Breaking the Army

It certainly appears that the new idea in Iraq will be to add troops and surge into Baghdad. Right, because we've never tried this before.

Yet Baghdad has received a substantial infusion of American forcse since mid-2006, for an offensive known as Operation Forward Together. And Baghdad became more dangerous, not less. After all, Iraq is in the throes of multi-tiered sectarian conflict, which Kagan recognizes -- threats to both the Iraqi government, the Iraqi people, and U.S. troops arise from al-Qaeda, Sunni insurgents, Sunni death squads, Shiite death squads, Shiite militias, and the Iraqi security forces themselves. And here's where Kagan's agnosticism on Iraqi politics will doom his plan. To send an additional 20,000 or so troops to simultaneously take on Sunni and Shiite forces in the capitol with no evident strategy is more likely to plunge Baghdad deeper into chaos while absolutely severing the factions in the Iraqi government from the population it allegedly represents.

The fact that we've already made this "one last push" into Baghdad, and found it to be a miserable failure, is lost on neocon politicians like Joe Lieberman, who has completely gone back on his campaign promise to find a way out of Iraq (not that the media has called him on it). It's a topsy-turvy world when the saner people, the cold-eyed realists, are not the civilians but the military generals in the field.

Warning that the active-duty Army "will break" under the strain of today's war-zone rotations, the nation's top Army general yesterday called for expanding the force by 7,000 or more soldiers a year and lifting Pentagon restrictions on involuntary call-ups of Army National Guard and Army Reserve troops.

Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, issued his most dire assessment yet of the toll of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan on the nation's main ground force. At one point, he banged his hand on a House committee-room table, saying the continuation of today's Pentagon policies is "not right."

In particularly blunt testimony, Schoomaker said the Army began the Iraq war "flat-footed" with a $56 billion equipment shortage and 500,000 fewer soldiers than during the 1991 Persian Gulf War. Echoing the warnings from the post-Vietnam War era, when Gen. Edward C. Meyer, then the Army chief of staff, decried the "hollow Army," Schoomaker said it is critical to make changes now to shore up the force for what he called a long and dangerous war.

"The Army is incapable of generating and sustaining the required forces to wage the global war on terror . . . without its components -- active, Guard and reserve -- surging together," Schoomaker said in testimony before the congressionally created Commission on the National Guard and Reserves.

How did we get in a situation where we were this clueless about future needs? We had a year and a half between Afghanistan and Iraq. We put too FEW troops into Iraq. Three years of war turned the all-volunteer army into chicken feed? This is a management crisis. I don't disagree that the Army needs to expand if we cannot handle this level of responsibility. Particularly when you have a crew with itchy trigger fingers running the show. Actually, I'd only resist expanding the Army if it meant that the magical thinkers in the Office of the Vice President wouldn't be able to view the world as a personal Risk board anymore.

I should mention at this point that John Kerry called for adding 40,000 soldiers to the Army as part of the 2004 campaign, which would have at least helped us not get to the crisis point we're at currently.

Meanwhile, there are only about three people on the planet that really want to add troops into the meat grinder that is Baghdad. George Bush, John McCain, and Joementum. The Iraqis sure don't want it.

The idea is also running into strong opposition in Baghdad. Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki has flatly told Gen. George Casey, the top American military commander in Iraq, that he doesn't want more U.S. personnel deployed to the country, according to U.S. military officials. The U.S. sent thousands of additional combat personnel to Baghdad earlier this year in an attempt to quell the daily violence there, but American officials say Mr. Maliki has made clear that he wants to see those forces -- except for U.S. trainers and advisers -- moved out of the city.

Senior U.S. commanders on the ground in Iraq, meanwhile, say they aren't sure additional forces are needed in Iraq.

Even Donald Frickin' Rumsfeld questioned the strategy and wondered whether these extra troops would have anything positive to do. What is the plan, fighting Sunnis and Shiites at the same time? Stopping Al-Sadr and Al Qaeda and everybody else who doesn't like us in that country? We'd be fighting the whole country.

Not only is this a stupid recipe for getting more Americans killed, it's actually destroying our capacity to protect and defend ourselves. This is a nightmare from which I fear we'll have real problems managing to recover.