Counter-ISG operations. Former CIA officer and Baker-Hamilton advisor Reuel Marc Gerecht preemptively nixes the direction of the ISG's likely recommendations:

As will soon be apparent, the Iraq Survey* Group, of which Mr. Gates is a member and to which I'm an adviser, has not discovered any way for the U.S. to exit Iraq -- except under catastrophic conditions. Its recommendations will probably be the least helpful of all the blue-ribbon commissions in Washington since World War II because it cannot escape from an unavoidable reality: We either declare defeat and withdraw completely tout de suite, or we surge troops into Baghdad and fight. The ISG will surely try to find some middle ground between these positions, which, of course, doesn't exist.

If one works through the different scenarios, they all return quickly to a Rumsfeldian position that the U.S. needs to do more in Iraq with less -- a position that has been proven flatly wrong since the spring of 2003. This is why Washington has not been able to draw down even though the president, his defense secretary and his generals have dearly wanted to do so. Any meaningful reduction of U.S. forces is very likely to collapse the Iraqi Army into Shiite and Sunni militias and bring on massive carnage, the likes of which the Middle East has not seen since the Iran-Iraq War. If Mr. Gates signs off on the ISG's recommendations, which will probably be completed before he assumes office, he will be party to a doomed strategy -- and everyone in Washington and abroad will recognize it as a failure as soon as they start to work through it -- before he even sets foot in the Pentagon. It may not be easy for Mr. Gates to recover from this initial flop.

However, when the ISG bombs, the Bush administration may finally get serious about correcting its mistakes in Iraq. It's a decent bet that when this happens, America's military officers may start to miss Donald Rumsfeld. He was the best cover any failing general could ever have.

Is at least a temporary troop surge off the table?

Here's a guess for a consensus way forward being cobbled together: Something like a limited time, last-ditch troop surge to Baghdad (people are talking about needing 30k over the 15k recently there), followed by a redeployment to a half dozen bases in (or alternatively some outside of) Iraq, with occasional counterinsurgency operations in al-Anbar, beefed up training of Iraqi forces, and logistics/support, drawing down to about 60k US troops in Iraq over the coming year; or variations thereof. Efforts to mitigate/prevent a civil war from becoming a regional war (some sort of conferring with the meddling neighbors, if that becomes politically acceptable here).

Apparently the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff Peter Pace has recently brought together twelve people with extensive experience in Iraq, including three former Iraq commanders, among them H.R. McMaster (yanked back from London) and Peter Mansoor, at the Pentagon for sixty days to brainstorm options -- a kind of parallel, internal-Pentagon ISG.

(*A reader notes: Iraq Study Group, not Survey Group.)

Posted by Laura at November 10, 2006 02:59 PM