The politics does not fit the military reality

Stephen Biddle:

The president's shaky political consensus for the surge in Iraq is in danger of collapsing after the recent defections of prominent Senate Republicans such as Richard Lugar (Ind.), Pete Domenici (N.M.) and George Voinovich (Ohio). But this growing opposition to the surge has not yet translated into support for outright withdrawal -- few lawmakers are comfortable with abandoning Iraq or admitting defeat. The result has been a search for some kind of politically moderate "Plan B" that would split the difference between surge and withdrawal.

The problem is that these politics do not fit the military reality of Iraq. Many would like to reduce the U.S. commitment to something like half of today's troop presence there. But it is much harder to find a mission for the remaining 60,000 to 80,000 soldiers that makes any sense militarily.

Perhaps the most popular centrist option today is drawn from the Baker-Hamilton commission recommendations of last December. This would withdraw U.S. combat brigades, shift the American mission to one of training and supporting the Iraqi security forces, and cut total U.S. troop levels in the country by about half. This idea is at the heart of the proposed legislative effort that Domenici threw his support behind last week, and support is growing on both sides of the aisle on Capitol Hill.

The politics make sense, but the compromise leaves us with an untenable military mission. Without a major U.S. combat effort to keep the violence down, the American training effort would face challenges even bigger than those our troops are confronting today. An ineffective training effort would leave tens of thousands of American trainers, advisers and supporting troops exposed to that violence in the meantime. The net result is likely to be continued U.S. casualties with little positive effect on Iraq's ongoing civil war.

The American combat presence in Iraq is insufficient to end the violence but does cap its intensity. If we draw down that combat presence, violence will rise accordingly. To be effective, embedded trainers and advisers must live and operate with the Iraqi soldiers they mentor -- they are not lecturers sequestered in some safe classroom. The greater the violence, the riskier their jobs and the heavier their losses.

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The result is a vicious cycle. The more we shift out of combat missions and into training, the harder we make the trainers' job and the more exposed they become. It is unrealistic to expect that we can pull back to some safe yet productive mission of training but not fighting -- this would be neither safe nor productive.

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Democrats and squishy Republicans are supporting this option, not because it makes sense militarily, but because it buys time for the retreat they want without the political consequences of forcing an immediate retreat. Militarily it makes no sense and at best it returns us to the Rumsfeld-Abizaid policy that they were all complaining about last year. It completely ignores the counterinsurgency doctrine incorporated in the manual for fighting this kind of war. The Senate proposal is totally senseless when you strip it of the politics.