Redstate

By Pejman Yousefzadeh Posted in War — Comments (4) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

I have serious problems with this statement:

Defense Secretary Robert Gates raised the possibility Friday of cutting U.S. troop levels in Iraq to 100,000 by the end of next year, well beyond the cuts President Bush has approved.

Stressing that he was expressing a hope, not an administration plan, Gates said it was possible that conditions in Iraq would improve enough to merit much deeper troop cuts than are currently scheduled for 2008.

Asked at a news conference whether he was referring to lowering today's level of about 169,000 U.S. troops to about 100,000 by the end of next year, Gates replied, "That would be the math." He quickly added, however, that because "there is no script" in war, his hoped-for cuts could vanish.

It was the first time a member of Bush's war cabinet had publicly suggested such deep reductions, perhaps offering a conciliatory hand to anti-war Democrats and some wary Republicans in Congress who have been pushing for troop reductions, a change in the U.S. mission and an end to the war.

Conciliation may have its place but it is intensely difficult at the moment to envision how a cut to 100,000 troops in theater is feasible in the short term. We all hope that it is, of course. But we are already risking the danger that the end of the surge may result in backsliding in Iraq and the dissipation of all of the gains made as a result of the surge. To have the troop cuts go even deeper--another 30,000 troops deeper, to be precise--invites a dangerous scenario in which the United States may simply not have enough boots on the ground to run a successful counterinsurgency operation. The only way that danger can be avoided is if Iraqi security forces become advanced enough to make up for any lack of American troops in theater. While that is a long-term goal of American counterinsurgency operations and must be met, it is an open question as to whether it can be met as soon as Secretary Gates appears to hope that it will be.

Moreover, even if Secretary Gates wanted to be conciliatory and even if he believes that the possibility of reducing American troops to 100,000 is a serious one, it is not worth talking about now. What Secretary Gates has done is give the antiwar side a number that it can bargain for, irrespective of the dangers that might be posed to American security. If that number cannot be met, the antiwar side will argue that yet another benchmark has not been met, that we have even more evidence that the reconstruction effort is a failure, and so on. (Just watch. They will.) Secretary Gates would have done better to announce any further troop reduction at a point when such a reduction can be done. That way, the troop reduction could serve as evidence that the reconstruction and counterinsurgency efforts are working and the American public would be pleased to see more troops coming home.