From the WSJ Opinion Archives
AT WAR
Rumsfeld in Denial
We won't win in Iraq unless we face reality.
Iraq is a military and political mess, and it's not getting better. The insurgency by Sunni Baathist cadres backed up by a presence of foreign terrorists is going to grow more violent. Our casualties will continue to increase. Baghdad and other cities are wracked by small arms and remote bomb ambushes and by mortar and rocket attacks, and are closed to commercial air traffic. The mayhem has driven much of the international aid and political community out of the contested zones. Assassins stalk the emerging Iraqi leadership to separate collaborators from the Coalition. Saddam Hussein remains a fugitive and therefore a terror in the minds of all Iraqis, and our allies shrink back from supporting us with serious levels of resources or troops.
Our Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld is in denial of reality. He publicly states the situation on the ground in Iraq is being distorted by the media and characterizes the violence as comparable to Washington, D.C., crime levels. He has denied there is a "guerrilla war" and insisted that the only opposition is a handful of "dead enders." He points with increasing defensiveness to the small number of coalition forces (besides the courageous Brits) and the increasing hours of electricity per day as evidence that his policies are working.
Some argue that Mr. Rumsfeld has ill served the president. We claimed victory in the initial war intervention. Our adversaries, however, haven't seen themselves as defeated. Mr. Rumsfeld's critics feel that he dug in his heels and inadequately resourced the campaign's opening phase. In my judgment, the manner in which we intervened, and ended the regime, has been a major source of our subsequent problems. It's not enough to achieve victory--which we did; you've got to achieve a situation in which your adversary recognizes that he's been defeated, and that violent resistance is futile--which we didn't. We went in with a small force that, while unstoppable militarily, was incapable of the sort of "takedown" of an entrenched opposition that our troops now face. We should have front-loaded our military power and withdrawn forces as things got better; instead, we went in light, and augmented power
Thousands of reservists have been called up. The coming months will see a continued rapid drawdown of deployed U.S. military combat power in Iraq (160,000 to 103,000) and an increasing reliance on 43,000 deploying reserve forces. This is driven not by military logic but by the realities of military end strength. We need to add six more activated National Guard brigades and 80,000 personnel to the Army authorized active-duty force. Mr. Rumsfeld must level with the administration and Congress on the coming crisis in Army active and reserve personnel and equipment readiness.
There's a reasonable expectation that the "Iraqification" of civil and military security forces will reduce some of the pressure on U.S. combat elements. So the decision to embark on a crash project to increase the Iraqi security forces from 60,000 to 200,000 by next September is a good one. The brilliant, Arabic-speaking Centcom Commander Gen. John Abizaid will no doubt successfully achieve this objective. Increasingly we will have Iraqi police, border patrol, civil guards and Army forces acting jointly with U.S. units to stabilize urban areas and to aggressively root out and destroy these criminal elements of the Saddam Republican Guards, intelligence services, and the Baath Party.
But none of this gets to the heart of the problem, which is that the U.S. military forces in Iraq are being forced into a drawdown situation. "Iraqification" doesn't address the question of the much broader U.S. Army manpower shortages, and it concerns me that Mr. Rumsfeld himself has said that he fails to see evidence that a shortfall exists. "Iraqification" may prove to be an alibi for broader inaction. Mr. Rumsfeld has so dominated the national security process with the force of his personality that his views on manpower are not being sufficiently challenged in Congress. The Joint Chiefs of Staff will have to candidly face up to this issue in the coming months, notwithstanding the political considerations involved.
I have no doubt that the courage and dedication of the armed forces will not falter. It is dangerous in Iraq. The young men and women who are serving there have done so with distinction and bravery. The president acted with political and moral courage to strike down Saddam while we had the window of opportunity. Our counterterrorist deterrent posture has been enormously strengthened. The question is whether we have the political will to carry out the required political, economic and security operations in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the next 36 months. Now is the time for resolute leadership.
Gen. McCaffrey, a professor of international security studies at West Point, led the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division in the 1991 Gulf War.
