the Surge becomes the Fizzle
Feb. 26th, 2007 08:48 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
winterbadgerNothing has changed, nothing is going to change, and we should just come home.
There are fewer deaths and less militia activity in those areas where US troops are patrolling, but there is greater violence and more death elsewhere. In other words, the insurgents and terrorists just move operations. Unless we were willing to exert the same level of scrutiny everywhere, this is not going to work. And we won't, because that would require, not 20,000 or 30,00 more troops, but hundreds of thousands, as the administration was told at the beginning of the war by a general who they then forced into retirement for sayign what they didn't want to hear. Such numbers would not be forthcoming without a massive increase in the size of the military, possibly entailing a draft. Which will never happen, because although "we're at war" is used constantly as a justification for infringemnts on civil liberties, the adminsitration will never treat this like a real war (you know, one in which your population has to make sacrifices and accept privation across the board, instead of just in those familiies whose members enlist voluntarily) because they know that the people would never wear it.
We need to pack up and come home. Yes, we should figure out the least harmful way to do that, but we should do it soon.
American military commanders in Iraq describe the security plan they began implementing in mid-February as a rising tide: a gradual influx of thousands of U.S. and Iraqi troops whose extended presence in the city's violent neighborhoods will drown the militants' ability to stage bombings and sectarian killings.
But U.S. troops, Iraqi soldiers and officials, and Baghdad residents say the plan is hampered because security forces cannot identify, let alone apprehend, the elusive perpetrators of the violence.
...
Military patrols frequently push into neighborhoods where they have been shot at or struck with improvised explosive devices, or IEDs, only to find no one to arrest.
"I don't know who I'm fighting most of the time," said Staff Sgt. Joseph Lopez, 39, a soldier based in the northern outskirts of the capital. "I don't know who is setting what IED."
Many people in Baghdad express deep reservations about the Iraqi security forces' ability and desire to battle their fellow citizens. U.S. soldiers say their Iraqi counterparts are swayed more by the anti-American speeches of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr than by the public appeals of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki for even-handed enforcement.
...
Iraqi army soldiers and policemen stand sentry at checkpoint after checkpoint, but more often than not allow cars to pass through without inspection.
"They're just standing and waving at the cars," said Sgt. Haider Hasim, 20, a member of the Iraqi National Guard's 1st Brigade, 2nd Regiment of the 6th Division, who patrols the western Baghdad neighborhood of Amiriyah. "They won't take weapons from their friends."
Commandos and policemen from the predominantly Shiite Interior Ministry have little desire to raid or arrest members of their own sect or residents from their home neighborhoods, said Hasim, whose father is Sunni and mother is Shiite. From what he has seen, the Iraqi soldiers brought in for the security plan are accomplishing little.
"They're doing nothing, they're just sleeping at the camps," he said. "We do not go out if the Americans are not with us."
...
For the Americans, the security plan depends heavily on pushing along the Iraqi security forces. The so-called joint security stations envisioned under the plan are intended not only to generate intelligence about insurgents and militias but also to bring together Iraqi military and police personnel, who often fail to communicate, as well as U.S. troops.
...
Lt. Col. Christopher C. Garver, a U.S. military spokesman, said that although part of the stations' function is to encourage Iraqis to visit, their locations would not be disclosed because of concern within the Iraqi government that such information would facilitate attacks.
There are fewer deaths and less militia activity in those areas where US troops are patrolling, but there is greater violence and more death elsewhere. In other words, the insurgents and terrorists just move operations. Unless we were willing to exert the same level of scrutiny everywhere, this is not going to work. And we won't, because that would require, not 20,000 or 30,00 more troops, but hundreds of thousands, as the administration was told at the beginning of the war by a general who they then forced into retirement for sayign what they didn't want to hear. Such numbers would not be forthcoming without a massive increase in the size of the military, possibly entailing a draft. Which will never happen, because although "we're at war" is used constantly as a justification for infringemnts on civil liberties, the adminsitration will never treat this like a real war (you know, one in which your population has to make sacrifices and accept privation across the board, instead of just in those familiies whose members enlist voluntarily) because they know that the people would never wear it.
We need to pack up and come home. Yes, we should figure out the least harmful way to do that, but we should do it soon.
