Left In Lowell

Josh Marshall of TPM points out Fred Kaplan’s Slate article, which says that by the army’s own recently-authored counter-insurgency manual, Bush’s “surge” (aka escalation) falls so far short of doing any good at all, it’d be laughable if it weren’t our kids over there, and the Iraqis we wanted to “free,” getting hurt and killed.

You see, that manual - co-written by well-thought-of army Lt. General (promoted to General and soon to be in charge of the Iraq theatre) David Petraeus - states that if you want to clear out an insurgency, for every 1,000 people in an area, you need 20 combat troops. Not regular troops, actual combat troops, and that’s a distinct difference. Using basic math, Fred Kaplan tells us that would add up to requiring about 120,000 combat troops in Bagdad alone, if you wanted to forget the rest of the country. We have 70,000 combat troops in the entirety of Iraq right now. Adding 20,000, even if they are just deployed to Iraq and you pull all the troops around the country into the capital, you’d still be 30,000 short. Just in Bagdad.

I doubt that the Iraq training program for its army can anywhere near make up the shortfall. Once again, this president is putting thousands of our boys and girls in harm’s way, ignoring every fact on the ground, and failing to listen to experts. His faith-based war leadership is going to get more people killed, all for nothing. Yes, I will say it out loud: they will be meaningless deaths. It’s time to bring our troops home.

[Hat tip to commenter KBusch at BMG]