Should Republicans go ahead and add Supreme Court Justices to head off Democrats

Troop numbers game

Victor Davis Hanson:

...

If numbers are not the only factors conducive either to military victory or to successful occupation, the question becomes one of how our present forces are being used. Here a general rule seems inescapable: defeating—even humiliating—an enemy decisively and then immediately establishing zero tolerance for the formation of militias and insurrectionists is a wiser strategy than stationing a vast, and often static occupation force over an opponent who does not believe he was defeated in the first place.

In this regard, we got off to an unfortunate start in the last days of the war. Worried about inflicting excessive damage on a tottering enemy in front of a worldwide television audience, we employed non-explosive GPS bombs, passed over retreating units of the Republican Guard, and avoided hitting infrastructure. Such magnanimity and caution, while admirable and understandable, may in hindsight have sent the wrong message first to looters, who made free with the infrastructure we spared, then to nascent private militias, and finally to entire cadres of resistance in Falluja and Najaf—the idea, that is, that U.S. forces would not put down those who in fact could be and should have been put down.

...

From the American point of view, the lesson of this paradoxical moral calculus should have been that our restraint can earn us contempt rather than the gratitude we expect. Following the same line of thought, one might well have concluded in recent depressing circumstances that the more Americans withheld their overwhelming firepower to parley with insurrectionists, out of worry over greater uprisings or in fear of cultural or religious transgression, the more likely the enemy was to become emboldened—and thus the more likely it would be that we would indeed need far more troops to encircle far more Fallujas. To the critics, not having enough troops earned us one Falluja, to which they proposed more troops as the remedy; but the worse sin might have been our failure to use immediately and forcefully the powerfully equipped troops we already had on hand.

...

None of us knows the number of troops that should now be stationed in Iraq. Should Iraqization fail, should insurrection increase, we might well end up needing more soldiers, in part because of our own past hesitancy to act promptly and forcefully against incipient insurrection. But lost in the present argument is the inescapable lesson of history: small armies, well-led and with established reputations for unpredictability and ferocity, can not only defeat numerically superior militaries but then impress quite large populations and occupy vast territories. Their relatively small size and finite presence can also help to convince interim governments that speed is of the essence in creating a highly visible, indigenous army and using it to put down insurrectionists—with obvious dividends for both public perceptions and the ease of transferring responsibility of governance to the occupied.

Our problem, in short, is not that Donald Rumsfeld is fighting wars with too few troops and then being too stingy in allotting occupation forces. Rather, our concern with restraining the use of the vast power of those already in the field has put us at risk of creating self-fulfilling prophecies. We have seen a Gulf War I and now a Gulf War II. Gulf War III is surely on the horizon if, failing to learn the lessons of the last two victories, we once more remove the stakes from the hearts of seemingly defeated and moribund killers.

In fighting an insurgency force to space is one consideration in the victory calculus. But, it is not the total force in the country that is important, it is the number of troops at the point of attack. The problem now in Faluja, is that it is a sanctuary for the insurgents, that permits them to plan their destruction in other areas. The most important task the US has now is to insure that there is no place in Iraq that is a sanctuary for the enemy. There are clearly enough troops in the country now to do that. Once the sanctuaries are destroyed, the insurgency will lose steam. At this point the insurgents are like cock roaches. They cannot take over but they can continue to make messes. Their nests need to be removed.