7,000 more troops. That doesn't sound so bad, right?
That's all we need, say an increasing number of Republican hawks, to defeat ISIL in Iraq. Just 7,000 more troops, to join the 3,000 that are already there, and we'll have ISIL on the run.
It's a hypnotically attractive argument. It sounds tough -- more troops! -- but the number is low enough that proponents can claim with a straight face that we aren't repeating the Iraq War all over again.
10,000. More than Obama. ("I'll be tougher!") Less than Bush. ("But I've learned my lesson!") Just right.
So it's no surprise that it's started turning up on the Republican presidential circuit, most recently in a detailed speech from my colleague and friend, Senator Lindsay Graham. The neoconservative establishment echoes this argument, as I saw firsthand during an event at the Brookings Institution last month. And while other GOP hopefuls haven't put a number to paper, mark my words that top tier candidates like Senator Rubio and Governor Walker will soon start nudging toward this number when they get pushed to give more specifics on their plans to fight ISIL.
The problem is that the number is pure and total fantasy, rooted only in political palatability, not in any practical reality.
How can we be sure that deploying 10,000 troops won't be an effective way to combat ISIL? Because we have a conveniently large body of evidence to test the proposition that American troops can effectively fight terrorism inside Iraq, end corruption in their military, or force Iraqi politicians to bridge political divides. We had an average of over 100,000 troops there for more than a decade -- and up to 160,000 during the surge -- and still the end result was a brutal sectarian government that couldn't hold the country together.
Every time I meet with brave men and women in uniform in Connecticut, I'm left in awe of their skill and dedication. I have no doubt that if there was a military solution in Iraq, our fighting men and women would get the job done. But the bottom line is we shouldn't be asking our military to solve fundamentally political problems. While they are highly capable of controlling a piece of territory, they can't magically produce a good government and unified political system in that space.
There are numerous examples of how military intervention failed to solve the underlying problems in Iraq. Our intelligence agencies concluded, repeatedly, that the U.S. presence drew terrorists into Iraq in order to fight America. While there are many factors that led to the rise of ISIL, the fact is they did not exist before the invasion of Iraq and likely formed the organization inside our military prisons. Adding to the unintended ironies, we spent $25 billion training and equipping the Iraqi army, and now much of that equipment is in the hands of ISIL. When our advisers arrived after ISIL routed the new Iraqi military in a matter of days, they concluded that few -- if any -- of the units that we trained were anywhere near battle-ready. And as we surged troop levels in Iraq in 2007 and 2008, the Shiite Prime Minister Nuri al-Maliki used our protection to begin a systematic marginalization of Sunnis that resulted in many Sunni tribes ultimately joining forces with ISIL for protection.
If American troops' presence in Iraq was a primary recruiting tool for extremists from 2003-2012, what has changed so that the same phenomenon wouldn't play out again? And perhaps even more to the point, how are a mere 10,000 U.S. troops going to produce a functional Iraqi army in a few months if more than ten times that number couldn't do it in a decade? If we all agree that the true solution to ISIL is political reconciliation and compromise, how does 10,000 troops get us closer to that goal?
Evidence accumulates by the day of our total inability to use U.S. military resources to affect the military balance of power in the Middle East. This week, Defense Secretary Carter revealed that the $500 million effort to train so-called "moderate" Syrian rebels had thus far trained 60 -- that's right, six-zero -- Syrian fighters so far. That's frustrating, and an abysmal return on investment, but frankly not very surprising given our experience in Iraq.
We simply have too much hard empirical data to believe that a few thousand more troops in Iraq will make a difference in the fight against ISIL.
And so here's where the 10,000 troop fantasy gets really dangerous. If the neoconservatives retake control of American foreign policy and the 10,000 troop strategy doesn't play out the way they hoped, what will they do? What did Rumsfeld do when his war that was supposed to last "five days, five weeks, five months" didn't wrap up in the allotted timeframe? What did Johnson do when the Vietnamese military wasn't performing up to snuff with only a small number of U.S. military advisers in tow? No one can be certain as to how events would unfold, but with Republican hawks back in charge of U.S. war policy, it's not hard to believe that 10,000 would turn into 20,000,and then 50,000, and so on, until we are back to occupying Iraq with 100,000 troops.
Another U.S. occupation of Iraq could likely militarily subdue ISIL to point that we could declare some sort of "victory", as President Bush famously did aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln in 2003. But it would be the opposite of victory, because our troop presence would only hold the line for as long as it lasted, and it would end up fueling the extremist fire in the region to a degree that would be hard to estimate -- if we hadn't just lived through it over the past decade.
Now, calling the 10,000 troop plan a fantasy doesn't mean that we shouldn't take ISIL seriously. Nor does it mean that we shouldn't design a plan, based in reality, to eliminate the threat that ISIL poses to the United States. That plan would continue President Obama's wise policy of keeping the U.S. military in a supporting role, and be even more assertive in coercing Prime Minister Abadi to make the tough decisions necessary to achieve a multi-sectarian military and true political reconciliation with his Sunni citizens. And a plan rooted in reality would dramatically increase our non-military aid to the region to provide an answer for the economic marginalization of Sunnis that, in part, led them to join forces with ISIL, and to address the growing humanitarian crises that right now fuel recruitment for extremists.
But there is no plan for success against ISIL that involves more and more American troops entering the fight. Proposing another 7,000 troops might hit the mark politically for Republican presidential candidates, but it is nothing more than a fantasy.
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