General Petraeus helped write the Army manual on fighting an insurgency. They all know that 20,000 more soldiers will not do anything to pacify Baghdad, let alone Iraq. We need impeachments.
It is all about the politics, the lies, the incompetence, and the hidden agendas of this evil administration.
This was posted at Talking Points Memo. The Army says it needs 20 combat (not support) troops for every 1000 civilian population to fight an insurgency. This "surge" is a crime.
"Kaplan runs through the numbers. But the key points are that you'd need 120,000 combat troops to mount real counter-insurgency operations just in Baghdad. We currently have 70,000 combat troops in the whole country. So concentrate all US combat personnel in Iraq into Baghdad. Then add 20,000 more 'surge' combat troops. That leaves you 30,000 short of the number the Army thinks you'd need just in Baghdad.
Needless to say, Iraq isn't just Baghdad. And if you know anything about how insurgencies work you know that if we actually had enough troops in Baghdad (remember, to even get in shooting distance of that you need to evacuate the rest of the country) the insurgents would just fan out and start literal or figurative fires where we're not.
What this all amounts to is that 20,000 or even 50,000 new combat troops don't even get you close to what the Army says you need to do what President Bush says he's now going to try to do. To get that many troops into the country you'd need to put this country on a serious war-footing and begin drawing troops down from deployments around the globe. All of which, just isn't going to happen, setting aside for the moment of what should happen. And that tells you this whole thing is just a joke at the expense of the American public and our troops on the ground in Iraq.
What's sad about this (and it's hard to know where to start on that count) is that a few years ago, much, much more would have been possible with more troops on the ground. Alternatively, if the president and his key advisors hadn't lied to the country about the number of troops required to stabilize and police Iraq (then-Army Chief of Staff Shinseki said 400k+, I think) we might not have pulled the trigger in the first place."
(Edited to fix the link, it didn't seem to work.)
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/week_2007_01_07.php#011851I posted this in GD on a thread about Petraeus saying we can't fight our way out of Iraq. We need more awareness about this simple point. We don't have enough soldiers to win in Iraq militarily.
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