perfidy

Ross, I'm not sure I agree with portions of this.

1) Where are you getting your acid test? Conscription-worthiness seems to me to be a pretty poor indicator of worth of a given fight, since the all-volunteer US Army is much more potent than a partly-drafted version any day.

2) When did you, or anyone with half a brain and a working bullshit detector ever believe that Iraq was really going to be a short-term deal? Iraqis are like most people-- they will complain as long as there's any excuse. That in and of itself isn't a great reason to pull out of a country. Hell, we're still in Germany!

3) Who's to say that prolonging the US presence by way of violence won't just sour most Iraqis on Islamic violence along souring them on the US occupation?

4) Regarding smarts: get serious.

Ross,
Hippy histrionics aside, I don't think there is any serious consideration of reintroducing conscription. The social and cultural repercussions of that would divide the country like never before. Not to mention that commanders don't want conscripts.

And there's little need to conscript, when it's the Congress that determines the manning levels of the armed forces. Congress can redetermine the missions the country is facing or may face, and authorize increases if deemed necessary. With, of course, the budgetary considerations of such a move in mind.

I seem to recall nobody in the administration claiming that this was going to be a quick in-and-out operation. Just the opposite in fact, they've stated from the beginning that it was going to be a long term op.

Thanks Johno, for getting the obvious ones out of the way. That allows me to do what I do best - pick nits!

Ross, the administration's words with Lugar scarcely qualify as "character assassination," let alone imply that it maintains teams dedicated to this purpose.

The administration is defending its position, which is a normal thing to do. Bob Novak is far from the first to criticize Rumsfeld's troop estimates. You have seen it from me here on these pages. Of course, I lack the pundit authority that Novak has, but his voicing of concerns that myself and many others share hardly puts a chill in my spine, or indeed any other part of my anatomy.

Even a big conservative pundit criticizing the president does not signal some kind of split in the party, or danger that any conservatives are going to decide to vote for effing Kerry now that we realize that we don't have enough troops. Even with Bush's faults, and most conservatives and even republicans are not exactly closemouthed about them, we all feel that Kerry would be a far worse choice.

To add to Johno's comment, from the President on down, they have all said that it was going to be a long fight. I don't know who you think thought this was going to be short. Unless you're talking about major combat operations - that was short, and in that regard Rumsfeld was right about troop estimates. But it was never the war, but the occupation that most of us were worrying that we would not have enough troops for.

You ought to read Max Boot's "Savage Wars of Peace" which is the history of America's small wars. The bar for American military action has never, and should never be set as high as civilization-threatening conflict requiring the full mobilization of the American people for war. Conscription is not an absolute good, and was a contributing factor in the start of WWI. In the Civil War, WWI, and WWII, it worked because of (general) support for the war, and the need to organize for mass conflict. It was used to lesser good in Korea, and much lesser in Vietnam. Our volunteer army is a vast improvement, over the draft army, and we should abandon it only in the direst of circumstances.

The current war on terror is a serious thing. There are many people who want to kill us, and we need to deal with that. Happily, they do not have the ability to invade our homeland in the traditional way. Therefore, massive scale industrial war isn't necessary.

Which is not to say that the lack of direct, large scale threat does not mean that we don't need to fight, but our current structure is adequate to the job (we just need to flesh out the numbers) and we do not need to put the whole soceity on a war footing.

GL - I didn't say "reintroduce conscription"; I said, "war worthy of conscription". World War II passed that test with flying colors. Does this one?

The Executive has told the military to accomplish its mission with what they have. There really isn't anywhere else to go to increase the resources available...any additional troops are going to have to come from National Guard units.

If the Executive thought that this was going to be a "long fight", what WERE their estimates? Are we tracking on them? All we have to go by are vague numbers fielded by lower-level folks, like Mitch Daniels' $50 Billion estimate for the war, or the civilian pentagon planning authority's estimates of a draw-down to less than 30,000 troops by August 2003.

With nothing more official in terms of estimates than that, we're in a situation today where some 130,000 troops are NOT ENOUGH to hold the situation. Those troops are being bolstered by increasing number of civilian constractors (guns for hire).

Here is the key question: Could this outcome have been predicted in the runup to the war? If the current situation had bee presented to America as a possible or likely scenario by the adminstration, would it have received authorization for this war?

I think the answer to the second question is clearly NO.

We all know that the administration's "unofficial" estimates looked nothing like what has happened. Was this deliberate?

If it was deliberate, then we have a serious problem on our hands. Lugar's recent irritation is further proof that the Executive branch is in a tailspin.

If it was not deliberate, then we have an irrresponsible, OPEN-ENDED committment of US troops without good reason, or (at best) based on a shaky chain of probabilities.

Ross,
No you didn't say "reintroduce conscription", but you support the argument that Iraq is undermanned. I thought you were arguing that the administration would have to reintroduce conscription to meet the manning demands.

A war "worthy" of conscription... I'm not sure about assigning a measure of worth to a martial undertaking. I think it depends on the needs of the mission, the needs of the strategy. Today we just don't need as many people in uniform as we did in ages past to accomplish the same mission.

As for whether scenarios were presented to the American people, are you kidding me?! The media was full of doom and gloom from the moment war was even considered. The last week, which saw flare-ups in portions of cities along the rivers, was really the first opportunity for those same media sources to scream "a-HA! Quagmire! Tet! Vietnam!!" Fortunately, alot of non-hippies can see through media hype.

Which doesn't mean I think Iraq has become Operation: HappyFunCandy, but the military will do what's asked of it.

You could describe Roosevelt's commitment to a Europe first strategy as an irresponsible, OPEN-ENDED commitment of US troops without good reason, or (at best) based on a shaky chain of probabilities. It was Japan that attacked us, and defeating Germany was by no means assured. And many argued that it was at the time.

We cannot immediately redress the staffing problem short of calling up guard and reserve units. But we can increase the size of the military without conscription. All the services have been meeting recruitment goals, or nearly, and with the highest retention rates in the forward deployed units. It seems I may have overestimated that problem. But in any event, we can get more troops, should congress and the president decide to embiggen the military.

The American people were informed that it would be a long fight. Poll numbers suggest that they did and still do support it. The recent increase in violence saw an uptick in public support. A country that supported trillions in expense over decades in the fight against your ideological cousins, the commies, (heh) will not quail at billions to fight terrorists who killed 3000 of our own only two and a half years ago. What's fifty billion, plus or minus? the federal budget's in the trillions. Maybe some whales can go without foodstamps for a while til we get this fixed.

Arguing about whether someone thought that we could draw down to 30,000 troops is in many ways irrelevant. Did we, in the face of an evolving situation, actually pull out 100,000 troops? No. Nit picking over estimates and such made two or more years ago is arguing over whether the surgeon who removed a tumor used a four inch or five inch scalpel. Tumor gone? Fine, lets worry about stiching up, and making sure the cancer doesn't come back.

B,
I have a feeling you're going to pay for that "commie" remark.

But the whales on foodstamps thing made me snot.

B: I call bullshit. Are you saying that the entire science of estimation, in military conflict, is just full of crap?

Responsible leadership means finding and using accurate, consensus estimates, then making decisions based on that.

Estimates from the best military planners in the Pentagon indicated that around 200,000 troops would be needed to correctly secure Iraq. Shinseki lost his job for saying so. Don't pretend that "nobody knew" how much it would take.

Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld, Feith and crowd thought the military planners were full of shit. They thought it could be done for next to nothing, and that Iraq could be used as a staging ground to create cultural change. What's the difference? The military guys look at what can go wrong, and assume that quite a few things will. Wolfowitz and crowd assume that they are never wrong.

Talking about estimates is not "nit picking". It goes to the heart of the decision making process. What you're doing is just trotting out meaningless excuses for not looking at the hard military realities of the situation prior to the war.

I'm not saying that the low estimates for the occupation weren't wrong. They were, and I argued that they were at the time, and still do. I talk on this very site how I think that we should increase the size of the military to avoid having that problem (bequeathed to us by Clinton) again.

But the totals for the conquest of Iraq proved sufficient however, so in that sense we are arguing over unspilt milk. Carping over estimates in the past in the manner that you are doing doesn't help solve the problem. You're just calling Bush and his aides idiots. What do you suggest that we do, now, to solve some of the problems that we are facing?

I don't think Wolfowitz et al are idiots. There's a huge difference between being an idiot and being wrong. It looks a lot like the gap between a well-formed, substantiated opinion and a wish list.

Wolfowitz, Rumsfeld and Feith had strong theories about geopolitics. I'm not sure where the errors creep in, exactly, but I'll hazard that it's in the "combination of risks" area. In order for their plans to work out correctly, a lot had to go right. Not all of it has, and now we're dealing with the down sides.

The errors can be sourced to something as simple as assigning the wrong risk factors. More likely, as I've said, military planners tend towards the likely case, and Wolfowitz et al have tended towards the optimal case.

When lives are on the line, using the optimal case seems irresponsible to me. It isn't necessarily stupid; it's irresponsible.

I second Ross on that point. That in a nutshell is my problem with the Administration's entire way of thinking. Everything seems to depend on other things-- chains of things-- working out.

It's like playing pool. You don't screw around with a three-ball carom, because every error is magnified with each subsequent collision. If you're playing for $1000, you make shots you know you can win with.

A valid point - but, the flip side of that analogy is if you only take safe shots you kn ow you can make, you never will get the three ball combo. In statecraft and war gambling (of a sort) is sometimes a reasonable thing. Especially in this case, where failure to achieve the most optimal outcome is still better than the initial situation..

Look, imagine that we have a series of goals/outcomes we'd like to see in Iraq. If many of the most optimal ones are indeed dependent on other things working out, fine - because we already sank the first ball. Saddam is gone. Is a partial failure in Iraq (also known as a partial success) going to make our security situation worse than before we started? I think not. They already hated us, but at least now they hate and fear us. Is their ability to strike us here in CONUS increased? No. Is funding to terrorists reduced? Yes.

The combo is moving on - and yes, we are at a tricky point. It will take some improvisation and hard work on the part of our military and the civilian types in Iraq. But the combo has not yet been derailed.

Rumsfeld is right in pushing for a more flexible military - and resistance is kind of silly, since that has been the trend since the end of Vietnam. We have the capacity to deal with emerging threats on the fly. We adjust our tactics faster than our enemies. We get inside their decision cycles. And then we kill them.

Sure, we need more troops. Other decisions could have been made that might have been better. Buckethead's reformulation of Murphy's Law: There will be fuckups. Regardless of who's in the white house, at the pentagon or in the front lines. But that does not mean doom or inevitable failure.

Ambitious goals can result in impressive results. Or ignominious failure. But practicing a one ball strategy in Iraq, or in the war on terror in general is probably not sufficient to the challenge.

This would be a good time to back up your assertion that the Iraq war has anything to do with terrorism.

One ball worked reasonably well in Afghanistan, until we pulled the troops out to send them after Saddam Hussein. Cleaning up Tora Bora, utterly and completely, should have been accomplished a year ago.

I have been wondering whether, at the end of Bush's presidency, there will be more dead soldiers, or more Bush vacation days. I hope to God it's vacation days, but right now it's looking pretty grim.

Terrorism:

Saddam provided major funding to Palestinian terrorists. Czech intelligence still insists that al Qaeda met with Saddam's intelligence officers. Terrorists such as Abu Abbas were given sanctuary in Bagdhad. There were terrorist training camps that included actual airliners for them to practice on.

As far as I know, we did not pull troops out of Afghanistan to fight in Iraq. We didn't have all that many there to begin with, which again was a problem for the occupation phase. We keep having that problem...

That is a perverse and pointless comparison.

B,
Certain specialized people were taken from Afghanistan and put into Iraq. Was the Afghanistan mission affected by this? I should think so, but the manning levels were not dramatically affected there.

As far as Iraqi terror, you can add that a suspect from the first Trade Ctr bombing fled straight to Baghdad and the attempted assassination of the elder Bush. The entire fedayeen organization is/was arguably a terror group as well.