Waiter, There's a Surge in My Soup

By Matt Taibbi, RollingStone.com. Posted January 10, 2007.

Proponents of escalation cite the example of Tal Afar, a town in northwestern Iraq. U.S. forces there have met some genuine success since September 2005 with the 'clear, build and hold' strategy that Mr. Bush apparently now favors for Baghdad.

But Tal Afar is only about one-thirtieth the size of Baghdad, and it isn't even Arab: its people are mostly members of the Turkmen minority. Trying to replicate that (limited) success in Baghdad is a fool's errand.

In Tal Afar, there was one U.S. soldier for every 40 residents. Using the same ratio in Baghdad would require 150,000 troops, sustained for more than a year. That's impossible. -- Nicholas Kristoff, New York Times

I was in Tal Afar, Iraq's "genuine success" story, over the summer. It was such a success story that the city's neurotic, hand-wringing mayor, Najim Abdullah al-Jubori, actually asked American officials during a meeting I attended if they could tell President Bush to stop calling it a success story. "It just makes the terrorists angry," he said. At the meeting he pointed to a map and indicated the areas where the insurgents held strong positions.

"Here," he said. "Oh, and here. And here. Here also..."

After that meeting the unit I was with -- MPs from Oklahoma on a personal security detail, guarding a Colonel who was inspecting police stations in the area -- went to a precinct house in one of Tal Afar's "safe" neighborhoods. There I found five American soldiers huddling in a room about the size of a walk-in closet, hunched over a pile of MRE wrappers and Play Station cassettes.

They seldom ever left that room, they explained. Occasionally they would have to go out and fight whenever someone started shooting at the police station (a regular occurrence, they said); sometimes they'd even round up the aggressors, only to have some Iraqi army creeps come by later and insist on the attackers' release, telling the soldiers they had the "wrong guys." The Iraqi army units and the Iraqi police in the town were constantly at odds and the soldiers there spent a lot of their time breaking up violent outbreaks between the two groups. In short, Tal Afar was a total fucking mess, a violent chaos, and yet Tal Afar is still upheld as the Iraqi success story -- and an example of the "impossible" standard of a 1-soldier-per-40-residents security paradise that even a liberal columnist like Nicholas Kristof dismisses as a hopelessly optimistic fantasy, saying such a wonder couldn't be replicated in Baghdad.

This whole sales campaign designed to pitch a new troop increase -- hilariously called a "surge" in the new "Iraq Policy Mark IV" that President Bush is planning to announce with a straight face -- is one of the more outrageous media deceptions in the history of an Iraq war that has been rife with them. President Bush is going on TV this week and tell the American people that 20,000 additional troops in Iraq is somehow going to make a difference in the security situation. He is going to be aided in this effort by a legion of knucklehead editorialists who entered the New Year pimping a preposterous new creation story about Iraq, one that argues that the Iraqi-American Eden was spoiled only by arrogant generals and Pentagon officials who tried to secure an occupied country on the cheap.

This absurd interpretation of events, pitched hardest by (among others) Washington's reigning power-worshipper/professional Crate and Barrel shopper David Brooks, pins the blame for the Iraq mess on such persons as Don Rumsfeld, George Casey and John Abizaid, all of whom sold Bush on a "light footprint" strategy for occupying Iraq. "Casey and Abizaid are impressive men, and Bush deferred to their judgment," Brooks wrote last week. "But sometimes good men make bad choices, and it is now clear that the light-footprint approach has been a disaster."

According to Brooks and a lot of other people in Washington (our possible next president, John McCain, among them), everything in Iraq would have been okay from the start, if we'd only had enough troops.

Coming to this realization now -- three and a half years late, as it were -- gives all these people a chance to argue one more time for a troop increase. They're going to get that increase now, and if history is any guide, they'll patiently give that troop increase another few years to work. When it doesn't, bet on it, they will come back once again and say that what they got was not a big enough increase, that what was needed was a full-blown commitment, a "Super-Marshall Plan," etc. And then we will be in Iraq until 2011 or 2012, just like everyone in Iraq (who's seen the huge embassy complexes we're just now breaking ground on) already knows we will be.

The whole idea that "more troops" are needed in Iraq is absurd on its face. They sell this idea in America as though our soldiers are being sent to patrol the streets like New York City cops policing Malcolm X Boulevard on foot -- spreading goodwill, talking to shopkeepers, collaring the occasional fare-jumper, and scaring off the odd stick-up kid by their very presence.

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Matt Taibbi is a writer for Rolling Stone.

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