The false strategic fuel argument

Shanker Vedantam:

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One of the most prominent advocates of this position is the political scientist Robert Pape of the University of Chicago. Increasing troops in Iraq, Pape argues, will win the United States a lot of battles with insurgents but also make it more likely that Americans will lose the war.

Pape's conclusions are based on a detailed examination of suicide attacks over the past 25 years. His central finding is that, contrary to conventional explanations, suicide attacks follow a certain strategic logic. From 1980 to 2006, Pape has counted 870 completed suicide attacks -- with the Iraqi insurgency accounting for the majority of such attacks in recent years.

Of the total, Pape has found that 824 of the attacks, or 95 percent, have come from groups that are fighting against military occupations of their homeland. Pape found that 85 percent of all the suicide attacks in the last quarter-century have come about in response to U.S. combat operations. There were eight times as many suicide attacks in Iraq in 2006 as there were in 2003.

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Pape reaches his conclusions by playing fast and loose with his definitions. If you take Israel for example, under his theory the most suicide attacks should be coming from Israeli Arabs, but there have been none to speak of. In Iraq, where he tries to make his case the suicide attacks are not by Iraqis who are feeling occupied, but by foreigners pushing an alien ideology that is currently being rejected in great numbers in Iraq. Another way to look at his argument is by looking at the ratio of violence to the number of US troops in Iraq.

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If the insurgency follows the rules of conventional mathematics, increasing the number of U.S. troops should produce a greater counterinsurgency effort and a more peaceful Iraq. That is what one analysis found. Alex Braithwaite of Colorado State University tracked insurgent attacks across Iraq's provinces over a six-month period from January to June 2005. On average, there were 16 attempted attacks in each province each week. Braithwaite found an inverse relationship between insurgent attacks and the presence of U.S. troops.

"The insurgency is most severe where U.S. troop presence is low," Braithwaite said, as he presented his findings last week at the American Political Science Association meeting in Chicago. "U.S. troops dampen the effects of the insurgency."

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I have taken Vedantam's story out of order because he tries to use Pape's argument to counter Braithwaite's. But, Pape's argument has already been shown to be defective by the effects of the surge and common sense. What Pape is really arguing is similar to an argument that Hitlers bombing of the Brits increased after they declared war on Germany. German recruiting also increased after the Brits declared war. It is a silly argument by anti war pseudo intellectuals. If Pape were right, then Braithwaite could not have found the data he found.

What Braithwaite's data demonstrates is that a higher force to space ratio reduces violence and makes it more difficult for the enemy to move to contact. At best Pape is arguing for the failed small foot print strategy we were using before the surge.

Jules Crittenden also looks at the lower combat deaths conundrum facing the anti surge forces in the US. My earlier post on the decline in combat deaths is here.