Commander in Chief.

We should respect the wishes of those that are on the front line. Do the right thing finish and this War. Let those who are fighting and dying have their say. Your vote is your voice.

Oldman wrote, But we cannot succeed playing by the current rules of engagement and strategic doctrine. Therefore the doctrine must be changed. We must reconquer Iraq and secure it square inch by square inch.

A bold plan! We could do it. How would we be better off?

There's no official army for us to attack. So we could roll our tanks around and look for resistance, and probably we could get some. We go into a sunni town, there's no resistance at first, then say a hundred guys pop up with RPGs and blast away at our armor. We destroy a hundred buildings and kill a hundred armed civilians and a thousand unarmed civilians. Do that in every sunni town and....

And maybe they'll suffer such losses they'll get tired of fighting a guerrilla war. It worked in germany. The nazis wanted to do guerrilla warfare with old men and boyscouts, and germans just didn't see the point. It worked in the american south. Davis wanted to do guerrilla warfare and there was no food and no ammo and the guerrillas had to prey on civilians to survive, and it didn't last real long. The KKK lasted longer but they didn't try to fight the federals. It worked in japan. It worked in china, there weren't that many attempts to fight the maoists. It worked in korea. It worked in vietnam -- after the south was conquered they didn't keep fighting back. Etc.

If you want to beat a national liberation movement you have to show them they're beaten. Kill 10% of the population, knock down 30% of the buildings, and give them a year or two of starvation and they're likely to fold. Once they decide they've lost and it isn't worth fighting any more, then you've won.

But what's wrong with doing that one town at a time? The only problem is they might stop fighting before they think they've lost. They want to fight us where we're weak and avoid us where we're srong, so their ideal strategy would be to invite in foreign press, and when we roll in they don't resist and we shoot up the town, or they do resist and we shoot up the town. Get the foreign press watching us kill 10% of the local population and they'd have something. So if we attack everywhere at once it will be over before they figure out what to do. The foreign press won't be very many places and the killing will be a 3-day story.

It might work. It's probably less than 5 million sunnis in iraq, if we kill around half a million of them in one week the survivors are likely to fold. That didn't work in algeria for the french when they killed them slowly -- algeria lost 10% of their population fighting the french, and then they lost another 10% afterward fighting each other. It might work in iraq.

But we can't admit that's what we're doing. If we admit that our goal is to slaughter civilians until the survivors are ready to submit to whatever we want to do to them, it would look bad to our remaining liberals and to the rest of the world. We need some way to pretty it up. As a start we could kill any media guys whenever we find them outside the Green Zone, and make it look like the insurgents are doing it. It's easier when nobody knows what's going on but us and the victims. And we can tell people that iraqi troops are helping us, whether there are any iraqi troops with us or not. If it looks like it's the legitimate iraqi government slaughtering its own citizens that's better. We can hide the iraqi casualty data. We can starve the sunnis. Pretty much everybody in iraq depends on food importa that we control, and we control the ration office. If the news gets out we can say it's because the insurgents are disrupting supplies. We can destroy infrastructure and when they surrender in once place we can start rebuilding power plants and water purification plants and such, and then whenever there's some insurgent action we destroy that stuff again, and blame it on the insurgents.

.... Are you sure we aren't already following this plan?

Btw, there's an arab saying that goes like this:
"Me againt my brother. Me and my brother against my cousion. Me, my brother, and my cousin against everyone else."

That's a west virginia saying.

They will slaughter and fraticide each other. Then when they've got that settled they'll come for us. It won't be right away but they will come.

I'm not sure about that last part. The vietnamese haven't come for us. The algerians haven't come for us or the french. The chinese haven't come for us. (Maybe they're going to, though.) The chileans haven't come for us, nor the guatemalans, nor the hondurans, nor the nicaraguans, etc. There are lots of places we've encouraged fratricide that they haven't come after us. Why would iraq be different?

if Kerry becomes president, will all the people who keep saying that Iraq is an amazing success continue to do so?

What do you think?

They're going to say that everything was wonderful but Kerry wrecked it. He didn't have to do anything to wreck it but win the election, that's enough. Kerry winning the election means the iraqis know we're going to lose so they'll all join the other side. So everything that was wonderful before turns to horror.

A Kerry win is very unlikely to be interpreted by them as an encouraging hand-off to a President who'll fight the war "better". Rather, I suspect, it would signal to them that the American public is beginning to warm to the idea that it might be time to start winding things down, and would make them considerably more reluctant to stick their necks out on the side of the coalition.

See, it's happening already.

Mark said, It appears we are going after every major town in the Sunni triangle at the same time. That is critical. Whether we can hold onto them effectively is the real question.

No, we already know we can't hold onto them, we don't have the troops. We don't have to hold onto them. All we have to do is kill enough people that they'll do *anything* to keep us from coming back.

Much rests on our ability to set up local Iraqi security and government while rebuilding the infastructure, essentially building trust.

If they believe that we can and will kill them without hesitation, that's all the trust we need. They'll smile at the reporters and thank us for bringing them democracy. And if they don't -- more airstrikes! It worked in east germany, it worked in czechoslovakia, it worked in poland, it worked in tibet. All it takes is the political will and sufficient munitions. Do we have the will?

I cant believe we havent sealed the borders.

With minefields, say? If we were to use minefields that have sufficient AI, we could airdrop them and they'd organise themselves. Maybe a bunch of tiny solar-powered sensors and some automated mortars that blast anything big the sensors report....

Anything that gets through the minefields could be reported and they could send a drone to blast it. Every couple of weeks send out a patrol to look at the kills and see if there's anything interesting left.

It might be possible. Maybe even affordable. If you could make the sensors for ten cents each, dropping 5000 per linear mile would only cost $500. The cost of the destructive part would add up but it's a tradeoff among range, accuracy, cost etc so that's hard to predict.

We have the technology. We could put a ring around iraq that would kill anything bigger than a rabbit that tries to cross the border. Blast first and ask questions later. All it takes is the money and the will. Maybe the problem is that Bush asked for just barely enough money to last through the elections, and that expense got marked off the list.

drezner: counting what you're counting is not an inflation of figures, if you don't think the coallition is responsible for the consequences of its actions that's your business.

Dear JC,

Because Iraq is not the only long term interest we have in the region. They won't draw the line at borderlines on the map. We're involved all over in there for the long term. They knock us out in one place, then they'll see if they can push us out someplace else.

We're talking about denial of territory tactics here JT. Clearly you don't know the difference. It's not all the same thing.

Oldman, sure, by denying iraqis secure bases we can delay the transition from stage 2 to stage 3 insurgency. But what good does that really do us?

Stage 3 will give us a target-rich environment which will make the troops feel better. Where's the harm?

But to win we need to kill a large enough fraction of nationalists that the rest give up. Remember, the enemy gets a vote. Why should they give up until they are truly beaten? Why would they consider themselves beaten until they've suffered worse casualties than they had under Saddam?