Stephen Biddle: 100,000 trooops, 20 years would still be a "long-shot gamble" of success

September 7, 2007

BURIED LEDE ALERT....Fred Kaplan has a good piece in Slate today about the upcoming Petraeus report and what Congress needs to ask about it. But I was more taken by an astonishing statement at the end of the piece from Stephen Biddle, a member of Petraeus's advisory panel. Here's his comment about the current plan to restore stability to Iraq via a "bottom up" strategy of working with tribal leaders:


Holy cats. This is coming from a "key proponent" of the tribal strategy? 100,000 troops for 20 years only gets us a "long-shot gamble" of success? What the hell do the pessimists think? Kaplan continues:


Um, yeah. I'd like to know if they agree with their advisor about this. I don't think they'd admit it even if they did, but someone sure ought to ask them.

A quick summary of the facts tells us that the Iraqi military is broken, the police force is even worse, we have ceded the south to the Shi’ites, Anbar province is under the control of the Ba’athists, our military is stretched to the breaking point, corruption is the norm, there is a cholera epidemic, high levels of violence against the civilian population, we can not provide basic services (like, for example, electricity or water), and the national government is squabbling (when not on vacation) and led incompetently by a man Bush thinks is under his tutelage (that alone should scare the hell out of you).

The sole force doing well in Iraq are the American contractors.

Personally, I blame the liberal media, and clearly it is time to bomb Iran.