Rational Grounds

I found that somewhat shocking, and I asked a general I know who works in the logistics department in the Pentagon if that was accurate. He confirmed. This is why you keep hearing about the Army "backdoor draft"ing people, lengthening tours, and quickly cycling people back to Iraq for multiple tours. With all of the above, according to my source, we effectively reduce the number of units necessary from a factor of three to a factor of two. Given the mission set before them, the Army has no other choice.

So we're not getting any more American troops. That's a bit of a wash, because the violence in Iraq is directed at getting the Americans out - as long as we have troops in Iraq, they will be attacked by a steady stream of foreign jihadists and local nationalists. Replacing American troops with Iraqi troops has been seriously bungled, and is not a viable solution in the near or midterm.

So we need troops, and they need to be from other countries. That's where things get tricky. Nobody wants to help us. The Iraq situation is incredibly grim, and we've made it abundantly clear that things are going to operate on our schedule and in our interests if they operate at all. There's no serious upside to helping us out, and bigtime downside in getting bogged down in Iraq.

Because we can't do anything about the downside for now, we need to make the upside vastly more appealing. The standard concessions of favorable trade agreements and mutual support are not going to cut it. We need to remake the Iraqi occupation as a U.N. enterprise, and give over real operational control. We need to make the British and any other would-be coalition members full partners in this, and make it clear that we will not be the gatekeeper on reconstruction contracts or trade deals with Iraq, nor will we be ordering their troops around. We need to make some painful, humiliating concessions to get anyone to give us the time or day. It's that, or ignominious failure.

If we do that, we may just get some real, substantive help. If we get significant increase in the number and diversity of troops, we can start cooling off the security situation. If we successfully rebrand the occupation as U.N. run (which, let's face it, will require some actual transfers of power to work), we may staunch some of the wounds to the dignity of the Iraqis and blunt the zeal of the jihadis enough to make some progress. And if we can calm things down to a manageable level, we can create the conditions for a new Iraqi order - however imperfect or anti-American - to grow. Otherwise, we will leave the country in chaos, destroying a society and our own strategic position in the region.

There's a good deal wrong with this solution. It may not work in time. If Iraq devolves into a true Sunni-Shiite-Kurd civil war the motives of all the actors have changed, and the power of our behavior to shape Iraqi actions will be greatly reduced. It may be that removing Americans and the American occupation as targets of opposition would even hasten this outcome by making the sectarian rifts the new primary source of discontent in the country.

Certainly true multi-national military coalitions are not problem-free enterprises. Relinquishing authority in the ways we would need to would make coordination and control by anybody much harder.

And the largest problem with this solution is that it's a fantasy. The Bush Administration would never do anything remotely like this. I might as well be wishing for free ponies for Iraqi children at the same time. Indeed, the Bush plan seems to involve gradually shifting the blame for the mess to the Iraqis as a cover, and then declaring that we're fed up and they can fend for themselves. We lose our strategic position and destroy Iraqi society, but at least the domestic audience is somewhat molified.