Push in Iraq revives criticism

WASHINGTON – The major U.S. offensive launched last weekend against insurgents in and around Baghdad has significantly expanded the military’s battleground in Iraq – “a surge of operations,” and no longer just of troops, as the second-ranking U.S. commander there said Friday – but it has renewed concerns about whether even the bigger U.S. presence there is large enough.

As the U.S. offensive, code-named Phantom Thunder, has been greeted with a week of intensified fighting in areas outside the capital – areas that the U.S. military has largely left untouched for as long as three years – the push raised fears from security experts and officers in the field that the new attacks might simply propel the enemy from one area to another where there are not as many U.S. troops.

Since President Bush ordered the troop increase in January, the military had focused on creating a more secure environment in Baghdad. “We are beyond a surge of forces,” Lt. Gen. Raymond Odierno said Friday from his Baghdad headquarters. He did not directly address the size of the force, saying only that the extra 30,000 U.S. troops “allows us to operate in areas where we have not been for a long time.”

Retired Army Gen. Barry McCaffrey, who in 2003 was among the first to call public attention to the relatively small size of the U.S. invasion force, said that the new operation shows how outnumbered U.S. troops remain. “Why would we think that a temporary presence of 30,000 additional combat troops in a giant city would change the dynamics of a bitter civil war?” he said in an interview Friday. “It’s a fool’s errand.”

An officer working in Arrowhead Ripper, the subsidiary offensive in Diyala province, said wearily, “We just do not have the forces in country right now to have the appropriate level of presence across the country.”

Many counterinsurgency experts agree. Andrew Krepinevich Jr., the director of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a national security think tank, said flatly that Army Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, does not have enough troops. “I suspect General Petraeus is taking a risk here, but that’s what commanders do,” he said.

The issue of the number of troops has dogged the Bush administration and its generals since before the war began. Retired Gen. Colin Powell, then secretary of state, told Gen. Tommy Franks in September 2002 – seven months before the U.S. invasion – there were not enough troops in the war plan. Most famously, Gen. Eric Shinseki, then the Army’s chief of staff, told a congressional hearing a month before the assault that the plan did not call for a sufficiently large occupation force.

Yet some who were sharply critical of the Bush administration back then judge the situation in another way now. “I think it is different – better planned, and tied to the operations in Baghdad,” said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash.

Frederick Kagan, a military historian at the American Enterprise Institute who was involved in developing the plans for the recent troop increase, was more emphatic. “They have been very deliberate in setting conditions, including establishing both our forces and Iraqi forces in key areas and developing intelligence and trust relationships, including with some former insurgents, and these developments will facilitate the operation greatly,” he said.

One of Petraeus’ nerviest gambles is that enemy fighters will not be able to move and disrupt other areas. The biggest concern for U.S. commanders is the big northern city of Mosul, where insurgents counterattacked the last time the U.S. military conducted an operation this size, in November 2004. That is especially worrisome because the United States now has only one battalion of about 1,000 troops stationed there, far fewer than were there then.

In terms of the fighting, the question may be academic. “There isn’t much more land power available for use in Iraq and Afghanistan,” retired Gen. Gordon Sullivan, a former Army chief of staff, said recently. “We are now ‘all in’ ” – that is, in poker terms, U.S. armed forces have put all their chips on the table.

That view underscores the question of the reliability and combat effectiveness of Iraqi security forces. Essentially, any additional combat power is going to have to come largely from them, as will the capability to “hold” large areas outside the capital.

“The Iraqi security forces will be able to sustain and continue to improve their ability to maintain security,” Odierno predicted. “They are staying and fighting. They are taking casualties.”

But other officers say the Iraqi forces themselves are not big enough, and have a mixed record in combat. Army Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, who oversaw training and advising efforts there until this month, said in recent congressional testimony that Iraqi units are improving, but “do not have tactical staying power.”

Iraqi security forces are “the weak link,” said Krepinevich. The Iraqi government is so factionalized that Iraqi forces remain largely ineffective, he explained: “This is the principal weak spot in our strategy – and I’m afraid it may be fatal.”

Terry Daly, a retired U.S. government expert in counterinsurgency, said that if the Phantom Thunder is indeed a short-term aggressive action intended to kill insurgents who have attacked the capital and to remove their rural strongholds, then he thinks it is the right move. “This is not more of the same-old, same-old futile search-and-destroy, but rather an operational raid” to help improve security in Baghdad, he said. “As such it is skilled American generalship, which we haven’t seen in a long time, and which looks good.”