The army’s very own training manual on counter insurgency warfare calls for one hundred and twenty thousand troops to pacify Baghdad. And yet, no one here can be bothered to respond to the point, even in the light of the fact that the total number of troops in country is going to barely more than would be needed for Baghdad alone.

If he says 20,000 more troops will win this, then I believe him. How knoess more about live combat than W?

Look how many times he’s been right so far: There’s the WMD claim that turned out. There’s the Sadaam and AlQuaeda connection that is now conventional wisdom, and thank God for W, the poor Iraqis finally have a full blown functioning democracy.

Instead of a typical Web Reconnaissance today, I decided to roam through the blogs both on the left and the right to see what the consensus was concerning President Bush’s speech last night.

The support for the war in Iraq and Bush’s handling of it has been slowly but surely dropping on the…

I’ll continue to update this post for a while as bloggers post their thoughts…
Blue Crab Boulevard: Having now read the speech, which I was not able to watch for a very good reason, I really think it did a good job of describing the situati…

It didn’t matter what the President said abou…

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Iraqi troops are mostly useless, they have been thoroughly infiltrated by insurgents of one stripe or another and they cannot be depended on in a tight situation, as has already been demonstrated more than a few times. If Baghdad is to be pacified, it will be American troops that will have to do most of the heavy lifting. There are many problems with training Arab troops, you can read about those problems here if you wish.

I note that it is the 82nd Airborne Division’s 2nd Brigade who will be the first into Baghdad. Paratroopers often make REALLY poor counterinsurgents. They are, by inclination and training, extremely aggressive and hard men. Just think of two incidents: Derry, January 1972 and Fallujah, April 2003.

Common factor? Paras of one sort or another vs. civilian protestors. Not a good mix. I know that we’re hard up for boots on the ground, but the paras? Great at direct action, raids and such. Patient, slow-moving, painstaking civil-military operations? Not so good.

General Shinseki was right when he called for several hundred thousand troops to invade and occupy Iraq, but he was over ruled by the civilian leadership and the war was done on the cheap for political reasons. The inevitable consequence of the civilian decision to invade Iraq with inadequate forces has now played out and no one has a clue what to do.

A force of seven hundred thousand to one million troops would now be needed to bring peace and stability to Iraq. It could have been done originally with four hundred to five hundred thousand, but now that the sectarian strife has been allowed to go on for three plus years it is going to take many more than simply preventing the strife from happening in the first place.