Post-war Iraq
Fred Kaplan recalls that Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz made the following statement in testimony to Congress last February:
It's hard to conceive that it would take more forces to provide stability in post-Saddam Iraq than it would take to conduct the war itself and secure the surrender of Saddam's security forces and his army. Hard to imagine.
It isn't hard to conceive of at all. It was one of the main reasons I had grave reservations about getting into Iraq.. The Bush administration was telling us that the war would be easy and that we'd be out soon afterward. Even I remember that we're still in Kosovo. and Afghanistan. You would think that someone as brilliant as Wolfowitz supposedly is would remember that too.
James Dobbins does.
He was Bush's special envoy to Afghanistan after the Taliban were defeated. According to Kaplan, Dobbins new book. America's Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, "concludes ... that nearly everything this administration has said and done about postwar Iraq is wrong."
According to Dobbins calculations we'd need over 526,000 troops on the ground in Iraq to have a force equivalent to what's in Kosovo, and they'd have to stay there until 2005. And there should be an international police force of over 50,000. In short, Dobbins experience suggests that to have a chance of building Iraq into a successful democracy would require a long-term commitment of nearly 600,000 people -- four times the number of people we have there now.
Read the whole Kaplan piece, there's a lot more in it. Iraq is going to cost us big time one way or the other. Either we invest time, people, and money now and have a chance of building a just society. Or we cut and run and leave behind a festering sore much larger and more dangerous than Afghanistan ever was.
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