If present evidence is any guide, by later this week President Bush and the Democratic Congress will be going toe to toe in a political showdown over who will control the future direction of the U.S. military presence in Iraq. Will the president have free rein to send more troops into Iraq against the wishes of the Congress and the majority of the American people? Or will the Congress again assert its power of the purse to take a leading role in shaping military operations overseas?

That’s the big political question of the moment. And it’s one that, contrary to Sen. Joseph Biden Jr.’s (D-Del.) ill-judged remarks, is not a matter of constitutional issues but politics. But getting far less attention is a far more important point.

In real military terms, the president’s “surge” concept is little more than a farce. Set aside the fact that most of the president’s military advisers oppose his plans for escalation. If we follow what the U.S. Army actually says about counterinsurgency operations, the president’s “surge” doesn’t even come close to what our troops would need.

Turn to the man President Bush is now tapping to implement his new strategy in Iraq, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus. 

Petraeus ran operations in northern Iraq in 2003. And at the time he was the general on the ground who all the sharpest people on military affairs thought was the one guy in charge who really understood what kind of a battle he was engaged in: in short, counterinsurgency, or rather, heading off an insurgency by prioritizing real reconstruction and hearts-and-minds work rather than kicking people’s doors down.

Petraeus spent last year co-authoring the Army’s new counterinsurgency field manual. And look at what the manual actually says. Counterinsurgency operations require a “minimum troop density” of 20 combat troops per 1,000 people in a given area. And note the key point: not just military personnel, but combat troops. 

With a population of some 6 million inhabitants, you’d need at least 120,000 just to control Baghdad. 

Now, consider how many troops are already in the country. The U.S. has under 140,000 troops in Iraq. But only about 70,000 are combat personnel. 

What that means is that even if you pulled all the combat troops out of the rest of Iraq and added another 20,000 combat troops, you’d still be a good 30,000 under strength for mounting the kind of operations the president describes. 

In theory, Iraqi personnel should be able to make up that difference, though their willingness and/or ability to do so thus far has been quite disappointing. But remember, that’s just Baghdad.  Getting those numbers into Baghdad would leave the rest of the country entirely denuded of U.S. combat troops. 

And if history is any guide, if we actually had enough troops in Baghdad, the insurgents would just fan out and start literal or figurative fires where we’re not.

What this all amounts to is that 20,000 or even 50,000 new combat troops don’t even get you close to what the Army says you need to do what President Bush says he’s now going to try to do. To get enough troops into the country you’d need to put the United States on a serious war-footing and begin drawing troops down from deployments around the globe. All of which just isn’t going to happen, setting aside for the moment whether it should happen. And that tells you this whole thing is just a joke at the expense of the American public and our troops on the ground in Iraq.

What’s sad — and what isn’t in this situation? — is that back in 2003, more troops and a serious counterinsurgency strategy could have reaped real dividends. Then the insurgency was only in its infancy. And thus it would have been much easier to control it, remove the fuel it’s grown on and stamp it out. Also, that was before three years of extended deployments had ground down American readiness. In short, we had more flexibility back then in who we could deploy and for how long. Alternatively, if the president and his key advisers hadn’t lied to the country about the number of troops required to stabilize and police Iraq, we might not have pulled the trigger in the first place.

One way or another, whether the president gets his way with his “surge” or not, the American people should know that the folks we pay to know about this stuff — the counterinsurgency experts in the Army and the Marines — say this number of troops isn’t even close to enough to do the job. 

With Iraq, the president doesn’t have a very good record of leveling with the American people.  Now might be a good time.

Marshall is editor of talkingpointsmemo.com.
His column appears in The Hill each week.
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