In any given week, I receive in the mail dozens of newsletters, special task force reports, and sundry other publications pertaining to the conduct of U.S. foreign policy. My friends and colleagues forward countless more via e-mail. I wish I could read all of them; in practice I manage to read in great detail only a few.

There is one newsletter series, however, that I always read: The “Audits of Conventional Wisdom,” published by MIT’s Center for International Studies. As I watch the Democrats poised to take control of Congress for the first time in 12 years, I am struck by the extent to which the conventional wisdom constrains our foreign policy choices, and I am growing increasingly despairing that bipartisanship, per se, holds the key to breaking the cycle of one flawed policy chasing after another. MIT needs to send out a lot more of these concise paper, and we need to figure out ways to get members of Congress to read them.

Take just one issue that has been in the news recently, but that has not (yet?) been taken up by the good people at MIT: expanding the size of the U.S. military, especially the Army.

There is strong bipartisan support for such a policy. When President Bush announced recently that he had asked Defense Secretary Gates to make plans for expanding the military, something that Gates’ predecessor Donald Rumsfeld was especially loathe to do, the Democrats’ response was, essentially, “What took you so long?” Rep. Rahm Emanuel, the Illinois representative and chairman of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, said he was glad the President “has realized the need for increasing the size of the armed forces … but this is where the Democrats have been for two years.”

Indeed, this was no idle boast. Quite a number of Democrats favor an increase, and they have found additional support for this initiative from within the think tank community. This support cuts across ideological lines. Nearly two years ago, the Project for a New American Century published an open letter to congressional leaders calling for “an increase in the active duty Army and Marine Corps, together, of at least 25,000 troops each year over the next several years.” The statement was signed by a veritable whos-who of luminaries within the foreign policy establishment, from Will Marshall at the Progressive Policy Institute, and TNR’s Peter Beinart, to Frederick Kagan and Danielle Pletka at neo-conservative AEI.

But as Wilson Center scholars Gordon Adams and John Diamond noted in Sunday’s Washington Post Outlook section, increasing the military by perhaps as much as 90,000 over its current active-duty strength of 507,000 men and women “is irrelevant to the stresses the Army is experiencing in Iraq. It would build enormous long-term costs into the defense budget, and it presumes a role in the world for the U.S. military that the voters emphatically opposed in November.”

Before we grow the Army, we must ask a very basic question. What do we want the Army to do? What is the mission? Is the Army, and an expanded one at that, the institution best suited for this role? Or, might a fundamental reassessment of our force posture, and also an audit of the other tools of statecraft, find that other personnel and agencies are better at fighting the terrorists, and preventing new terrorists from emerging.

Adams and Diamond touch on these issues in their op ed, and I am now collaborating with Adams on another piece focused specifically on the inapplicability of a large conventional Army to counterterrorism efforts. We intend to show that a larger Army is not only largely irrelevant to fighting terrorism, but it may actually be counterproductive, in that the stationing of large numbers of foreign troops has for decades served as a primary motivating factor for terrorists. And not just in the Middle East. As the University of Chicago’s Robert Pape has shown, suicide terrorists from Sri Lanka to Chechnya have seized upon the resentment and humiliation engendered by the presence of foreign troops to rally support and recruit new members. Al Qaeda and other radical groups are doing this right now in Iraq.

Pape concludes in a recent Cato Policy Analysis:

Understanding that suicide terrorism is mainly a response to foreign occupation rather than a product of Islamic fundamentalism has important implications for how the U.S. government should conduct the war on terrorism. Over the next year, the United States and its allies in Iraq should completely turn over the responsibility for Iraq’s security to Iraq’s new government and should start systematically withdrawing troops. The Bush administration should similarly revisit the deployment of all U.S. military personnel in the Persian Gulf region. The West managed its interests there during the 1970s and 1980s without stationing any combat soldiers on the ground. This “offshore balancing” approach kept our forces close enough that they could respond in the event of an emergency that posed a direct threat to U.S. vital interests. In order to effectively fight al-Qaeda, the United States should complete the transition toward a similar “offshore balancing” strategy by the end of the Bush presidency.

Alas, all indications are that President Bush is poised to go in the opposite direction, escalating the conflict in Iraq by sending 20,000 (or more) additional troops in an attempt to stem the rising tide of violence. Fewer than one in eight Americans currently support such an expansion of the U.S. military role in Iraq, but the public ultimately has very little control over the conduct of foreign policy. Neither, in practice, does the Congress, although the new Democratic majority can make life much more difficult for the White House.

Congressional Democrats are taking a wait and see attitude on the question of more troops for Iraq, but some are inclined to go along. Jeff Zeleny reports in today’s New York Times “Some key Senate Democrats say they could consider supporting a short-term increase in American troop levels in Iraq, a stance that reflects division within the party and could provide an opening for President Bush as he prepares to announce his revised plan for Iraq as early as next week.”

If they can’t, or won’t, stop a further escalation of the conflict, might the Democrats apply their new power to smother the idea of a larger Army, the very same larger Army that is more likely to become involved in more foreign entanglements? What are the chances? 

Related posts:

1. Nothing is Too Good for Our Boys, Redux
2. Contractors and Government: Till Death Do Them Part
3. Afghanistan: I don’t believe in miracles
4. On Honoring the First Amendment