4th and Long
President Bush's Commitment of more troops to Iraq isn't just unpopular-it's a last-ditch gamble against tough odds
Nearly lost in all the clamor surrounding President Bush's decision to send an additional 21,500 American soldiers to Iraq is just how seismic a shift he is making. In one fell swoop, Bush is effectively repudiating many of the basic tenets that have been the foundation of his Iraq strategy-namely, that political progress would eventually quell the violence and that most Iraqis support America's efforts to build a democracy there.
It wasn't hard to miss. In his subdued prime-time address to the nation, Bush glossed over the minirevolution in his administration's approach. Notoriously reluctant to admit mistakes, Bush offered a bland, passive apology. "Where mistakes have been made," he said, "the responsibility rests me with." Yet documents released by the White House describing the new policy are surprisingly specific about how much has changed. The primary threat is no longer just a Sunni insurgency; it is now "violent extremists from multiple communities." Political progress alone will not lessen the violence; "political and economic progress are unlikely absent a basic level of security." Even more dramatic, the White House concedes that Iraqis don't all support its democracy-building efforts; instead, they are "increasingly disillusioned" by them.
Bush may have undersold his policy makeover, but any sales job may have been doomed from the start. He faces a war-weary public numbed by the relentless violence in Iraq, as well as a political climate already consumed by the 2008 presidential contest.
The Bush plan has been widely derided as "too little, too late." With the additional soldiers, the U.S. presence in Iraq will not quite top 155,000. For the first three years of the war, military experts complained that there simply weren't enough troops to pacify Iraq. "As of a year ago, the surge would have added combat power to your force relative to its challenge," says Wayne White, formerly the State Department's top intelligence expert on Iraq. "Since then, we've had a virtual sectarian civil war opening up a second front."
Now, many U.S. military officials are skeptical that additional forces can accomplish much when dozens of bodies are turning up daily, victims of sectarian death squads. A senior Pentagon official compares it to a situation where "you have a house on fire and you're dumping 140,000 gallons of water a minute on it to put it out-but you still have a gas line going into the building feeding the fire. Well, you can pour on an extra 20,000 gallons a minute, but first you have to turn the gas off."
No holds barred. White House officials came to a very different conclusion. "You can't get the necessary political deals in the absence of personal security," says a senior U.S. official. So, instead of mostly training Iraqi forces to provide security, Bush now wants U.S. forces to provide security for the Iraqi people, putting the troops at greater risk. Most of the additional U.S. soldiers will be headed to Baghdad, where some will be stationed with Iraqi forces at about 30 joint security posts around the capital.
U.S. officials concede that the plan will result in higher numbers of killed and wounded Americans. "If you have more troops in Baghdad, obviously you'll have more chance of casualties," says a U.S. military official in the Iraqi capital. American soldiers will find themselves more frequently in dangerous urban combat situations like the daylong street battle that raged on Baghdad's Haifa Street last week. Defense Secretary Robert Gates promises that no areas will be off limits. "In the last six months, quite candidly, we've been in reactive mode," says a senior military official, who adds that the military will be freed from Iraqi restrictions on the targeting of extremist leaders.
For Bush, it marks the riskiest initiative of his presidency. "This is the hardest choice he could have made politically," says a senior U.S. official. Even key Republicans decried Bush's announcement. "I've gone along with the president on this, and I bought into his dream," said Republican Sen. George Voinovich of Ohio. "At this stage of the game, I don't think it's going to happen." Long-time war skeptic and possible presidential hopeful Sen. Chuck Hagel, the Nebraska Republican, was irate, declaring Bush's plan to be "the most dangerous foreign-policy blunder in this country since Vietnam-if it's carried out."
The most dubious part of the new Bush plan is its reliance on the Iraqi government to achieve the very same set of goals it has failed to accomplish in the past year. Director of National Intelligence John Negroponte told Congress last week that "the various parties [in Iraq] have not yet shown the ability to compromise effectively on the thorny issues of de-Baathification, constitutional reform, federalism, and central versus regional control over hydrocarbon revenues." His list is eerily similar to the list of benchmarks Bush laid out for Iraqi Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki. While suggesting that the U.S. commitment was not open-ended, Bush refrained from any specific threats. "If the Iraqis don't perform, the strategy won't work," a senior U.S. official tells U.S. News. "This part of the plan I have the least confidence in."
Bush's new plan amounts to a repudiation of much of Donald Rumsfeld's six-year legacy at the Pentagon. Rumsfeld had staunchly refused to give U.S. troops the mission of keeping the Iraqi people safe. "You couldn't really have that change until Rumsfeld was gone," says a senior U.S. official. Bush also announced a broader expansion of the badly strained Army and Marines, which effectively reverses Rumsfeld's efforts to create a smaller, more nimble force. Bush would increase the overall size of the military by some 92,000-that's 65,000 soldiers and 27,000 marines-over five years. Congress has allowed the Army to temporarily grow by some 30,000 soldiers beyond its previous cap of 482,000. Today, it is about 5,000 soldiers short of that goal.
"A bad marriage." Along with the additional military deployments to Iraq, the Bush administration is trying to rejuvenate some of its political efforts in Iraq. Pledging to wade into the battle between moderates and extremists, U.S. officials want to find ways to support Iraq's dwindling number of political moderates. With much of this struggle occurring far from the U.S. diplomatic presence in the fortress of Baghdad's Green Zone, the White House is dispatching as many as 400 additional civilians to staff joint military-civilian teams around Iraq.
For all the carping, the president's critics have few of their own plans to offer. While some suggest a phased withdrawal, few can counter Bush's nightmare scenario of a hasty U.S. departure resulting in the complete collapse of the Iraqi government and "mass killings on an unimaginable scale." Democratic Sen. Joseph Biden has offered a plan to partition Iraq along sectarian lines, but many experts say the country is simply too much of a patchwork quilt for such a division. "Iraq is like a bad marriage-it's violent, but nobody is openly talking about divorce," says Vali Nasr, an expert on Iraq at the Naval Postgraduate School. "The United States cannot come in and pre-emptively divide a big Arab state." In another six months, warring Iraqis may well have achieved that objective themselves.
How the Game Plan Changed
ASSUMPTIONS
Before: Political progress will help defuse the insurgency and dampen levels of violence.
Now: While political progress, economic gains, and security are intertwined, political and economic progress are unlikely without a basic level of security.
Before: A majority of Iraqis will support the coalition and Iraqi efforts to build a democratic state.
Now: Iraqis are increasingly disillusioned with coalition efforts.
Before: Iraqi security forces are gaining in strength and ability to handle Iraq's security challenges.
Now: Many elements of the Iraqi security forces are in the lead but are not yet ready to handle security challenges independently.
Before: Dialogue with insurgent groups will help reduce violence.
Now: Dialogue with insurgents has not improved security and may not produce strategic gains in the current context.
Before: A majority of Iraqis and Iraqi leaders see their interests as best advanced by a unified Iraq.
Now: Many Iraqis are also advancing sectarian agendas.
OPERATIONAL SHIFTS
Before: The primary security focus was on transferring responsibility to Iraqis, with less focus on population security.
Now: The primary focus is on helping the Iraqi police and Army provide population security.
Before: Restrictive rules of engagement hindered execution of Baghdad security plan (preventing U.S. forces from going into Shiite strongholds).
Now: Iraqi leaders have committed to permissive rules of engagement (coalition forces may now go into Sadr City).
This story appears in the January 22, 2007 print edition of U.S. News & World Report.