in order...
Pollack believes that casualties will tend to the low side of his range. Do you agree, and why?
yes--basically, because we've gotten so good at this war thing relative to others that the other guys won't stand a chance if/when we take it seriously, as I think we will. The nightmare scenarios of urban warfare are certainly possible, but I see them as sort of one tail end of bell curve of potential outcomes, with an early coup being the other tail. The large middle part of the curve is a short, sharp war that we win quickly and thoroughly, but with him perhaps having gotten some nasty shots off against some things we care about. We know this enemy very well, and we know how to fight, so if we put our mind to it I'm not too worried about the war itself. (Of course, having written this now it will certainly come back to haunt me in a few months<g>...)
If it is a coup, then what does that do to our reconstruction plans? Without a complete power shift our gain is temporary and uncertain.
very good question--see below...
Do you know/can you say whether well thought out planning is going on for the 'now what' when we win? I would be greatly reassured to hear that mature adults have a rational plan that goes beyond the next 6 months, and that this is not all an exercise in testosterone.
so would I, so would I... There are indeed some people doing some good work on the inside about this (I assume--I haven't actually talked to people in the know about it--they would consider it prying.) Unfortunately, they're most likely the people over at State, whose star is not ascendant. So god knows what actually will happen.
My hunch is that the first concept is to draw a line at some point midway in the Iraqi leadership hierarchy and say "the people above this are history, we won't deal with them even if they topple Saddam because they're too complicit in his regime and its crimes." the people below the line would get a free pass, or at least probation, so long as they proved pliable. So the thing about a coup is, who would do it and what would they say to us about what they wanted afterward? Our answer might depend on that.
After that, if you assume no coup and eventual unconditional surrender of the military (with Saddam dead in a bunker), then the fun begins. This is where I'm most scared this admin would fumble the ball. I simply can't understand why they haven't devoted more time and energy and resources to making the new Afghan polity work, for example, and that doesn't bode well for Iraq. They might try to pass it off to the UN or some others, in order to avoid the headaches of doing it themselves. We'll see. I'd expect that the eventual outcome would be somewhere between Afghanistan and the Balkans for a few years--but a lot of this will depend on how things actually play out. It's worth keeping in mind that two years into the post-WWII period we shifted our strategy entirely, because we realized that Russia was strong and threatening, European problems were devastating, and the Brits were incredibly weak. So we ended up doing a hell of a lot more than we ever planned to, quite frankly...
for a start on thinking about what should be done after the war, you might want to check out this new WINEP monograph:
washingtoninstitute.org
tb@menoconciseeither.com |
