The Trouble With Post-Occupation

The "residual force" concept deserves a response on the merits, and Spencer Ackerman makes most of the best points:

That, however, is the exact same message of June 2004, which failed to reassure anyone. The US's allies in Iraq want the US to stay in force - if not forever, at least for some extended duration. The US's enemies in Iraq - a far more numerous and politically salient force - want the US out expeditiously. Anything that reassures one horrifies the other, leaving US troops caught in the crossfire. The Iraqi political process is meant to provide equilibrium for the complex dynamic of post-occupation, but it has only dragged the country into a zero-sum sectarian contest, with each side inspecting the US's intentions to see which faction it will back.

As the 2004 handover demonstrated, Iraqis are unlikely to be fooled into thinking 40,000-plus US forces stationed indefinitely in the country represents an end to the US presence. Worse, if the idea is to either protect Iraqis from a slide into chaos or safeguard enduring US interests - be it preventing genocide or fighting al-Qaida or keeping the oil flowing - then keeping only 40,000 troops in Iraq is senseless. As Major General Joseph Fil commented to Ricks: "My nightmare - the thing that keeps me up at night - is a failure of Iraqi security forces, somehow, catastrophically, mixed with a major Samarra mosque-type catastrophe." Leaving the Iraqi security forces aside, another huge sectarian provocation is guaranteed. In 2009, US commanders of a post-occupation force will find themselves powerless to deal with it. At that point, US troops will be little more than a constabulary force to keep the Iraqi politicians who failed to avert the crisis - and probably contributed to it - alive.

Right. We don't have 160,000 troops in Iraq right now because that's somehow a convenient or expedient thing for us to be doing. The plan never called for that many forces to be in the country. Rather, the US ideal is a much smaller force along the lines of the Democrats' "residual" or the Bush administration's "post-occupation" force. The trouble is that 40-50,000 troops turns out to be far too few to exercise meaningful control in Iraq. At the same time, it's far too many troops to credibly wash our hands of things. 50,000 troops indicates a commitment to controlling the situation, but 50,000 troops is too few to control the situation, so why not surge another division in? Meanwhile Iraqis opposed to a US occupation (i.e., the vast majority of Iraqis) will still feel occupied, and the fact that the troop presence will have the imprimateur of the Iraqi government will do more to discredit that government than to legitimate the presence.