Max Boot has an entirely frustrating opinion piece in the Jerusalem Post. In it, he says the US is not getting out of the "imperialism" e.g. the military intervention business, so we might as well get better at it. But the US has thousands of people who know perfectly well how to do a military intervention: the point that Boot misses, is that the Bush administration deliberately shut such people out, for two reasons: a) a lot of those real experts had served in interventions championed by the Clinton administration [Bosnia, Kosovo, Haiti] and b) those like Eric Shinseki who had the gall to know the truth and say it about the troop strength that would be required to secure Iraq were ridiculed and pilloried by the likes of Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld. Boot himself makes the point that he somehow refuses to really digest, when he cites former Clinton era envoy to the Balkans Jim Dobbins' Rand study:

THERE HAVE never been more than 160,000 coalition soldiers to control a population of 25 million Iraqis. Even adding in 20,000 private security contractors, that still amounts to only one soldier for every 139 Iraqis. According to a study conducted by James Dobbins and his colleagues at RAND, in most successful occupations, ranging from post-1945 Germany to post-1999 Kosovo, the figure has never been lower than one soldier per 50 people. In Iraq, that would mean 500,000 troops, or three times the number the coalition has today.

That study wasn't classified, and Dobbins was talking at think tanks all around town about his findings. But the Bush-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz crowd refused to hear that the ratio of troops required for Iraq should have approximated successful Clinton era interventions of 1 soldier for every 50 local people, e.g. 500,000 troops for Iraq, just as Shinseki had said.

I agree with Boot, the US should not check out of the intervention business for good [although who would ever have confidence in a Bush administration intervention again? I suspect not even very many Congressional Republicans, much less Democrats]. What's needed is US leadership which is not hostile to the truth and the experts who have real experience and wisdom to offer war and post-war planners. Not ideologues who are willfully blind, even hostile, to the truth.

PS: Mary at the Left Coaster points to more case studies that back up the ratio of one peacekeeper for every 50 people as the recognized standard for stable peace operations.

Posted by Laura at July 2, 2004 04:56 PM