What this country needs now is a surge arrestor

I was going to write something sarcastic about Fred Kagan, the man who converted Bush to the theology of The Surge, but why bother. It’s not his fault that the president takes him and his co-genius, retired General John Keane, seriously. It is what it is, which isn’t much. Let’s move on.

The man in charge of implementing The Surge is General David Petraeus, the new commander of everybody with a uniform in Iraq, excepting mercenaries and people who bought the uniforms in the marketplace, or stole them, or were given them to make mass murder and ethnic cleansing less of an effort.

Petraeus is actually a good choice. He did well during the first months of the occupation when he was in charge of the Mosul area. US commanders then had considerable slush funds at their disposals, and he used his to hire Iraqis for various projects recommended by local citizens of stature, which is apparently one of the elements of the new plan. Then his money ran out and he couldn’t get more — Halliburton’s needs were more urgent — and then Anbar province started to go rapidly south and his division was diverted there, and then Mosul went to pieces, and then so did the rest of the country.

So he got high marks the first time around. When he went back, it was to take on an assignment that probably made his first one look oh so easy: training the Iraqi army. Again, he did all the things that should have worked, embedding US troops with the Iraqi forces, stationing them long-term in neighborhoods so residents could get used to their presence and build relationships, using them more as peacekeepers than fighters. But by that time the militias were asserting themselves, the country was falling apart and the Iraqi troops didn’t show much of an appetite for shooting their friends and neighbors or getting shot at. He spent a year doing that; things were far worse when he left than when he got there.

His next assignment was writing the Army’s new counterinsurgency manual, which includes an emphasis on the things he was doing when he was there, to the extent he was allowed to do them and to the extent the situation allowed, and which appear to be at the heart of The Surge. The talk about pumping money into neighborhood economies comes from him, and you’ll hear a lot in coming days about gaining the confidence of the locals and integrating US troops into Iraqi army units.

The problem with that approach at this late date is that the political wing of one of the militias, Moqtada al Sadr’s Mehdi Army, is more or less propping up the government; they’re the ones who were responsible for the spectacle at Saddam’s execution, which Iraqi prime minister Maliki is adamant in defending. The other large Shiite militia, belonging to the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), is tight with Iran and its leaders appear to be biding their time, integrating themselves into the army and paramilitary forces and waiting for the inevitable moment when US troops mix it up with al Sadr’s people again, which is about to happen and which means some elements of the Iraqi army will be drawn into fighting others alongside US troops, which won’t engender a lot of confidence in either. The ideal outcome for SCIRI is the erasure of al Sadr’s forces, leaving SCIRI with a clear shot at dominating both the army and the government; if al Sadr goes down, so does Maliki. Meanwhile, they’ve been pleased to leave the dirty work of ethnic cleansing, wholesale murder and pissing off the Americans to al Sadr.

It’s possible that had Petraeus been in charge in 2003, and been given a free hand, that the insurgency would have faced much tougher going than it did. Now, though, he’s faced with running an undermanned counterinsurgency effort heavily reliant on Iraqi troops that are very much part of the problem, in the middle of a civil war; not the ideal laboratory for testing his theories.

If the leaks coming from the White House and other locales are to be believed, The Surge will involve as many as 20,000 US troops and an equal number of Iraqi ones. If they all wind up in Baghdad, the city will be hosting in the vicinity of 115,000 troops in total. The Army’s rule of thumb for peacekeeping is that it requires 20 troops for every 1,000 civilians. Baghdad has a population of around 6 million; if you do the math, the ideal number of troops for peacekeeping operations in the city would be 120,000. This is probably not a coincidence.

But there are, of course, a number of problems that peacekeepers generally don’t face: there’s no peace to keep; the US forces are short on people with the language skills and civil society support training required to rebuild a country’s institutions along with its infrastructure; more than 75% of that 115,000 will be Iraqi forces that at best aren’t particularly reliable and at worst are acting in opposition to US aims; there are another 20 million people in the country, requiring another 400,000 troops for effective peacekeeping (if there were peace). The odds for success are considerably less than the thin ones of nearly four years ago, and not much greater than the two mini-Surges toward the end of last year, which were negatively effective.

Petraeus is, astoundingly given the administration’s unerring instinct for the wrong move in Iraq, the right guy for the job. He’s just four years too late and 400,000 troops too light. You’ll probably hear a whole lot about his counterinsurgency manual in coming days and weeks, much of it from instant experts on the right (by their fruits ye shall know them); the Army says 1.5 million copies of it have been downloaded since it was released (Acrobat file) three weeks ago.

He’ll be working for the new chief of US Central Command. The officer now responsible for managing the ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan — replacing General John Abizaid, who in another uncoincidental event told Congress a few months ago that he thought more troops in Iraq would be counterproductive — is Admiral William “Fox” Fallon, the first Navy officer to take the CentCom reins in the command’s 25-year history. This is interesting. One would think the institutional press would find it interesting as well, but apparently not; during the first White House press conference following the announcement, no reporter thought to ask why the president appointed someone whose primary expertise is in naval and air combat just when the US is about to significantly escalate the urban warfare in Iraq.

Bob Gates, the new defense secretary, said that Fallon “is one of the best strategic thinkers in uniform today and his reputation for innovation is without peer.” Maybe that’s all there is to it. Fallon has experience, albeit from a distance, at overseeing Special Forces troops engaged in training the Phillipine army in counterinsurgency tactics, including the sort of civil support exercises the administration has belatedly rediscovered. From that perspective he’d be a good fit with Petraeus.

He’d also be a good fit with an attack on Iran; he has three aircraft carrier strike groups in his area of operations now, another on the way and three more that could be called in on relatively short notice. The Brits have a couple of minesweepers on extended deployments to the Gulf, and there is an assorted bunch of other US and British warships floating around there as well. The administration has made no secret of the fact that the naval buildup is aimed at “sending a message” to Iran, and it’s no secret that this administration’s messages to countries without nuclear arsenals usually involve blowing stuff up, and it’s no secret that since all of our ground troops are occupied elsewhere, any attack on Iran will of necessity rely on air and sea power with a Special Forces assist. Suspicion is warranted, but remains foreign to the press.

Fallon was the subject of a brief Associated Press profile yesterday. The AP writer, Audrey MacAvoy, failed to note his historic achievement in breaking the olive drab CentCom ceiling but did come up with one of those apparently mandatory anecdotes aimed at revealing the secret of a subject’s success. Back when James Baker was riding in to save the Iraq day, a Newsweek profile revealed that the secret of Baker’s success is turkey hunting, which provided him with the infinite patience necessary to wait until just the right moment to spring the Iraq Study Group’s findings on Bush. “You can wait all day and you only get one shot,” says a former minion. “When the time comes, and it’s only a split second, he doesn’t hesitate to pull the trigger.” Boom. Damn.

With Fallon, it’s surfing.

Shortly after arriving in the islands to head U.S. forces in the Pacific, Adm. William Fallon asked a former world surfing champion for lessons on riding the waves.

“I was awfully impressed that a man that’s in his 60s, as I am, would have the wisdom and the youthful spirit to take up surfing,” said surfer Fred Hemmings, who also is a state senator.

The 62-year-old Navy officer’s willingness to try new things was one quality Defense Secretary Robert Gates cited Friday in giving Fallon one of the world’s toughest jobs: commanding U.S. troops in the Middle East as they battle insurgencies in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Hemmings went on to say that Fallon was “genuinely was sensitive to me as a person, to who I am, my roots and background. It’s a tremendous asset in any human being, much less a military leader.” Hemmings is a Republican, but in Hawaii even Republicans acknowledge the need for humanity in humans.

So there you have it. AP might have mentioned that surfing requires a lot of patience too, although not as much as turkey hunting and only in very rare instances involving firearms. As it happens there are some good breaks in the Persian Gulf, but you have to think that Fallon is there to make his own waves (actually he’s in Tampa, but no need to award AP or Newsweek a monopoly on strained analogies).

It’s something of a reach to imagine that an acquaintance with counterinsurgency in the Philippines and a penchant for surfing explain Fallon’s appointment to his new post, but the press are still willing to go the extra mile to avoid thinking unpleasant thoughts. I suspect the Senate will show the same restraint; several members have already said they anticipate that he’ll sail through the confirmation process.

But the good news is that The Surge, and the appointments of Petraeus and Fallon, really do represent new thinking on the part of the White House. That’s also the bad news; exactly how bad — and it could very well be extremely so — we won’t know for several months.