(National Review's Rich Lowry and the Standard's Bill Kristol weigh in on the troop issue in today's Washington Post.) In Iraq, the lack of troops has been a major problem for years, and little has been done about it. A review: From the May 3, 2004 Weekly Standard:
But can the coalition get the insurgency under control with the forces it now has available? Only if it is very, very lucky. A wise strategy would be to immediately dispatch at least six more combat brigades (about 40,000 troops with their necessary support groups), sending one each to Falluja, Karbala, Najaf, and Mosul, one to strengthen the patrols along the Iranian border (we might even need one more along the Syrian border, given the recent violence there), and one for a reserve. We can already see sufficient dangers in these areas to warrant preventive reinforcements. If we increase our presence now, we might be able to deter new problems, with increased patrolling, and to solve some old ones--including the standoff with Moktada al-Sadr that has been allowed to drag on very dangerously. Neither the Bush administration nor its critics seem to want to acknowledge that wars and counterinsurgencies are made up of a string of fleeting opportunities that, once past, can never be recovered. The coalition has received ample warning of the possibility of widespread violence erupting suddenly in Iraq. By sending more troops now, we stand a fair chance of preventing an explosion. If we wait until it has occurred, the prospects for success in Iraq will have dimmed dramatically…. Any sound strategy for dealing with the problems in Iraq today, however, will have to begin with more troops. A paucity of American forces in Iraq has been the central problem of U.S. policy since before the war began. It remains the central problem today. Until it is resolved, the outlook will remain grim.
From the New York Times, June 16, 2005:
After the battle here in September [2004] the military left behind fewer than 500 troops to patrol a region twice the size of Connecticut. With so few troops and the local police force in shambles, insurgents came back and turned Tal Afar, a dusty, agrarian city of about 200,000 people, into a way station for the trafficking of arms and insurgent fighters from nearby Syria -- and a ghost town of terrorized residents afraid to open their stores, walk the streets or send their children to school. It is a cycle that has been repeated in rebellious cities throughout Iraq, and particularly those in the Sunni Arab regions west and north of Baghdad, where the insurgency's roots run deepest. ''We have a finite number of troops,'' said Maj. Chris Kennedy, executive officer of the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment, which arrived in Tal Afar several weeks ago. ''But if you pull out of an area and don't leave security forces in it, all you're going to do is leave the door open for them to come back. This is what our lack of combat power has done to us throughout the country. In the past, the problem has been we haven't been able to leave sufficient forces in towns where we've cleared the insurgents out.''
From the April 26, 2006 Stars and Strips:
U.S. troops entered Mukhisa and the adjacent town of Abu Kharma on Sunday after hearing that the region is home to foreign fighters, members of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi's group and financiers behind roadside bomb and mortar attacks, said Lt. Col. Thomas Fisher, battalion commander.... One obstacle his troops face is that the two towns' contact with coalition forces over the past three years has consisted of three raids, in which hundreds of townspeople were arrested only to be released later, Fisher said. "When you neglect a town and don't engage the population, the terrorists who are here and the insurgents can tell them anything they want, and they will believe it because there is no one else telling them anything different," he said.
From a May 30, 2006 Washington Post piece:
...Marine officers on the ground have been open for more than a year now about needing more troops in Anbar, whose Sunni population, remoteness and comparative lawlessness have made it a stronghold for the insurgency. Anbar borders Syria, a conduit for some of the weapons, money and fighters.
From AP, June 19, 2006:
Hundreds of American and Iraqi troops backed by a U.S. gunship pushed into an insurgent-infested section of eastern Ramadi, expanding their campaign to bolster their presence in one of Iraq's most violent cities…. "It's one of the first steps to moving into areas of the city that have not had a large coalition or Iraqi presence for a long time, if ever," said Col. Sean MacFarland, commander of the 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division that oversees the city.
And now this piece, "Situation Called Dire in West Iraq,", from today's Washington Post:
[Chief of intelligence for the Marine Corps in Iraq Col Pete] Devlin offers a series of reasons for the situation, including a lack of U.S. and Iraqi troops, a problem that has dogged commanders since the fall of Baghdad more than three years ago, said people who have read it. These people said he reported that not only are military operations facing a stalemate, unable to extend and sustain security beyond the perimeters of their bases, but also local governments in the province have collapsed and the weak central government has almost no presence. One view of the report offered by some Marine officers is that it is a cry for help from an area where fighting remains intense, yet which recently has been neglected by top commanders and Bush administration officials as they focus on bringing a sense of security to Baghdad. An Army unit of Stryker light armored vehicles that had been slated to replace another unit in Anbar was sent to reinforce operations in Baghdad, leaving commanders in the west scrambling to move around other troops to fill the gap.
The stakes couldn't be higher in Iraq, but our commanders are still, years after the invasion, "scrambling" to fill the troop gap. The buck stops where?