WASHINGTON - The Pentagon's announcement this
week that it is adding 12,000 more troops to the
approximately 138,000 soldiers it already has in Iraq
has put an abrupt end to the fleeting sense of triumph
that followed November's "victory" by US Marines who
regained control of Fallujah, the main Sunni rebel
stronghold.
While the administration sought to
spin the decision as a matter of keeping the insurgents
"on the run" and backing up security for elections
scheduled to take place January 30, most analysts have
described the move as an effective admission that
Washington's counterinsurgency campaign has not, in
fact, been going particularly well.
That
conclusion was anticipated to some extent just the day
before, as the Pentagon confirmed that 134 US servicemen
were killed in November, making it the most lethal month
since the March 2003 invasion along with April, when the
same number of soldiers were killed battling Sunni
rebels and Shi'ite insurgents in Baghdad and in the
occupied country's south.
Given the recent
disappointing performance of Iraqi police and security
forces, the influx of more US troops marks at least a
symbolic setback to the larger strategy of
"Iraqification", or giving indigenous Iraqi forces more
responsibility for maintaining order and keeping the
largely Sunni insurrection in check.
"I fear
that it signals a 're-Americanization' ... of our
strategy in Iraq," retired army Colonel Ralph
Hallenback, who worked with the US occupation in 2003,
told Thursday's Washington Post.
The
announcement also offered an "I-told-you-so" moment to
any number of critics, who have argued from the outset
that the Pentagon's civilian leadership, in hoping to
prove that wars could be won with fewer forces, more
firepower and greater speed, was dead wrong.
Washington, their argument goes, might have made
a major tactical - if not strategic - mistake in not
carrying out the 2003 invasion and subsequent occupation
with a far bigger force, as the army had strongly
recommended.
"I believe we should have had more
at the beginning. Some of the difficulties we have in
Iraq may not have had the same impact as they are having
now," said Republican Senator Chuck Hagel, who was
visiting Baghdad with a congressional delegation on
Thursday.
Hagel, like many other Vietnam War
veterans, has long argued that when Washington commits
its troops abroad it should do so only with overwhelming
force and a clear "exit strategy" - key elements of what
came to be known as the Powell Doctrine, named for the
outgoing secretary of state and former chairman of the
joint chiefs of staff, Colin Powell.
For the
vets, one of the most important lessons of the whole
Indochina debacle was to scrupulously avoid situations
in which US forces found themselves in an escalating
guerrilla war, where the only way to contain a growing
insurgency was to deploy more troops to the theater.
"Adding troops at this point is the opposite of
what senior Pentagon officials expected when the war
began in March 2003," noted the Washington Post's
veteran military correspondent Thomas Ricks.
"We
now face the plain fact that the insurgency is growing,"
wrote Joseph Galloway, Ricks' experienced counterpart at
Knight Ridder Newspapers, who scorned the claims of one
widely quoted senior US military commander that the
Fallujah campaign had "broken the back of the
insurgency". Galloway noted that rebels had recently
been mounting as many as 150 attacks a day - 10 times
the number of one year ago.
"Why does my mind
keep going back to the ... Powell Doctrine," he asked in
reference to lessons learned in Vietnam, "which the
current civilian leadership in the Pentagon declared
dead and gone while they were doing their victory laps
and praising their own strategy of smaller, faster,
deadlier in the field of military affairs?"
The
announcement on troop numbers raises yet another
bogeyman from the Vietnam era - the administration's
"credibility" in conducting the war, particularly when
the top civilian leadership not only had insisted from
the start that the number of "boots on the ground" was
adequate, but had also ridiculed senior retired and
active-duty military officials who publicly warned
before the invasion that many more would be needed.
"We should have leveled with the American people
in the beginning," Democratic Senator Joseph Biden - who
is travelling with Hagel - told reporters in Baghdad.
"It was absolutely inevitable," that more troops would
be needed, he said, adding that the administration's
claims that January's elections and the training of more
Iraqi security forces would permit Washington to rapidly
draw down its troops beginning as early as the end of
2005 were unrealistic.
The US escalation, he
said, "[has] made American citizens believe that they
were ... misled or that things are in a worse shape
[than they have been told]."
Certainly in worse
shape is the military itself. Troops who were originally
promised tours of duty that would not exceed 12 months
at the absolute most are now looking at extensions of
two months at least. Some units originally scheduled to
return home in October have been told they will have to
wait until March 2005.
As noted by the New York
Times, extending the tours of duty "is risking problems
with morale and retention," which is already a rising
concern both in the ranks and on Capitol Hill.
It didn't help that the much-read Perspectives
page of Newsweek this week featured Marine Staff
Sergeant Russell Slay's "instructions" to his
five-year-old son in a letter he sent to his family
shortly before he was killed in Iraq. "Be studious, stay
in school, and stay away from the military. I mean it."
Last week, the Army National Guard announced it
has fallen significantly behind its recruiting goals
this fall, continuing a downward slide that began last
year. The guard missed its October target by 30%.
At the same time, the Baltimore Sun reported
that the army is planning to pull officers out of
military professional schools or delay their entry into
academic programs in order to meet "war-time needs". It
is also considering curbing "family-oriented programs",
such as one that permits soldiers to extend their tours
of duty at particular US bases so their children can
finish high school.
Also, the Los Angeles Times
reported last week that the Marine Corps is offering
bonuses of up to $30,000, in some cases tax-free, to
persuade enlisted personnel with combat and experience
or training to re-enlist.
Such reports are
feeding efforts by some lawmakers to add as many as
50,000 soldiers to the armed forces, an expense that
Pentagon and so-called "deficit hawks" in Congress would
prefer desperately to avoid. Deficits, indeed, is
another bad word dating from the Vietnam era.
