Arianna on the Mythic Hero, Petraeus
From the Huffington Post:
Now they are willfully ignoring Petraeus’ blueprint for success — and acting like they are following it to a tee. His newly-minted counterinsurgency approach calls for a ratio of 25 soldiers per 1,000 residents — which would require 120,000 soldiers to provide the proper security for Baghdad, and roughly three times that amount for all of Iraq. But let’s just focus on the 120,000 soldiers that, according to the manual written by Petraeus — “the expert on counterinsurgency,” remember? — are needed to secure Baghdad. Simply put: we’re not even close to that number. And never will be. Even after all of the planned 21,500 additional troops are sent to the embattled capitol, there will still only be 85,000 security forces there — and that includes significant numbers of Iraqi security forces, whose readiness and loyalty have repeatedly proven to be unreliable at best.
So Petraeus says it will take 120,000 soldiers to succeed. Instead, he’s being asked to do it on the cheap — and pretend that he’s getting what he needs. And this is just in terms of troops. Petraeus’ manual also says that a muscular military presence is just 20 percent of what is needed for a counterinsurgency effort to succeed — the other 80 consists of establishing political and economic reform, two areas in which the United States is also failing miserably.
Despite this, Petraeus, to his eternal discredit, is going along with the charade — probably crossing his fingers behind his back — and promising to let us know how it’s really going sometime this summer. But we don’t need to wait until sometime this summer. We can see the news, and count the bodies, and know for ourselves that this is all just another case of prolonging the inevitable, of asking more young men and women to die for a lost cause. For the first time since the war began, we’ve just had five straight months with 80 or more U.S. fatalities.
Undermining the military experts is one of the pillars of Bushpolitik. Dishonesty, cronyism, classism, racism, fascism and waste - of lives and resources - are its other pillars.
Conservatism, principle, strategy and competence left the building long ago.
