Why only 20,000 [additional troops in the surge]? How do we get at the specifics of what they decide to do?
There's a whole discussion now about how big the reinforcement should be. Gen. Casey, he understands that the White House wants a different approach, and he himself has increased his force by some 7,000 in August. So he develops a recommendation, which I think really becomes something for two-brigade reinforcement, which is about another 7,000. ...
And this time, the Iraqis of course [are] supposed to pony up the brigades they never supplied last time, plus one. So the two brigades that never showed last time are supposed to show this time, plus one. So there will be three additional Iraqi brigades, bringing their brigades up to nine. ... So a plan is developed.
Really, until the very last moment, there's an option that's promulgated that's called 2-1-2: two American brigade combat teams in Baghdad; one on call in Kuwait as kind of a reserve force; two on call in the United States, if you need them. It would be sort of a phased introduction of forces. ... The broader context for this is the American military is stretched thin, and there's just not a lot of excess capacity. In fact, there's no excess capacity. ...
So that's a leading option. ... But remember, the White House has seen this movie before. They gave 7,000 troops in August. Now they're talking about another 7,000 troops. It just smacks of incrementalism to the president, to the vice president, to some of his advisers -- another kind of piecemeal effort that's unlikely to be decisive. ...
And another important factor is by this time, the decision has been made that a new strategy requires a new commander, and that new commander is to be Dave Petraeus. And Dave Petraeus -- the former commanding general of the 101st Airborne, former head of the training effort of the Iraqi army in Iraq, and the senior American Army general at Fort Leavenworth who's overseen the development of the new counterinsurgency manual -- wants five brigades, and he wants them as quickly as possible.
He doesn't want to do this incremental approach -- send two; if you need it, send another one; if you need it, send more. He believes that you need mass, because it's a big city; you need everybody you can get. He wants to be decisive, and he wants access to all five brigades. That becomes his position, and it's a position that's very much in tune with the thinking at the White House.
So when the decision is made -- and I believe it's made over just the last few days prior to being announced -- the president opts for the bigger package. And he announces a surge of five brigade combat teams -- not up to five -- five brigade combat teams for Baghdad, two additional battalions for Anbar, and then they're going to hold over a Marine unit there.
So you end up with a force that's upward of 20,000 -- 21,500 or so becomes the total force. And I wouldn't be surprised if it eventually ends up being somewhat larger, although it can't be greatly larger. ...
Who is [Gen.] Jack Keane and what is his role in all of this?
There's a very interesting side story to this. ... Gen. Jack Keane, who was the former vice chief of staff for the Army under Shinseki, was Rumsfeld's choice for a while to replace Shinseki, but was unable to take the job for personal reasons. He becomes a very active force in the discussions outside of government as to what to do next. He has a lot of influence inside the government, and he throws his weight very much behind a surge; in fact, a surge that's even bigger than the one that the president opted for.
He works on a study that's done under the auspices of the American Enterprise Institute and [military historian and AEI resident scholar] Fred Kagan. And there's a very interesting thing about this study that some people haven't noticed, and that is, a lot of the work on this study was done by two recently retired American Army officers. They ... served under H.R. McMaster, and they were part of the unit that took Tal Afar in what is seen to be the kind of textbook case for how to do counterinsurgency -- clear, hold and build, the one the White House always cites, the one that's in the military's counterinsurgency manual.
These two recently retired Army officers did a lot of the technical work on this AEI study calling for a surge -- how you would get the forces, where they would be deployed. And I think this reflects the fact that there's no monolithic view within the Army as to how to proceed in Iraq. ...
[The] selection [of Gen. Petraeus] sends what kind of a signal to the rest of the military and to the rest of the government?
[Petraeus is] obviously a very dedicated, capable and thoughtful officer. He had some success in Mosul in engaging in nation-building activities, which he basically dreamed up himself since nobody else was thinking this way in Baghdad. At a time when [Ambassador L. Paul] Bremer, [head of Coalition Provisional Authority, 2003-2004], was trying to promulgate a very rigid and sweeping de-Baathification effort, Petraeus managed to persuade Bremer to exempt the professors at Mosul University from this, because otherwise he'd have to shut down the university. ...
What you will have now in Baghdad are two people, first of all, who are committed to the idea that additional U.S. troops can be a positive influence, who haven't been committed to the notion that we have to withdraw to transfer responsibility to the Iraqis. But really, they've changed the mission. …
The mission now is going to be population security. And what do I mean by that? It means so much of the effort before was on enabling the Iraqis, getting them to step up, not doing too much because they have to do it, putting them online as quickly as possible. They stand up; we stand down.
I think now the thinking is more is they stand up, and we also stand up, and together we try to do something that we really haven't done that effectively in Baghdad, which is actually protect the people who live there. This is a very tall order. But it's key to their strategy that they're going to try to apply, because the theory is that if you can begin to bring security to these mixed Shi'ite-Sunni neighborhoods and actually protect the population, that population will become less dependent on, let's say, militia forces or rogue elements to provide for their own security. I mean, if you're a Shi'ite and you're getting attacked by Sunnis, and the American military can't protect you and certainly the Iraqi military can't protect you, it's understandable that you might look to Jaish al-Mahdi [the Mahdi Army] as your protector. So part of the theory behind this is if the Americans and the Iraqi security forces bring security to the city, the population will be less inclined to turn to the militias. …
The way it works now is there are these what they call FOBs, forward operating bases, around Baghdad -- Striker, Falcon, Liberty. I've been on these places. You stay with the units there, and they do patrols in the city. They can be long patrols, and they're dangerous patrols. They come back out to the FOB; another unit comes in. They're doing these patrols in and out of the city, but no one's living in these neighborhoods except for maybe a tiny number of possibly American advisers at a police station. …
So one of the big departures here, it's not simply a matter of additional troops; it's an entirely different operational concept. We're going to put forces that will stay in these areas, as Gen. [Raymond] Odierno, [commander, MNC-I, 2006-present], says, 24/7. They're going to be a presence there all the time. And that's the hold phase. The Iraqis are supposed to do most of it, but we're going to be there to make sure it actually happens and to kind of stiffen their spine. This is some of what was done in Tal Afar. So they're applying these lessons in this town out west and trying to do it and scale it up and do it to a larger extent in Baghdad. ...
Really the big challenge is, well, how do you deal with the Mahdi Army? The Mahdi Army has replaced Al Qaeda as the main threat to security in Baghdad. That's in the Pentagon's own public reports. The Shi'ite militias and their agenda to rout the Sunnis and push them out of the city has become the biggest threat to stability in Baghdad.
When I was embedded, the insurgent element was there. But much of what I saw was what they call counter-JAM operations -- counter-Jaish al-Mahdi, trying to keep these Shi'ite militias from killing Sunnis and clamp down on them. But Moqtada al-Sadr, who's a force in the Iraqi government, he has some 70,000 Mahdi Army fighters he can call on. So really the big challenge that's out there is how to deal with the Mahdi Army and how to handle them.
I don't think the Americans are going to want to recreate Mogadishu and go in for a big fight in Sadr City with the Mahdi Army if it can be avoided. I think what they're hoping is by establishing more control over the city, by beefing up the capability of the Iraqis, by being partnered with these Iraqi units and by putting pressure on the Maliki government, they can create a situation where the Mahdi Army maybe restricts its activities to Sadr City and excludes those activities that include going outside the confines and killing Sunnis. I think that's a big part of the strategy that's under way now.
What are the problems here? A, the Iraqis have to send three more brigades -- but they have to really, really send them this time. That has to actually happen. They promised it will happen, but it has to happen. ... B, the Iraqi government has told the Americans: "No more constraints on where you can go in Baghdad. No more of this business [that you can't] pick up this Shi'ite guy because he's a friend of the government even though he might be implicated in a death squad. You find bad guys; there are no inhibitions on what you can do to track them down." That's a commitment that's been made by the Maliki government. Easy to say, but it has to happen in practice. …
Then all of this reconstruction that the Iraqi government has promised and the American government has now committed to also has to happen to build support among the population, because part of what's happening is there's a breakdown in trust, and the breakdown in trust is between the Iraqi citizens and their own government. One way you try to build that trust is by the government actually doing things for its own citizens: picking up the trash, fixing the sewer lines, creating jobs, opening banks instead of closing banks, providing medical services, all these sorts of things that give people a stake in the new order and make it think that the Iraqi authorities in the Green Zone aren't simply a bunch of sectarian leaders who have hijacked authority but actually people who represent their interests. All of this has to happen. It's just a massive challenge.
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