Some experts say we have too many troops in Iraq

Some experts say send more U.S. troops to Iraq. Others say with equal certainty that Iraq would calm down faster and embrace democracy more naturally if we had fewer troops there.

This is the point I was trying to make earlier today: The liberation of a totalitarian state does not happen in a straight line. The trip from dictatorship to democracy inevitably has wrong turns and setbacks. You can’t count on seeing increasing numbers of happy faces every day. But at every bloody outburst, you can count on some armchair general declaring it's all chaos over there, and all the chaos is the result of sending too few troops.

Cooler heads will recognize there are opposing forces in Iraq, and those forces will try to stop progress in Iraq with murder and mayhem. Occasionally the enemy will find excuses for its violence, such as the presence of large numbers of foreign troops.

Which is why Michael Vickers, a former CIA officer and former member of U.S. special forces, has been advising the United States to reduce its troop strength in Iraq. Do what is working in Afghanistan, he recommends. Let the locals do most of the work of defending themselves, and they will.

“When democratic powers intervene in insurgencies, history is on the side of smaller, not bigger battalions,” Vickers says.

“During the 1980s, the U.S. defeated a far more formidable insurgency in El Salvador than the one in Iraq today by using trainers and advisers. Before U.S. intervention in 1981, the government there was about to collapse as insurgent strength nearly equaled the army. But a force of 55 U.S. military trainers expanded and professionalized the Salvadoran army, and within a decade, the insurgency fell.

“The U.S. has been more successful at preventing the re-emergence of the Taliban in Afghanistan than it has been at quelling the resistance in Iraq. Although the U.S. has one-tenth the forces in Afghanistan — which has a larger territory and population than Iraq — a superior political strategy has led to better results. A new Afghan government assumed sovereignty within two weeks of the fall of the Taliban, and a less-intrusive counter insurgency strategy was implemented. It works through the Afghan government and relies on local militias for security.

“In Iraq, a U.S. force two-thirds smaller can defeat the insurgency over time if Iraqis take primary responsibility for their security, with U.S. support. The force would be similar in numerical terms and composition to the one in Afghanistan. The strategy would focus more on special operations, primarily directed by U.S. trainers and advisers. The U.S. would still maintain a large, central ‘insurance’ force to prevent any Iraqi insurgents from massing.”

Military tactics are an art, not a science. That’s why experts, even those with battlefield experience, can look at the same facts and come up with diametrically opposed conclusions. Send more troops. Bring most home.

To make the “best” choice for U.S. troop strength in Iraq, there are almost too many factors to “know.” You have to read 25 million Iraqi minds, consider a thousand variously logical scenarios, and try to predict the unpredictable.

And then you have to choose a number.

Frank Warner