Faster than a retreating neocon! More powerful than Dick Cheney with a shotgun! Able to leap self-evident truths at a single bound! (”Look, up in the sky. “It’s a surge!” “It’s an escalation!” It’s a supreme act of futility!”

Yes, it’s the new Bush Iraq policy. George Bush, “The Decider” from another reality, who came to Washington with sensibilities and ideologies far beyond those of normal humans! George Bush, who can change the course of sensible foreign policies, bend logic and common sense in his bare hands, and who, disguised as a United States president, fights a never-ending battle for continuing conflict, death, destruction, and the American way!”

Okay, maybe that was little over the top but probably not any more than the Iraq policy, which President Bush will announce tonight.

Maybe futility is too harsh a word for what Bush is going to propose. Perhaps as Joshua Marshall, over at Talking Points Memo, writes, we should just consider it a ‘punt’ – a strategically meaningless increase in troops meant to allow the president to avoid dealing with the failure of his policy and to lay the groundwork for getting the next president to take the blame for his epochal screw-up.”

Marshall recommends a piece by Fred Kaplan in Slate and it is well worth reading. Kaplan’s point is this. According to Army’s new field manual on counterinsurgency—its first in over 20 years, which, by the way, was co-authored by the new U.S. military commander in Iraq, Gen. Lt. David Petraeus, is that it requires a lot of manpower—at minimum, 20 combat troops for every 1,000 people in the area’s population. Baghdad has about 6 million people; so clearing, holding, and building it will require about 120,000 combat troops.

The bottom line is:

Right now, the United States has about 70,000 combat troops in all of Iraq (another 60,000 or so are support troops or headquarters personnel). Even an extra 20,000 would leave the force well short of the minimum required—and that’s with every soldier and Marine in Iraq moved to Baghdad. Iraqi security forces would have to make up the deficit.

In the short term, then, say for a year or so, enough troops might be concentrated in Baghdad if troops now deployed in Iraq have their tours of duty extended, troops due for redeployment to Iraq are mobilized several months ahead of schedule, nearly all these troops are transferred to Baghdad, and enough Iraqi troops can be mobilized to make up the remaining slack.

A “surge” raises any number of interesting questions. For example, one might very well wonder in light of continuing violence in the middle of Baghdad between Iraqis and U.S. forces how a future surge can be reconciled with the current U.S.  policy of hunkering down into a decreasing number of secure bases scattered around Iraq and venturing out only for brief patrols.

Another deals with basic fairness to the troops. Boosting the number of US troops at a time when the US Army is stretched to its limits is not an easy job, even for the can-do president. Military analysts suggest that Bush can only successfully make up his force surge by extending tours and resorting to the reserve.

The Los Angeles Times reported that the nation’s top military officials, have concluded that a buildup would require them to reverse Pentagon policy and send the Army’s National Guard and Reserve units on lengthy second tours in Iraq.

Under Pentagon policy, Guard and Reserve units have been limited to 24 months of mobilization for the Iraq war. That means most Reserve units that already have been sent to Iraq are ineligible to return. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff have concluded that a significant troop buildup would require the Pentagon to send Guard and Reserve units for additional yearlong tours.

What is certain is that that such a move will likely increase the  number of US casualties at a higher rate than the present.

It’s also been reported that the White House is also creating an economic package of possibly $5 billion that will be tied to certain conditions. As this is less than one month’s cost of U.S. military operations in Iraq one wonders how just how serious an effort it is.

A third issue is history. People always say we should try to learn from the past. Well, let’s consider that. The reality is that with regard to surges, we’ve been there, done that already. There was one of 20,000 troops in early 2004, a similar one in the fall of 2005, and one a bit smaller in the summer of 2006.

Finally, as Anthony Cordeman, the astute analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies writes:

Any such plans raise serious issues regarding how well any additional troops can be trained, language and area skills for complex missions with a heavy political and economic dimension, and the eventual impact on retention. Unless such an effort is scene as a possible cover for eventual withdrawal, it also presents critical problems in terms of scale and duration.

It may well mean too few troops for too short a time to do more than “win” temporary victories where the insurgents and militias are force to remain quiet, disperse, or shift their operations to other areas, but can easily outwait a temporary US presence.
 
The most serious problems for both the US and Iraqi governments, however, are strategic. There will be little point in surging US military forces, or in trying to build more effective Iraqi forces, unless the US and Iraqi government can find a way to halt this drift or to resolve it in ways that allow Iraqi Sunnis, Shi’ites, Kurds, and other minorities to live in relative peace.