by Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n
The American Enterprise Online<\/em><\/p>\n W<\/span>hen Saddam\u2019s statue fell in April 2003, 70 percent of the American people, along with both Houses of Congress that authorized the war, were quite happy with President Bush\u2019s decision to depose the Baathist regime. Three years and a messy reconstruction later, less than half the public says it was a wise idea.<\/p>\n Democratic senators and Beltway pundits scrambled to square their initial support with later about-faces. The easiest tactic: \u201cThe Administration sent too few troops, and so botched the victory that I foresaw and endorsed.\u201d<\/p>\n Recent statements by General Zinni (The Battle for Peace<\/i>) and Michael Wood and General Bernard Trainor (Cobra II<\/i>) offer the most comprehensive critique. They damn Donald Rumsfeld for shortchanging the armed forces, since he supposedly wanted to save money while transforming the military into a lighter, more technologically reliant, \u201cless is more\u201d force. As we saw in Afghanistan, in lieu of manpower, fewer soldiers would rely on sophisticated computer-guided munitions and indigenous forces \u2014 without a heavy footprint or burdensome logistics.<\/p>\n But thinking that Panama, the Balkans, or Afghanistan was the new blanket model, the critique continues, was foolish. Generals like Richard Myers and Tommy Franks ostensibly caved in to their civilian superiors\u2019 armchair strategizing. Seasoned field commanders in Iraq were left with a conventional force barely sufficient to win the war \u2014 and insufficient to secure the peace. Now, principled men like Zinni and Trainor are stepping forward in best-selling books and op-eds to disclose the \u201creal\u201d story of how their unsung brothers in the military were left vulnerable by ideologically-driven bureaucrats and compliant, opportunistic top brass.<\/p>\n T<\/span>here are several surprising things about this criticism \u2014 besides the premature disclosure in the\u00a0New York Times\u00a0<\/i>by Wood and Trainor of a classified post-bellum study, enlistment of journalists to co-write their best-selling books, appearances on the talk shows to hype our supposedly fatal miscalculations in the midst of a war, and the favorable portrayal of officers and civil servants who chose to talk to the authors (with less favorable treatment of those who refused).<\/p>\n First, the claim that we\u2019ve deployed too few troops can apply only since the fall of Baghdad in April 2003. Whatever the difficulties of the three-week war, it took out the worst regime in the Middle East in record time. How could half a million troops have done significantly better?<\/p>\n Second, it isn\u2019t always how many troops, but their use, that determines their efficacy. In 1991, a huge American force watched as Saddam murdered Shiites and Kurds; their omnipresence meant nothing when they couldn\u2019t use lethal force to stop the slaughter or remove Saddam.<\/p>\n Third, much of the criticism is geopolitical rather than tactical \u2014 and better grounded back in the 1990s, when the military was slashed in the end-of-history, post-Cold War era of utopian hopes. If we were still committed to stay in Europe, Japan, Okinawa, and Korea, then tying down a huge force in Iraq might have invited hostile adventurism elsewhere. The current strains on the military were not just predicated on Iraq, but involved the entire American presence overseas, where present means were insufficient to meet the envisioned global ends.<\/p>\n Fourth, since Iraq was seen as a captive rather than a belligerent nation, we tried to preserve infrastructure and adopt restrictive rules of engagement to win hearts and minds. Part of that strategy meant rapidly training Iraqi security forces, keeping a low profile in a touchy Islamic nation, and turning autonomy quickly over to a new government. Again, a huge American force in such a war, circa Vietnam 1965, would only have presented more targets, caused more resentment, and created more Iraqi dependency on Americans.<\/p>\n Fifth, there is a no-win flavor to this debate. Many are now calling for deadlines to get our \u201csmaller\u201d forces home right away, even as others decry the continued lack of sufficient troops to secure the country. And if our precision weapons yield far greater lethality per combatant, should we deploy the same, more, or fewer soldiers to employ them?<\/p>\n No one knows the optimum number of American soldiers that should now be, or should have been, in Iraq. But I suspect that, had we deployed far more Americans, the present cries to bring them home, and the accusations of imperial hubris, would have been even shriller.<\/p>\n \u00a92006 Victor Davis Hanson<\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" by Victor Davis Hanson The American Enterprise Online When Saddam\u2019s statue fell in April 2003, 70 percent of the American people, along with both Houses of Congress that authorized the war, were quite happy with President Bush\u2019s decision to depose the Baathist regime. Three years and a messy reconstruction later, less than half the public […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[774],"tags":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p466Sb-12m","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[{"id":12022,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/kurdish-syrian-and-turkish-ironies\/","url_meta":{"origin":3990,"position":0},"title":"Kurdish, Syrian, and Turkish Ironies","author":"victorhanson","date":"October 16, 2019","format":false,"excerpt":"Victor Davis Hanson \/\/ National Review Outrage met Donald Trump\u2019s supposedly rash decision to pull back U.S. troops from possible confrontational zones between our Kurdish friends in Syria and Recep Erdogan\u2019s expeditionary forces. Turkey claims that it will punish the Syrian Kurds for a variety of supposed provocations, including aiding\u2026","rel":"","context":"Similar post","block_context":{"text":"Similar post","link":""},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":4656,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/do-we-really-need-more-troops-in-iraq\/","url_meta":{"origin":3990,"position":1},"title":"Do We Really Need More Troops In Iraq?","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 23, 2004","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson (A later version of this essay appears in the current issue ofCommentary Magazine.) How many American troops should be posted in Iraq, beyond the present spike of 135,000\u2014a number that was itself raised from the informally agreed-upon level of 115,000? Critical Consensus This question of numbers\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2004"","block_context":{"text":"June 2004","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2004\/june-2004\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":1348,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/a-tale-of-two-surges\/","url_meta":{"origin":3990,"position":2},"title":"A Tale of Two Surges","author":"victorhanson","date":"December 6, 2011","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Tribune Media Services From 2007 to 2009, a surge of 20,000 troops under the generalship of David Petraeus saved a mostly lost war in Iraq. Petraeus\u2019s counterinsurgency doctrine helped win over the population, as the surge in troops gave greater security to Iraq\u2019s government and military.\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Iraq"","block_context":{"text":"Iraq","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/the-world\/the-middle-east\/iraq\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":3975,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/refighting-the-war\/","url_meta":{"origin":3990,"position":3},"title":"Refighting the War","author":"victorhanson","date":"June 7, 2006","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson Commentary Magazine Ten years ago, Michael R. Gordon of the New York Times and the retired General Bernard Trainor wrote a critically acclaimed revisionist history of the first Gulf war. Challenging the rosy consensus view of that four-day victory on the ground,\u00a0The Generals\u2019 War\u00a0(1995) set out\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "June 2006"","block_context":{"text":"June 2006","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/archives\/2006\/june-2006\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":9674,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/has-trump-nominated-too-many-military-leaders-or-not-enough\/","url_meta":{"origin":3990,"position":4},"title":"Has Trump Nominated Too Many Military Leaders\u2014Or Not Enough?","author":"Megan Ring","date":"December 15, 2016","format":false,"excerpt":"\u00a0By Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ National Review Choosing military men for top cabinet spots is not unprecedented, nor is it foolish given how Washington insiders have performed. President-elect Donald Trump is being faulted for supposedly appointing too many retired generals to cabinet-level jobs and \u201cmilitarizing\u201d the government. Former lieutenant general Michael\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Jim Mattis"","block_context":{"text":"Jim Mattis","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/jim-mattis\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]},{"id":10115,"url":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/the-tar-pits-abroad\/","url_meta":{"origin":3990,"position":5},"title":"The Tar Pits Abroad","author":"victorhanson","date":"April 24, 2017","format":false,"excerpt":"by Victor Davis Hanson\/\/ Defining Ideas \u00a0 As missiles fall on Syria in retaliation for Bashar Assad\u2019s medieval use of chemical weapons\u2014and as voices call for the use of some American ground troops to expedite his removal\u2014we might reflect upon American military interventions in the post-Vietnam era. America\u2019s major interventions\u2026","rel":"","context":"In "Bill Clinton"","block_context":{"text":"Bill Clinton","link":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/ahref=\/index.php\/categories\/angry-reader\/categorylink\/a\/bill-clinton\/"},"img":{"alt_text":"","src":"","width":0,"height":0},"classes":[]}],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3990"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3991,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3990\/revisions\/3991"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3990"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3990"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/victorhanson.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3990"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}