The Adventures of Chester: Congressman Murtha and Strategic Forecasting

On Rep. Murtha: I watched him on Meet the Press this weekend. I think he's a stand-up guy. He seemed cut from the same cloth as many other senior field-grade Marine leaders I've observed. Very blunt, calls things like he sees them, sees a problem, or what he percieves to be indecision or lack of commitment and wants to call attention to it. I don't think he has any ulterior political motives, and I doubt that he is a pawn of the Democratic leadership, though we've seen them try to use him to their own purposes. I don't think he wants to simply tarnish the President.

Having said all that, I disagree with his prescriptions.

Immediate withdrawal is a bad idea. I do tend to agree with him that not everything has been done to get necessary equipment to the warfighters in the field. This is an unfortunate consequence of having a military geared toward large weapons systems, and not people.

A recent Strategic Forecasting reportsays this:

The American concept about Iraq is long gone. The failure to identify the intentions of the Baathists after the war is now history. But the essential problem remains in Washington's public posture:

1. The administration cannot admit what is self-evident: it does not have the ability, by itself, to break the back of the Sunni insurrection. To achieve this, the United States needs help from non-jihadist Sunnis -- Baathists -- as well as the Shia. U.S. troops cannot achieve the mission alone.

2. In order to get this help, the United States is going to have to make -- and is, in fact, making -- a variety of deals with players it would have regarded as enemies two years ago, and must make concessions that would seem to be unthinkable.

These negotiations are constant. The United States is doing everything it can to get former Baathists into the political process -- people who were close to Hussein. It is working intently with people like Ahmed Chalabi who were close -- some say very close -- to the Iranians. It is cutting deals left and right like a Chicago ward boss.

This is, of course, precisely what the United States must do. Its best chance at a reasonable outcome in Iraq is to split the Sunni community between jihadist and Baathist, and then use the Baathists to counterbalance the Shia -- without alienating the Shia. It takes the skill of an acrobat, and the fact is that Bush has not been too bad at it. The war itself has become a side show. U.S. troops are not in Iraq to win a war. They are there to represent U.S. will and to act as a counterweight in the political wheeling and dealing. War is politics by other means, so being shocked by this makes little sense. Still, the numbers of U.S. troops are irrelevant to the real issue. Doubling them wouldn't help, and cutting them in half wouldn't hurt. The time for a military solution is long past.

My biggest problem with the "not enough troops" argument, as I've stated in numerous posts in the past several months, is that there are no more troops to send. To restate the issue again: we can surge, say, 500,000 or 750,000 troops into one place for a very short period of time, but we will probably accept unmanagable risks in other theaters in order to do so. In order to manage those same risks while operating in Iraq, somewhere around 150,000 is all that we can rotate into the country on an indefinite basis -- and worst-case scenario planning requires the assumption that the rotations occur indefinitely. In other words, if you want more troops in Iraq, the real question becomes are you willing to pay for them, and where will they come from? Many of the same Democrats who so frequently call for a higher troop level have previously implied that Bush is about to reinstate the draft, and taken him to task for this fiction. The fact is that more troops in Iraq requires either a much larger defense budget than Democrats would be willing to pay for or -- and let me stress that I think this is a horrible idea -- a draft. In short, while more troops may or may not be needed, calling for them without specifiying their origin is a bit . . . less forthright than preferable.

Of course I could be wrong on all this. If anyone else has an alternative analysis of where numbers of troops can come from, I'd love to see it.

More from StratFor:

The problem with the hysteria in Washington is this: In all the negotiations, in all the promises, bribes and threats, the one currency that counts is the American ability to deliver. The ability to craft a deal depends on the ability of Bush to threaten various factions, and to make guarantees that can be delivered on. There is a pretty good chance that some sort of reasonable settlement can be achieved -- not ending all violence, but reducing it substantially -- if the United States has the credibility it needs to make the deals.

The problem the Bush administration has -- and it is a problem that dates back to the beginning of the war -- is its inability to articulate the reality. The United States is not staying the course. It has not been on course -- if by "course" you mean what was planned in February 2003 -- for two years. The course the United States has been on has been winding, shifting and surprising. The fact is that the administration has done a fairly good job of riding the whirlwind. But the course has shifted so many times that no one can stay it, because it disappeared long ago.

Having committed the fundamental error -- and that wasn't WMD -- the Administration has done a sufficiently good job that some sort of working government might well be created in Iraq in 2006, and U.S. forces will certainly be withdrawn. What threatens this outcome is the administration's singular inability to simply state the obvious. As a result, the Democrats -- doing what opposition parties do -- has made it appear that the Bush administration is the most stupid, inept and incompetent administration in history. And the administration has been reduced to calling its critics cowards.

The administration's position in Iraq is complex but not hopeless. Its greatest challenge is in Washington, where Bush's Republican base of support is collapsing. If it collapses, then all bets will be off in Iraq. Bush's challenge is to stabilize Washington. In fact, from his point of view, Baghdad is more stable than Washington right now. The situation inside the Beltway has now become a geopolitical problem. If Bush can't pull it together, the situation in Iraq will come apart. But to forge the stability he needs in Washington, the president will have to explain what he is doing in Iraq. And he is loath to admit, from his own mouth, that he is making deals with the enemy.

That is certainly a very interesting perspective not seen elsewhere. No wonder StratFor charges lots of money for its service. If the MSM could do such interesting analysis, StratFor would have to lower their prices.

UPDATE: One interesting sidenote to the breakout of Iraq discussion and debate this weekend: it is probably not lost on many Chinese observers that an American President is openly and rigorously countered with debate on his policies, even while he is visiting a foreign land. What might the effects of this phenomenon be on the millions of Chinese who are watching their own regime's behavior? The setting of this most recent round of Iraq debate, Bush in China, debate there and at home, is fascinating.

Posted by Chester on November 21, 2005 10:18 PM to The Adventures of Chester